“Yes, Mukhnet. Where does this name come from?”
I gave up trying to get him to pronounce my name correctly. When I told him I was Moroccan German, he turned to the Algerian NGO workers.
“Are you guys crazy or what, bringing a Moroccan woman and an American man to this area?” he asked.
I interrupted, trying to deflect his anger from the Algerians. “Sir, they didn’t bring us. We asked them to take us. We wanted to see the region here and the work these NGOs are doing.” I didn’t lie, but of course also didn’t tell him that we knew the region had suffered from terrorism.
“Wanted to see the region? And if anything happens to you guys? Lady, you don’t know these people. They will kidnap you and force you to marry one of them and ask for ransom for the American, and then I will have his president and your king asking for my head.”
We all started laughing.
“That’s nothing to laugh about,” he said in an angry voice. “Maybe I should take you guys downstairs and give you some chickpeas. Would you like to eat some chickpeas?”
The Algerian NGO workers grew very quiet and looked at the ground. I translated to Michael: “Wow, he asks if we want to eat chickpeas.”
I turned to the police chief. I was excited about eating chickpeas, the way I knew them from my childhood in Morocco. My grandmother would sometimes cook chickpeas and add cumin and a bit of salt for me.
“That would be great,” I said. “Do you make them with cumin?”
This time he was the one who burst out laughing, along with the other police.
I turned to our driver and the other Algerians and asked if they wanted chickpeas, too, but one of them whispered: “‘Chickpeas’ is the code word here for beatings.”
The police chief then asked who we worked for.
“We are journalists and we work for the New York Times,” Michael said. When I began to translate, the chief interrupted me.
“Have I understood well? You are reporters for the New York Times?”
“Yes,” Michael said.
The chief stood up. “I don’t believe it. This would have been the perfect gift for these terrorists, kidnapping two journalists from an American media outlet.”
He asked one of his officers to contact the Ministry of the Interior in Algiers and tell them where we were. Then he told us to go back to the capital. The police drove us to the edge of Naciria. From there, a dark blue Toyota tailed us all the way back to Algiers.
Several days earlier we’d submitted a request to extend our visas. I couldn’t imagine our arrest would help. “I think the Algerians will throw us out of here,” I told Michael.
To our great surprise, when we reached Algiers, we learned that the extensions had been granted. It didn’t make sense.
We were still hoping to find a way to interview Droukdal in person. That evening, Michael called me in my room and said that I should come outside quickly and bring all my equipment. “Bring your phone and computer. We will need some time here.”
We met on the hotel terrace. Michael told me that he had just received a phone call from our editors in New York. An FBI agent had come to the New York Times office and reported that there was a threat against Michael’s life. The agent didn’t get into specifics but said it was related to the work we were doing and came from somebody with ties to the militants.
“And what about me?” I asked. “We always work on these stories together, so if there is a threat against you, there must be one against my life as well.”
Michael called the FBI agent in front of me, but the agent said there had been no threat against my life. He strongly advised Michael to get out of Algeria but said that I wouldn’t have to leave.
“So we need to decide,” Michael said. “I could leave, and you could stay and finish the job; or we both stay; or we both leave.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I told him. “Why would they threaten you but not me? Both our names are at the top of these stories.”
“Maybe it’s one of these guys who wants to marry you and who is jealous,” Michael said half-jokingly. But I didn’t buy it.
We decided that I should reach out to some of the people we’d interviewed in the past to see if they knew anything. Had we upset the jihadists? But if we had, they would be after me as well.
I called Abu Jihad in Zarqa, using my satellite phone, and asked what was going on. I talked to Zarqawi’s supporters in Jordan and the guys from the camps in Lebanon. “Do you have anything against my colleague?” I asked. They all said no.
Then I contacted my AQIM source through our email account. “We learned that there is a threat against my colleague’s life,” I wrote. “Do you have anything against him?”
“We have nothing against you or your colleague,” he wrote back. “But you should leave the country for your own sake. Something is wrong here, and it’s not coming from us.”
I told Michael that I couldn’t guarantee his safety if we stayed, and that I didn’t want to stay either. “This stinks,” I told him. “Let’s get the hell out of this place.”
We called our editors in New York, who told us there was an Alitalia flight leaving for Rome in three hours.
We ran back to our rooms, packed, and left Algeria. I spent the flight running through the list of people we had interviewed in my head. Who would have had a reason to threaten Michael? For days I wondered why this threat had surfaced on the same day Michael and I had been detained. Something was off, but we concentrated on finishing the story.
I was still determined to interview Droukdal and his group and also to give them the chance to answer some of the allegations against them.
“Are you and your colleague safe? Are you out of Algeria?” our contact person inside the group asked me in a draft message the next day.
“Yes we are,” I wrote back. “Now how about we get you the questions for the head of your group and you guys send us back the answers, on your letterhead and with a recording of his voice?”
“I can’t promise anything, but I can try.”
Michael and I worked on a list of questions, and I sent them to my contact. “It is very important that we get the answers on tape so we can hear his voice,” we told him in our message. We also wanted a statement from Droukdal on camera, with the date, which we would use for verification but wouldn’t publish, and if possible the whole interview in writing.
Ten days later, I received a link to a Dropbox account. The link was valid for only an hour or two. When I clicked on it, I found the text of the interview, the voice recording, and the video clip we’d asked for. The group also sent us a message on stationery stamped with the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb letterhead, acknowledging that the group had received questions from the “honorable journalist Souad Mekhennet, who works for the New York Times.”