The morning began promisingly, when we managed to shake off the secret police, who had been following us since the day we’d landed in Algiers. These police weren’t hard to spot. I’d tell our driver to go around a traffic circle three times, and if a car followed us around all three times, I knew we were being tailed.
On the way to the NGO compound, I told our driver to pull into a gas station. The car behind us passed by and made a U-turn farther down the road. The driver likely thought we would spend a few minutes getting gas. Instead, we quickly pulled out, leaving the other car behind. The police eventually found their way to the NGO compound and waited outside, but the place had two exits, and we left through a different gate than the one we’d come in.
Naciria was more than an hour north of the capital, in the direction of the mountains. I’d made contact with my source in AQIM, a commander in charge of the group’s media operations, to let him know we’d be in the area, but we didn’t schedule an appointment. If we met, it would be on short notice so as not to alert the authorities, who might be watching.
My source and I had devised what seemed, at the time, a novel and safe way to communicate. We avoided the phone completely. At first, we had been in touch by regular email. But at some point, worried about government surveillance, he and I had set up a joint email account using a German provider. We both had the log-in and password, which meant that we never had to send each other a message. Instead, as former CIA director David Petraeus and his mistress would do years later, we wrote emails and left them in the drafts folder, where each of us could log in and read them.
As an Algerian, our friend from the NGO felt a personal connection to the communities he helped, and he was outraged by the economic inequality in the area we were visiting. He told us that young Algerians particularly resented the government’s penchant for importing Chinese workers instead of using local labor.
On the way to Naciria, we stopped to talk to some of his colleagues, who were handing out children’s clothing and groceries to poor families. One of the recipients was a woman with a mentally challenged son about four or five years old. Her husband had died, and she said there were no services for her child and that she didn’t get any support from the government. If it weren’t for the NGO, she told us, she wouldn’t be able to feed her children. Dilemmas like these, our guide told us, were part of what convinced boys from poor families to join AQIM. People had nothing, and they didn’t trust the government to take care of them.
Our driver was a bit nervous about the trip to Naciria. He didn’t ordinarily work with journalists but had recently lost his job, so he was helping us out. I told him to keep his ID cards and car registry documents ready in the well under the radio. If the police stopped us, he was to let me do the talking.
For security reasons and so as not to get our guide in trouble, we’d taken two cars. That way, if we wanted to stay on and do interviews after the NGO workers left, we wouldn’t inconvenience them. Michael and I sat in the backseat of the first car, a white Renault, while our driver and the NGO coordinator sat in front. The VW bus behind us, packed with food and clothes, carried the Algerian woman and two Algerian men who had been handing out aid. They were locals who had worked with the organization for many years.
By then, it must have been about midday. We were driving toward Boumerdès when we saw a police checkpoint. An officer stopped us and asked our driver for his identity papers.
The driver opened the door and started to move his right hand down his back, as if he were reaching for something in his back pocket.
“Stop! Don’t move!” the policeman yelled, pointing his AK-47 at the driver, his finger on the trigger.
“Please don’t shoot!” I screamed. I turned to the driver. “You idiot, what are you doing with your hand?”
“I have the documents in my back pocket,” he said.
“The idiot has the documents in his back pocket,” I shouted to the policeman. Then I heard Michael say my name slowly in a worried voice. Turning toward him, I saw that his hands were raised and that another policeman was pointing an AK-47 at his head. To my right, yet another policeman was pointing an assault rifle at me. I also put my hands up and screamed at the driver, “You idiot! Didn’t I tell you to keep them in front? Do you want to kill us?”
I knew we were in mortal danger. The police were nervous and trigger-happy. I screamed at the driver because I was scared but also because I suspected that if the police saw a man taking orders from a woman, they would know he wasn’t a jihadi. I turned to the policemen and said, “It’s okay, officers and friends! We aren’t terrorists.” They looked a little surprised, and I thought, Yes, who the hell would say this to the police? “This idiot driver has his documents in his back pocket, so please, if you need to see them, he has to reach behind him.”
They finally allowed him to get out of the car and searched him while we waited. Armed police still surrounded us. Then they asked him to open the trunk. “These people in the car with you, are they foreigners?” the police asked.
“Yes, yes, they are foreigners,” he replied.
“That’s it, friend,” I whispered to Michael. “We’re done.”
“You need to come to the police station,” one of the cops said. He asked Michael to move over so he could sit in back with us.
One police car led the way and the other drove behind the second car in our convoy. I was more worried for the Algerians, our driver, and the NGO workers than for us.
“Do you speak English?” I asked the policeman sitting with us.
“No,” he answered in Arabic.
I turned to Michael and told him in English that we would now be taken to the police station. Still speaking English, we agreed to try to ask as many questions of the police as possible while not revealing immediately that we were journalists. We also agreed that we would take full responsibility for keeping the locals out of trouble.
“So what were you guys doing here?” the police chief asked when we got to the station.
I said that we were traveling with this NGO, which was helping us to learn about its work and the area.
“Here? In this region? Are you out of your mind?”
I translated to Michael, who said, “Okay, keep asking them why.”
“Why? What’s wrong with this region?” I asked.
“Lady, this is Al Qaeda land. Don’t you know we are having lots of attacks here?”
“Really? Who is attacking you?”
“Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Droukdal and his people,” the police chief said.
“You got Al Qaeda here?” I tried to play na?ve.
“Yes, of course. You see these pictures here?” He turned around and motioned toward three pictures, each showing the face of a different man. “These are my men, who have been killed by Al Qaeda. But wait. First let me ask, who are you?”
He began with the Algerians, asking for their ID cards and affiliations. When he got to Michael, he asked me, “Is he American or what? And you?” I told him my name and said that I was a German citizen.
“Mukhnet?” he asked.
“No, no, Mekhennet.”