Who Killed Daniel Pearl (37 page)

I spend the first day looking for lodgings that accept foreigners.

The next day, not really knowing where to begin, I roam around near the airport, now under American control, where I finally find someone who worked here ten years ago, at the time of the hijacking, and who confirms the overall picture outlined for me by A. K. Doval, the man from the Indian secret services.

Just in case, I pass by the hideous Hollywood-style villa, half candy-pink, half pistachio-green, that Mullah Omar had specially built and furnished on the outskirts of the city. Stucco and radar; kitschy turrets; rococo bedrooms and anti-aircraft installations; gigantic murals in the most pretentious styles, that mix visions of a future Afghanistan with freeways and dams, with bucolic scenes of life in paradise.

I wander around the Aïd mosque, the ruined offices of the Ministry for the Repression of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue, the flourishing music stores, the little arena where the Taliban held wrestling matches and where, occasionally, the Taliban's supreme chief would come in person and, like a modern-day Nero, provided he was having a good day, would bring his personal body guards to fight in a match. (Legend has it he would even occasionally come on foot. Since no one knew his face, he could be there incognito.)

But I'm having great difficulty finding any trace of the other Omar, my Omar, the one who really matters to me.

I go to see another religious official whose name and address were given to me in London, and he tells me about yet another Omar Sheikh, also Pakistani, but it is a different man with the same name.

I go to one of the
madrasas
where I've heard the Pakistani “brothers,” who had come for the jihad, were welcomed—but no one there remembers him either.

I look up Mohammed Mehran, an intellectual I met on my Afghan mission a year ago, and one of the leading experts on Arab and Pakistani training camps—Omar's world when, as a young student barely out of the London School of Economics, he was here for a few months in 1993–1994. But although Mohammed is an inexhaustible source on the structure of the camps and the kind of training received there, spending hours answering my questions about how they function, he can scarcely shed any light on the particular case of Omar Sheikh.

Everywhere I go, I feel he has been—and yet I find no trace of him.

With every step, I sense his presence—but it is as insubstantial as shadows.

I know that here, in this maze of narrow streets, lies hidden another key to his mystery and to the nature of his ties with al-Qaida, but nothing tells me how, if I were to come upon it, I would recognize it.

In a word, the investigation is at a standstill.

For the second time, as in Bosnia, I've run into a complete lack of clues or witnesses.

For three days, it goes on like this.

I spend the time reading, reflecting, walking through the bazaars, daydreaming, listening to the call of the
muezzin
, which seems (or is it my impression?) more aggressive than during my other stays here. I reread
Les Amants de Kandahar
late one afternoon, seated at a table on the terrace of a café on “Mujahideen Square,” waiting, losing patience, waiting some more. And then, since I have to wait, I spend the time trying to imagine Omar's life, not here, but at Miran Shah, then Kahlid bin Waleed, during the time of his first visit, when he completed his first two training sessions—and as long as I'm daydreaming, I linger one last time over what remains the most disconcerting part of the puzzle: the transformation of a young Englishman into a fanatic of holy war and crime.

There are no direct witnesses, of course. No one to tell me, “I knew Omar at Miran Shah and Khalid bin Waleed, and this is what he was like.” Instead, Mohammed's stories, and bits of secrets confided to Peter Gee, to Rhys Partridge and to his other kidnap victims, whose police depositions Indian services gave to me and I recall. And then, my own knowledge of him. Because isn't that what it means to know someone? To be able to imagine how he would behave, even in situations of which we know close to nothing . . . And by drawing on all this, I have the feeling I'm beginning to know Omar . . .

