subject: My Al Qaida Story Of 2002 [print this page] My Al Qaida Story Of 2002 My Al Qaida Story Of 2002
In January 2002 I made a trip to help the family of a friend of mine that worked for me at my bagel shop in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was born in Peshawar, Pakistan but managed to get to Canada with her sister Layla and continue their university education while working and supporting their family back in Peshawar. Now I had made many trips to Peshawar on business, mostly nefarious activities but some carpet dealings as well. It was fairly safe at the time but there was always that leer in people's eyes when they would see me walking through the markets in my Birkenstock sandals. I could sense they wanted to kill me but it was the 80's and Osama Bin Laden was not as famous yet as he is now. The Russians had just entered the country with 50,000 men strong and killed almost everything in their way, causing millions of Afghans to flee to the Pakistani side and many had settled in Peshawar which was the closest big city to the famous Khyber Pass, gateway of the Old Silk Road.
Why anyone would try and occupy Afghanistan is beyond me as they have defeated all who tried in their 10,000 year history. The British tried three times in the 1800's and when Alexander the Great tried they took many of his fighters as slaves and used them to breed with their women. Nuristan is a province in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan and many of the freedom fighters that ultimately made the Russians turn around and flee back to their
homeland with their tales between their legs. When Osama Bin Laden came to fight the Russians in the 80's with the help of the CIA, of course, he setup shop in Peshawar, as did the original leader of the PLO Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, who was a teacher and mentor to Osama and persuaded him to come and help in the fight against the Russians. So Peshawar has quite a history and besides the good things like the Silk Road coming through, it has it's roots of terrorism that the world could have done without. I would make about three trips per year on average for the decade of the 80's and was oblivious to the Russian war going on, and many of the hotels I would stay at were bombed to smithereens when I would return the next trip. I finally settled on the Pearl Intercontinental Hotel, a five star gorgeous building that was heavily guarded and felt safe enough to me. On June 9th 2009 it was finally destroyed and 17 people lost their lives when a crazy suicide bomber broke through the front gate and rammed the building with a huge amount of explosives.
I arrived on January 13th at Peshawar airport on a PIA flight from Dubai where everyone lining up at the gate looked like some kind of terrorist to me and I wondered why they were being allowed to travel. The flight, however was like traveling on the Toronto to Halifax route, very boring except that most of the people looked very dangerous to me, except the pretty women, of course. My friend and his whole family met me at the airport, which made me feel good as I didn't want to have to take a taxi with a possible Al-Qaeda driver. My friend knew this as he was once a General in the Army of the former King Mohammad Zahir Shah and knew very well the dangers that abound in that region of the world. We left the airport and went directly to the village he lived in, which was an already established refugee camp from a previous migration of Afghans that streamed into Peshawar during the Russian invasion of the eighties. His property was walled off as were all the others, when In say walls, I mean 20 feet high and shards of glass embedded into the tops all along the way to make it near impossible to scale them and attack. Didn't seem to be much trust of the neighbor in this village.
There was a huge steel door which had a smaller one that was used as a peep whole of sorts, and once the servant inside could see who we were he opened the big door, long enough for us to get the car in and then shut quickly and loudly behind. It did seem that all precautions were taken for my safety, but I was still oblivious to the real dangers present. After several hours and a meal eaten on the floor as they don't use tables or cutlery for that matter, people came to visit to see the Westerner, which I found out out none of them had ever seen one like me live before, only on TV. Some of these people were wearing all black clothing, turbans and all, they looked at me as if they wanted to kill me right there and then. I knew Khailillulah was a General and had the utmost respect of these people because I saw them kiss his hands and feet! He later told me they were with the Taliban, but only because they had no money and the Taliban would give them food and and a little pocket change to do their nasty deeds, which in most cases was to beat or kill people who did not agree with their version of Sharia law.
I am a lover of massages and would get one wherever in the world I would travel, my favorite being Japan as they were by extra strong men with deep tissue massaging. So I asked my friend if he knew anyone that could give me a massage while I was there, and being a gracious Afghan he went right out into the village and came back with the local barber. There was no oil in the house and they improvised with a lotion normally used for hair. The strength of this man was unbelievable and it felt like he could break any bone or snap my neck without any effort. Thankfully he was in the house of a formal General who would probably chop him up in pieces if he killed me, even accidentally, so I felt safe in that regard. When the massage was over we settled down and the barber rolled a big fat hashish joint that would have got a dozen people high back home in Canada. I took out my stack of pictures of my family and friends and we began to look at them while we smoked. The barber seemed genuinely interested, as I am sure he was. At the end just before we bid each other goodnight he asked me if he could have a picture of myself as a memento of the occasion and to show his family that he actually met a Canadian man. I thought that was nice and gave him a good shot of me as I had duplicates anyhow.
A few days later I got sick with dysentery and had a temperature of 105 degrees, that's enough to kill a person of my age the hospital said, and only babies survive such temperatures. So I decided to get the hell out of that dirty country, as I was now over 50 years old and didn't want to die there with my son being back in Canada, he would have been very mad at me. I had to check into the Intercontinental Hotel to get clean water and food and get the energy to buy a ticket and get to the airport. That took about a week before I had the stamina, and once done I and had the ticket in hand I felt much better and couldn't wait to leave. I found myself finally in the departure lounge of the Peshawar airport, after one of the most diligent searches outside of Israel, and looked forward to flying to civilization, as I was in the land of the Flintstones without the cozy characters.
I made it home and was greeted by my dieing father, still in bed and my son who was 13 at the time, both of them could not be as happy as me though. Four days later I received a disturbing email from my friend in Peshawar, telling me that 16 masked men, most likely from Al Qaeda, had scaled his walls at 2 in the morning while he and the family slept foolishly unguarded. They smashed him in the face with the butt of a Kalashnikov machine gun causing his nose to bleed profusely. Then systematically began looking for the Canadian man Hank Cooper, and even had a photo of him to make sure they got who they came for. His cute 10 year old son came out and stood in front of one of them and they just picked him up by his thick hair and hurled him into the stone walls. They became increasingly agitated not finding me as they had direct intelligence that I was there, the barber was standing outside the gate and had brought them there, all of them wanting to share in the $35,000 reward. They were so mad that they could not find me they wanted to take my friend's 13 year old daughter in exchange for me. The house being filled with antiques from his many years as a dealer, the terrorists began filling their car with as many of the antiques as they could. When it was evident I was not to be found and the car was so filled with the stolen booty, there was no more room for the girl and she was spared the ordeal of kidnapping and most surely raped by the gang as well.
The sun was beginning to rise and the lunatics left, Khailillulah was taken to the hospital to stop the hemorrhaging in his nose and the family called the police to come and investigate. They knew it was the barber and sent the cops to his house, but he was not there, only his wife and five year old son. They immediately took the son and put him in a jail cell and told the wife when her husband comes to turn himself in they will release the boy, which the barber did and was subsequently beaten to a pulp by the police. These things would never happen in Canada but sometimes in certain situations you would wish the police could do the same things as in Pakistan, but I guess that is why Canada is such a beautiful and free country and Pakistan is not. I don't mean to offend anyone from that country but it is just a matter of fact.
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