In our country, if someone has been detained, he never comes back. Either he dies, or he comes back as someone else…mentally dead. —Amna
It’s early spring, the season of Ramadan and Easter. Amna is enjoying these warm days as the first small blooms unfurl. Though the month-long fast has been harder than usual with a day job and three kids, it’s also a time of spiritual and physical renewal for her. Today feels like a strange time to be telling one of the darkest chapters of her and Tariq’s story. In another way, though, it seems fitting: there’s light ahead.
A single reckless order from a supervisor upended Tariq and Amna’s lives. In most cases, that would have been the end: Tariq and maybe Amna, too, would be dead or something like it. In Dangerland, people who get thrown to the sharks don’t live to tell their story.
But throughout their ordeal, Tariq and Amna and their families used their wits and courage to affect the outcome, each in a different way. When a lumbering bureaucracy failed to rescue Tariq, Amna and both her and Tariq’s brothers worked to save him.
After Tariq’s first detention, the supervisor who had forced him to take the dangerous action at the airport did not call to express regret or offer support—just the opposite. With shameless duplicity, he left an accusatory rant on Tariq’s voicemail. He shouted, “What did you do?!”
It was pure theatre to frame the events for their employer and deflect attention from his own treachery. After leaving that message, he either blocked Tariq or turned off his phone. So did the other, most likely terrified team members from that airport trip. Tariq would find out later that the others had fled the country. He was alone.
To set the record straight, Tariq emailed his office a detailed, step-by-step account of what had happened. Then he sat up all night, smoking and trying to think his way out of the trap he’d fallen into.
Someone leaked that confidential email to local authorities, the official front of the Monsters. The supervisor was trying to cast him as a traitor to their employer; the leaked email allowed the Monsters to cast him as a traitor to his country. It was as if someone was determined to get him out of the way, one way or another.
Amna didn’t know the extent of the threat yet, but she saw the dread in her husband’s eyes.
The bad guys were not strangers far away from us. Our neighborhood was full of them, and one of them had been working security at the airport. He started telling everyone, “I saw Tariq at the airport, and he did blah blah.” Tariq went down to the neighborhood store to buy diapers for Laith, and one of those men pointed a gun at him and told him to go back home. He wanted Tariq to react in anger to give him an excuse for violence. Instead, Tariq turned around and left.
Tariq’s brothers managed to mediate a period of calm with the neighborhood gunmen. But a riptide current was forming around Tariq and his family, and the sharks were just waiting for them to get pulled far enough from shore to attack. The only hope of escape was to swim sideways to the current instead of against it.
Tariq called a different work supervisor for help and advice. That man, an American, said, “Don’t worry, I’m with you, and nothing bad is going to happen.” But bad things were already happening, and no one seemed to be taking any effective action to stop them.
On the third day, Tariq received a summons from the local authorities. If he didn’t show up, they would come and take him.
He couldn’t tell me what was happening. He just said, “I’m going to work today,” as if everything were normal. But he was smart. He also gave me a list of three names. He said if anything happened, I should call one of those people.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked.
He said, “Nothing; everything is OK. It’s just in case.”
Tariq left the apartment around 8am. When he wasn’t home by 6pm and didn’t answer his phone, Amna knew she had to do something. She chose a familiar name on the list—one of Tariq’s good friends, an American colleague. Because women in their culture didn’t call men who weren’t relatives, she put Suleiman on the phone and said, “Ask him about your dad.”
The friend’s reaction to the situation was shock and then panic. He called the second supervisor, who gave more baseless assurances: “He’s fine. Everything is OK. They just asked him some questions, and he’s fine.”
I asked, Who are “they”? What questions? But we got no more answers from Tariq’s employer. Tariq’s brother tried to reach the second supervisor, but the man didn’t answer or return his calls. Through other channels, his brother found out Tariq had been jailed and accused of being a traitor. If convicted, he would be executed.
When I heard that, I thought first of my kids. How could I tell them that their dad…? I was in a panic and started crying. My mom tried to calm me down over the phone.