The layout of the camps of Khalid bin Waleed and Miran Shah: The camps are all alike, Mohammed Mehran told me. Built along the same lines. At the bottom of a very green valley, surrounded by snowy, deserted mountains. Hangars of poor-quality sheet metal that sparkle in the sunlight. Tents. A mosque. An immense parade ground where everyone gathers for prayers and for exercises. The exact image, in other words, of the naïve painting on the wall of my room in the Hotel Akbar. But Khalid bin Waleed, the second camp Omar attended, and the one Mohammed knew the best, having visited there just before the Americans razed the place, had one unusual feature. It had another, smaller parade ground, where the combatants' families came regularly to share their joys and sorrows, to be united in an ecstasy of shared sacrifice and death, and, sometimes, to intermarry, widows and survivors, thus constituting a sort of a holy fellowship of relatives of heroes. They came also as if to the theatre, with their children, to see the “holy warriors” act out, as though on a stage, their glory, their sacrifice, and their death. War and theatre. Crime and crime drama. A bucolic and austere setting. Luxuriant and lugubrious. Actors and martyrs. Allah Akbar. Omar is there.

Daily life in the camps: The days . . . The nights . . . I try to imagine Omar's nights at Khalid bin Waleed. Details . . . Always details . . . Because, as usual, everything is said and done in the details: Where does he sleep, for example? In a bed? On a mat? On the ground? In the snow or on the stones? Alone? With the others? Response: on mats on the ground, under a tree, when it rains, without a pillow of course, without sheets or blankets, in stocking feet when it's cold, huddled against one another like sardines, to get warm. Terror and brotherhood. Terror-brotherhood. Heat, rank and exquisite, and, at last, the bliss of a sense of belonging. In the style of my dear Sartre: the experience of the hangar and collectivity, the sweaty stench of humans, their fetid breath, the nausea— in a word, the “autodidactic” destiny of a social misfit named Omar who, far from suffering from the fleas and bedbugs, the cold, the promiscuity of bodies, the mingled breath, the decaying human matter, finds the most profound and intense pleasure in them. If, as Peter Gee told me, Omar's problem really was that of the impossibility of his belonging, if his secret dream was really to escape his painful and guilty solitude, at Khalid bin Waleed, his desires were fulfilled. The hell, thus the heaven, of Khalid bin Waleed.

The days at Khalid bin Waleed: What did they eat? What did they drink? It seems like a frivolous question, but it isn't for Omar. Omar with his fragile health. With the body and the physiology of a prosperous European. Omar, whom I now know couldn't make it to Bosnia because the trip was too exhausting and, ultimately, made him ill. And Omar who, arriving directly from London at the camp at Miran Shah, had had the same problem. Dishes of poorly cooked rice. Old meat that has spoiled, eaten with the fingers off huge, communal plates. Rancid oil, cooked a hundred times over. Bad, stagnant water. Milk that has gone sour. Meager amounts of fruit. Filthy kitchens. Filth everywhere, all the time. Miran Shah turns out to be like Bosnia, only worse. Food poisoning that, this time, knocks him flat. Fever. Delirium. Dry, swollen tongue. The body—bathed in sweat—letting go at both ends. Left in bed, if one can call it a bed, while the others go out to drill. Off to the jihad and glory, Omar falls ill after twenty-one days (the end of the first leg of jihadist training) and must immediately leave for Lahore (either the home of his uncle, Rauf Ahmed Sheikh, a judge on the High Court of Lahore, or that of his grandfather, I don't know which—back to home base, Omar the weakling, the pitiful).

What does Omar do when he gets sick? At Solin, in Croatia, it was simple. He stayed in bed. Waited. And the Convoy of Mercy picked him up on its way back and took him home to London. But here? From what I know of Miran Shah, doctors and nurses are nonexistent, as are medicine and medical care. And what I know of that army, the army of jihadists, the holy warriors, the soldiers of God, is that it's the only army in the world where no one cares about the health, the physical state, or even the age of the soldiers. There is no age limit for recruitment, for example. No draft board to declare you exempt. Little kids and old men of eighty. And the little kids, by the way, can be ten years or ten months or ten days old—there are mothers who take their newborn to the camp! There are actually nurseries in the camps, for the babies dedicated to the jihad! In short, no hospital at Miran Shah nor, for that matter, at Khalid bin Waleed. The closest hospital is at Muzzafarabad, two hundred kilometers away, where those who are wounded in combat receive treatment. Sink or swim is the only choice. Omar, at Miran Shah, nearly sinks, and goes back to Lahore.

