Sister’s 9/11 defence comes to light
‘They deserve it,’ Omar’s sibling said in 2004
The comments were made 13 years ago, but for many Canadians they continue to define Zaynab Khadr, and by extension much of her ill-famed family.
In interviews with the National Post and others, the Ottawa-born daughter of an alleged al-Qaida insider spoke with jarring ambivalence about the 9/11 attacks.
The person behind the 2001 terrorist attacks wanted to hit the American government “where it will hurt it, not the people,” she told the CBC. “But sometimes innocent people pay the price. You don’t want to feel happy, but you just sort of think, well, they deserve it, they’ve been doing it for such a long time. Why shouldn’t they feel it once in a while?”
Zaynab has also denied that her family were terrorists, and suggested they travelled to Afghanistan in the 1980s only to do charitable work.
But those incendiary 2004 remarks — and other facets of her extraordinary life — are again coming to the fore, as brother Omar Khadr asks a court to loosen his bail, in part so he can have unencumbered communications with his sister and mother.
The 38-year-old sibling — now living in Sudan with her fourth husband and four children — was herself accused by the RCMP of aiding al-Qaida, though never charged with anything. She welcomed Osama bin Laden at her second wedding, appeared in court to support the Toronto-18 terror defendants — and briefly married a devout Christian man who, by strange coincidence, is now a victim of Muslim extremists himself.
When brother Omar was released on bail pending his appeal of U.S. terrorism charges, a judge ruled he could only talk to his sister and mother under court-approved supervision. Khadr asked the Court of Queen’s Bench in a recently filed application to lift that restriction and others.
Even if family members tried, they would be unable to influence him in any negative way, the 30-year-old says in an affidavit, noting he is now an independent adult.
“He has been perfectly well behaved since his release,” Khadr’s lawyer Nathan Whitling said in an interview Monday. “Regardless of what Zaynab may have said in a documentary many years ago, there is no danger whatsoever of somebody somehow corrupting Omar into becoming a bad person.”
Meanwhile, the renewed attention to the Khadr women appears less than welcome. At the Toronto home of Maha Elsamnah, the siblings’ mother, a man who answered the phone reacted angrily to a reporter’s inquiry.
“Every time (Omar) sh--s, you have to write about it? Don’t call back and don’t bother her,” he said before hanging up abruptly.
An up-to-date Facebook page under Zaynab’s name contains a mix of posts about her brother’s case, critiques of U.S. policy in the Middle East, diet advice and recipes. There are also hints of her conservative Muslim leanings.
“All sects of Islam have agreed unanimously that homosexual acts are a sin, hijab is mandatory, imams must be men,” says a cartoonlike post she shared on her page Monday. “If you reject this, you are lying to yourself and you are weak in faith. Accept Islam for what it is or leave our mosques.”
The sister was last in the news in 2016 when she was briefly imprisoned in Turkey. According to Omar’s affidavit, the detention was over an expired visa. He says she then moved with her current husband to Malaysia, gave birth in Egypt and now lives in Sudan, a country ruled by a hard-line Islamist government. She is planning to visit Canada in the near future, he said.
Zaynab was born in 1979, after her Egyptian father and Palestinian mother had settled in Canada. But the family moved to Pakistan in 1985, in the midst of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Western intelligence agencies and the United Nations have said Ahmed Khadr started on the path to extremism then, and wound up working closely with bin Laden in the 1990s when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and the al Qaeda leader took refuge there.
Her father arranged for Zaynab to marry an Egyptian man in 1995, when she was just 15, but the fiancé went on the run after being implicated in the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan by Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of al-Qaida’s founders.
They did eventually marry, but the marriage lasted only six months. Two years later she wed a Yemeni man in Kabul, the wedding that both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri attended.
Zaynab, who stoutly defended the Taliban’s brutal rule during those 2004 interviews, returned to Canada in 2005, only to face RCMP accusations of being part of al Qaeda.
She was never prosecuted, though, and on a nowdefunct website to counter the family’s years of horrid publicity, insisted the Khadrs only ever wanted to help the victims of Afghanistan’s wars.