Pakistan’s minister for civil aviation, Ghulam Sarwar Khan, recently declared that he would like to become a suicide bomber in order to destroy Islam’s enemies.
Khan’s outburst is unsurprising given Pakistan’s longstanding fixation with native daughter Aafia Siddiqui, an Al Qaeda operative from an upper-class background currently imprisoned in an American jail near Fort Worth, Texas.
As American authorities learned from interrogating Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), the mastermind behind Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks, Siddiqui or “Lady Al Qaeda” acted as a courier for Al Qaeda. She briefly married KSM’s nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi, who, like KSM, is imprisoned at the American naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and faces the death penalty for his support of the 9/11 attacks. She became the only woman to make the FBI’s most wanted list of Al Qaeda fugitives in 2004.
Afghan national police arrested Siddiqui on July 17, 2008, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, and handed her over to American authorities. Subsequent indictments listed her as carrying sodium cyanide and plans for attacking various targets in New York City including the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty. On her second day in captivity, she opened fire on her American army and FBI interrogators with an unattended assault rifle before her captors wounded her. In 2010, a federal court in New York City sentenced her to 86 years in prison for attempted murder.
Siddiqui recently burst into international notoriety again as the objective of a British-Pakistani terrorist, Malik Faisal Akram. For ten hours on January 15-16, he held hostage a rabbi and three congregants in a Colbyville, Texas, synagogue 20 miles away from her Fort Worth prison, demanding her release. The crisis ended with the four hostages escaping unharmed and the police shooting Akram.
Akram exemplified how Siddiqui has become a “cause célèbre in the terrorist world,” with numerous jihadist groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region (AfPak) demanding her release along with Siddiqui supporters worldwide. In America, she even has an Aafia Foundation named in her honor, where an Aafia Fact Sheet notes how she earned a bachelor’s degree at MIT and a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience at Brandeis University in the 1990s. There “Aafia was known for her passionate commitment to dawah (the teaching and spread of Islam). This attracted a negative response from certain bigoted interests (especially Zionists).”