{"id":159,"date":"2010-04-06T17:00:46","date_gmt":"2010-04-06T17:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/wp3\/?p=159"},"modified":"2010-04-06T17:00:46","modified_gmt":"2010-04-06T17:00:46","slug":"the-mysterious-case-of-the-grey-lady-of-bagram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunnionline.us\/english\/2010\/04\/06\/159\/","title":{"rendered":"The mysterious case of the grey lady of Bagram"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align: justify;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-left: 5px; float: right;\" alt=\"aafia-siddiqui\" src=\"images\/stories\/articles\/aafia-siddiqui.jpg\" width=\"283\" height=\"210\" \/>ISLAMABAD: Dr Shams Hassan Faruqi sits amid his rocks and geological records, shakes his bearded head and stares at me. \u201cI strongly doubt if the children are alive,\u201d he says. \u201cProbably, they have expired.\u201d He says this in a strange way, mournful but resigned, yet somehow he seems oddly unmoved. As a witness, supposedly, to the mysterious 2008 re-appearance of Aafia Siddiqui \u2013 the \u201cmost wanted woman in the world\u201d, according to former US attorney general John Ashcroft \u2013 I guess this 73-year-old Pakistani geologist is used to the limelight. But the children, I ask him again. What happened to the children?<\/div>\n<p>  <!--more-->  <\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: justify;\">Dr Faruqi is Aafia Siddiqui\u2019s uncle and he produces a photograph of his niece at the age of 13, picnicking in the Margalla hills above Islamabad, a smiling girl in a yellow shalwar khameez, half-leaning against a tree. She does not look like the stuff of which Al-Qaeda operatives are made. Yet she is now a semi-icon in Pakistan, a country which may well have been involved in her original kidnapping and which now oh-so-desperately wants her back from an American prison. Her children, weirdly, disconcertingly, have been forgotten. <br \/>Aafia Siddiqui\u2019s story is now as famous in Pakistan as it is notorious in a New York City courtroom where her trial for trying to kill an American soldier in the Afghan city of Ghazni in 2008 \u2013 she was convicted this month and faces a minimum of 20 years in prison on just one of the charges against her \u2013 is regarded as a symbol of American injustice. \u201cShame on America,\u201d posters scream in all of Pakistan\u2019s major cities. She is known as the \u201cgrey lady of Bagram\u201d, supposedly tortured for five years in America\u2019s cruel Afghan prison. President Asif Ali Zardari has asked American envoy Richard Holbrooke to repatriate Siddiqui under the Pakistan-US prisoner exchange scheme, while the Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has dubbed her a \u201cdaughter of the nation\u201d. Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif promises to demand her release. But none of them mention the children. Ahmed, Sulieman and Maryam are their names. <br \/>Ahmed was returned to Pakistan from Afghanistan in 2008, but Dr Faruqi tells me he doesn\u2019t believe for a moment that it is Aafia Siddiqui\u2019s son. \u201cHe came here to stay with me, but he said he didn\u2019t know Aafia until he was taken to Ghazni. He said to me: \u2018I was in the big earthquake in Afghanistan and my brothers and sisters were killed in their home while I was out fetching water \u2013 that\u2019s what saved my life.\u2019 He told me that after the earthquake, he was put in an orphanage in Kabul. He was shown a photograph of my niece Aafia and said he did not know this lady, that he had never seen her before. Then he was taken to Ghazni and told to sit next to this woman \u2013 my niece. The boy is intelligent. He is simple. He is honest.\u201d <br \/>All such mysteries require a \u201cstory-so-far\u201d. It goes like this. Aafia Siddiqui, a 38-year-old neuroscientist, an MIT alumna and Brandeis university PhD, disappeared after leaving her sister\u2019s home for Karachi airport in 2003, taking Ahmed, Sulieman and Maryam with her. The Americans say she was a leading Al-Qaeda operative. So does her ex-husband. She had re-married Ammar al-Baluchi, currently in Guantanamo Bay, a cousin of Ramzi Yousef who was convicted for the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing. Not, you might, say, a healthy curriculum vitae in the West\u2019s obsessive \u201cwar on terror\u201d. In 2004, the UN identified her as an Al-Qaeda operative. <br \/>But released inmates from the notorious American prison at Bagram near