I knew it was against protocol to go over the supervisor’s head, but I had to help my husband. So I called the supervisor’s supervisor, who was outside the country. He was surprised by everything I told him, as if he were hearing it for the first time.
Amna would find out later that her phone call set the gears into motion just in time. But things would keep getting worse before they got better.
Her brothers said, “You can’t stay at home tonight. The next step is that they’re going to come here to the apartment.” This was the apartment that they’d saved for so long to buy, and that Amna had lovingly decorated to make a haven for the kids during COVID lockdown.
They took only the essentials—papers and money—and went to an apartment that Amna’s brother was keeping while his family’s home was being renovated. The next morning, they went back to Amna and Tariq’s apartment and saw that it had been ransacked. Amna’s brothers whisked her and the kids away to their parents’ home outside of the city.
Tariq’s brother was trying to find some way to help, but they started calling and interrogating him. They tried to manipulate him into believing Tariq was some kind of traitor. They sent him on pointless errands for things that didn’t exist: “Your brother has a GPS device/walkie talkie/etc. hidden in the house. Go get it and bring it to us.” Then they said, “You worked for the old regime. It will be so easy to call you a traitor, too.”
When they forced him to admit that I had called Tariq’s employer, they said, “Then we’re going to take her, too.”
They started calling me and threatening me. They demanded to know why I had contacted the Americans. Was I a “traitor” like my husband?
The Monsters were in a rage about Amna’s phone call. It had changed the scenario. With higher eschelons of authority alerted to the arrest of a U.S. employee, they couldn’t kill Tariq. They hated the Americans, but they had to make a show of cooperating with them. Remember the proxy wars? Incredibly, as far as the U.S. was concerned, the Monsters were allies.
The U.S. supervisor told me how surprised they were that these men had taken Tariq. In fact, he said, the U.S. had given them weapons and trained them. I wanted to ask, “Are you crazy?! They are violent lunatics, mentally disturbed—why would you arm them?”
To soothe their thwarted egos, the Monsters settled for inflicting terror and humiliation. They made sure Amna and her family knew they were being watched. The family had gathered up some of Tariq’s work equipment, like his body armor, and taken it out of the apartment for safekeeping. Then the call came: “We saw what you took from the house.”
Tariq’s U.S. employer connected Amna with a lawyer, but that man was so scared and useless, it was almost comical. However, through a personal connection, Tariq’s brother was able to find out exactly where they were detaining him.
Then it was Amna’s turn. After three days, they told her to come to the police station. Like Tariq’s summons, this wasn’t a choice. Her little brother insisted on going with her.
I was scared, but I didn’t want him to come. When a man comes into their clutches, they will do their best to humiliate him. If he is with a woman, they will insult her to try to provoke a reaction from him as an excuse to harm him.
Amna’s brother stayed by her side as long as he could. They made him wait outside the building while they took her into an interrogation room.
There were five creepy men—they were so, so creepy. The tallest one was the worst. Later after Tariq came home, when I described this man to him, he looked sick—I could tell he recognized him as the one who had been the worst to him, too. Another one with a long beard, clearly some kind of religious extremist, mocked me as I shook with fear. They had a woman present in the room, supposedly to protect my modesty, but really she was there to help them manipulate me. She would say, “You must answer the question—it is best for your husband’s safety.”
But there were no answers to give. I tried to explain that we lived simple lives. If you are angry because he works for the U.S., then why do you make it so easy to work with the Americans? Hundreds of local people work for them. Are they all traitors?
I said, “My husband is a good guy, just trying to raise his kids.”
The bearded creep laughed and jeered, “Yeah, right, he’s a good guy.”
This is their work there: to make you feel bad, to scare and humiliate you. It was for the best that my brother didn’t see this. If he had, something would have happened.
They produced a bunch of papers and told me to sign them all. I don’t know what was in them; I just signed. I was hoping I could get to see Tariq. I didn’t have any clue whether he was still alive. But they wouldn’t tell me anything or let me see him.
After they released Amna, there was nothing to do but go home and wait. She waited and waited and waited. Then on the fifth day, Tariq came home, badly beaten but alive.