The schedule at Miran Shah and Khalid bin Waleed: The rhythm of the nights and the days . . . The first thing that must strike Omar, I am sure, is the way time drags on slowly, without breaks or events. Five prayers don't make a rhythm; three meals aren't enough to organize a day around. The first thing that bothers and changes him is this slackness, time that's almost immobile, bloodless, like time during insomnia, when nothing happens except the succession of days and of nights, of dawns and of dusks. Time reduced to this? The time of these epic and beautiful moments—the sunrises, the sunsets—whose meaning, as it would be for all city dwellers, had been lost on him in London? Yet not even that, for, in the camps, one never sees the sun rise. And one never sees it set. Or, if one does, it is without looking at it—it is forbidden to notice, a European and Christian concern, a wonder of aesthetes and idolators, silence! The first commandment of jihadist time: act as though nothing were happening. The first shock of Omar the jihadist: the time that doesn't pass, time emptied of events, of thought, the pure passage of time. Omar no longer reads. He no longer reflects. Caught in the mechanism of the days, in the repetition of collective movements and that of survival, he scarcely has time to think. No longer an autodidact, but an illiterate. Drunk, no longer on the group, but on the void. The illiterate destiny of Omar. To become impoverished in spirit. Amnesia. Brain washing?

The schedule, once more: The concrete filling of the hours. The same as in almost all camps. It's a protocol, almost a ritual, it doesn't change from one camp to the next. First prayer before dawn. Then, recitation from the Koran, in Arabic. Then a lecture by an emir, or an
uléma
who is passing through, on a point of doctrine, a saying of the prophet, a group of
suras
, a page of the
Kitalbul Jihad
, the “Book of the Jihad” by Abdullah bin Murbarik, the Koranic scholar responsible for a collection of the sayings of the Prophet regarding the holy war. Then and only then—it's eight o'clock—is breakfast served. After that—it's nine o'clock—military training. Prayers at noon. Lunch. Rest. Afternoon prayers. Training. New indoctrination session: the wars of Mohammed; the lives of his companions; his holy Face; the contours of his Face; why there is only One; the horror of video games, drugs, the films of Stallone and others that were so influential in arousing violence in Omar and that he sees, now, condemned, relegated to oblivion. Domestic work. Chores. Prayers at twilight. New recitation from the Koran. New lecture on the “jihad” (combat on the path of God) and on the “qital” (the art of killing, according to the path of Allah), on the holy values of Islam (fraternity and
oumma
, the community of believers) as well as the materialism of modern life and the moral decadence of the West (the incapacity, in Europe, of sons to love fathers, of fathers to love sons, of brothers to love brothers, as brothers love in the land of Islam—as in the camps). Last prayers. Sleep.

I add them up. Five prayers. Four or five time slots devoted to religious indoctrination and the Koran. As opposed to two, perhaps three sessions of actual military training (in sum: learning how to handle a Kalashnikov, an RPG-7, grenades, a rifle, a rocket launcher, and, the specialty at Khalid bin Waleed, remotely detonated landmines). Is this what they call a “training camp”? Is this how the dreaded camps of al-Qaida function? Is the religious more important than the military at Khalid bin Waleed? Does the minaret have control over the rifle? The
uléma
over the emir? And, in “holy warriors,” does “holy” count more than “warriors”? Well, yes. That's right. That's what the West doesn't realize when we think of these camps, and yet, that is the reality. That these camps are about life as well as combat, that jihadism is a way of living and of being as well as a penchant for war—it's one of the things I have come to understand in the twenty years I have been interested in Afghanistan, and something that my conversations with Mohammed Mehran confirm. That the important thing is less the actual jihad than to believe in the jihad, and that the jihad is as much, if not more, of a religious obligation as it is a military obligation, that the liberation of Kashmir and Palestine are merely a point of departure, almost a pretext—this is also the first thing Omar realizes as soon as he arrives. It's his chance, actually. It's the card he's going to play. That's the only explanation for the odd title of “instructor” he boasted of to the Bengali and Pakistani inmates at Tihar Jail, a title I have long wondered about—how could it have been conferred upon such a weakling, such a city boy? Omar never would have been an “instructor” at the camp of Khalid bin Waleed if the actual military component had been more important than the religious.