Kabul\u2013 where torture is commonplace and at least three prisoners have been murdered \u2013 have stated that there was a woman held there, a woman whose nightly screams prompted them to go on hunger strike. She was dubbed the \u201cgrey lady of Bagram\u201d. At her New York trial, Siddiqui demanded that Jewish members of the jury be dismissed, she fired her own defence lawyers who said she had become unbalanced after torture; Siddiqui blurted out that she had been tortured in secret prisons before her arrest. \u201cIf you were in a secret prison &#8230; where children were murdered&#8230;\u201d she said. <br \/>And so to the town of Ghazni, south of Kabul. It was here that Afghan police stopped her in 2008, carrying a handbag which supposedly contained details of chemical weapons and radiological agents, notes on mass casualty attacks on US targets and maps of Ghazni. American soldiers and FBI agents were summoned to question her and arrived in Ghazni without realising that Siddiqui was in the same room, sitting behind a curtain. According to their evidence, she managed to take one of their M-4 assault rifles and opened fire. She missed but was cut down by two bullets from a 9mm pistol fired by one of the soldiers. Hence the charges. Hence the conviction. <br \/>She wasn\u2019t helped by an alleged statement by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed \u2013 the man who supposedly planned 9\/11 and who is the uncle of her second husband, Ammar al-Baluchi \u2013 who claimed that Aafia Siddiqui was a senior Al-Qaeda agent. But then, he\u2019d just been waterboarded 183 times in a month \u2013 which hardly makes his evidence, to use a phrase, water-tight. <br \/>The questions are obvious. What on earth was a Pakistani American with a Brandeis degree doing in Ghazni with a handbag containing American targets? And why, if her family was so fearful for her, didn\u2019t they report her missing in 2003, go to the press and tell the story of the children? Ahmed \u2013 son of Siddiqui or Afghan orphan, depending on your point of view \u2013 is now staying with Siddiqui\u2019s sister, Fauzia, in Karachi; but she refuses to let him talk to journalists. The Americans have shown no interest in him \u2013 even less in the other two, younger children. Why not? <br \/>It\u2019s odd, to say the least, that Dr Faruqi also maintains that in 2008 \u2013 before the Ghazni incident \u2013 Aafia Siddiqui turned up at his home in the suburbs of Islamabad. \u201cShe was wearing a burqa and got out of the car, just outside here,\u201d he says, pointing to the tree-lined street outside his office window. \u201cI only caught sight of her once, and I said \u2018You have changed your nose\u2019. But it was her. We talked about the past, her memories, it was her voice. She said the ISI (the Inter-Services Intelligence) had let her come here. She wanted to get away, to go back to Afghanistan where she said the Taliban would protect her. She said that since her arrest, she knew nothing of her children. Someone told her they had been sent to Australia.\u201d <br \/>More questions. If Siddiqui was a \u201cghost prisoner\u201d in Afghanistan, how come she turned up at Dr Faruqi\u2019s home in Islamabad? Why would she wear an Afghan \u201cburqa\u201d in the cosmopolitan capital of her own country? Why did she not talk more about her children? Why could she not show her face to her own uncle? Did she really come to Islamabad? <br \/>Fauzia Siddiqui is now touring Pakistan to publicise her sister\u2019s \u201cunfair\u201d trial, her torture at the hands of Americans. Most of the Pakistan press have taken up her story with little critical attention to the allegations against her. She has become a proto-martyr, a martyr-in-being; if her story is comprehensible, it requires a willing suspension of disbelief. But America\u2019s constant protestations of ignorance about her whereabouts before 2008 have an unhappy ring about them. <br \/>And the children? Rarely written about in Pakistan, they, too, in a sense, were \u201cdisappeared\u201d from the story \u2013 until the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, paid an uneasy visit to Pakistan this week and, according to Fauzia, told the Interior minister, Rehman Malik, that \u201cthe children of Aafia Siddiqui will be sent home soon\u201d. Was Karzai referring to the other two children? Or to all three, including the \u201creal\u201d Ahmed? And if Aafia\u2019s two\/three children are in Afghanistan, where have they been kept? In an orphanage? In a prison? And who kept them? The Afghans? The Americans?<\/p>\n<p>Dawn\/The Independent News Service<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ISLAMABAD: Dr Shams Hassan Faruqi sits amid his rocks and geological records, shakes his bearded head and stares at me. \u201cI strongly doubt if the children are alive,\u201d he says. \u201cProbably, they have expired.\u201d He says this in a strange way, mournful but resigned, yet somehow he seems oddly unmoved. As a witness, supposedly, to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c42-articles"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The mysterious case of the grey lady of Bagram - SunniOnline<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sunnionline.us\/english\/2010\/04\/06\/159\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The mysterious case of the grey lady of Bagram - SunniOnline\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"ISLAMABAD: Dr Shams Hassan Faruqi sits amid his rocks and geological records, shakes his bearded head and stares at me. \u201cI strongly doubt if the children are alive,\u201d he says. \u201cProbably, they have expired.\u201d He says this in a strange way, mournful but resigned, yet somehow he seems oddly unmoved. As a witness, supposedly, to [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/sunnionline.us\/english\/2010\/04\/06\/159\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"SunniOnline\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-04-06T17:00:46+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"majed\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"majed\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/2010\\\/04\\\/06\\\/159\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/2010\\\/04\\\/06\\\/159\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"majed\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/26da0e970ff572e94f1b7d9009ab39be\"},\"headline\":\"The mysterious case of the grey lady of Bagram\",\"datePublished\":\"2010-04-06T17:00:46+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/2010\\\/04\\\/06\\\/159\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":1360,\"commentCount\":0,\"articleSection\":[\"Articles\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/2010\\\/04\\\/06\\\/159\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/2010\\\/04\\\/06\\\/159\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/2010\\\/04\\\/06\\\/159\\\/\",\"name\":\"The mysterious case of the grey lady of Bagram - SunniOnline\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2010-04-06T17:00:46+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/26da0e970ff572e94f1b7d9009ab39be\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/2010\\\/04\\\/06\\\/159\\\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/2010\\\/04\\\/06\\\/159\\\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/2010\\\/04\\\/06\\\/159\\\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"The mysterious case of the grey lady of Bagram\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/\",\"name\":\"SunniOnline\",\"description\":\"The Official Website of Sunni Community in Iran\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/26da0e970ff572e94f1b7d9009ab39be\",\"name\":\"majed\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/d14a5567692b3eb9bd620c2cb94ec98fcf8d44e4ec418fc172b76b04163a7ee9?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/d14a5567692b3eb9bd620c2cb94ec98fcf8d44e4ec418fc172b76b04163a7ee9?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/d14a5567692b3eb9bd620c2cb94ec98fcf8d44e4ec418fc172b76b04163a7ee9?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"majed\"},\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/sunnionline.us\\\/english\\\/author\\\/majed\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The mysterious case of the grey lady of Bagram - SunniOnline","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/sunnionline.us\/english\/2010\/04\/06\/159\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The mysterious case of the grey lady of Bagram - SunniOnline","og_description":"ISLAMABAD: Dr Shams Hassan Faruqi sits amid his rocks and geological records, shakes his bearded head and stares at me. \u201cI strongly doubt if the children are alive,\u201d he says. \u201cProbably, they have expired.\u201d He says this in a strange way, mournful but resigned, yet somehow he seems oddly unmoved. 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