The Lady of Bagram is a work of fiction and must be read and understood as such. It is loosely based on a true story.
Chapter One (Continued)
Aafia S re-appeared in 2008 as mysteriously as she had vanished. There had been murky reports about her whereabouts in the years in-between. Some said she was in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. Others speculated that she was the “Lady of Bagram,” a mysterious woman who was the only female prisoner in the notorious military base where the American’s held the terrorists they rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many of them reported hearing a woman’s screams deep into the night; one or two said they had seen her. No one, of course, actually knew if this was Aafia S but everyone speculated.
Nor did anyone know who had handed her over to the Americans. The conduit could well have been the Pakistani ISI, eager to prove to the Americans that they were serious about the War on Terror and earnest in their alliance with the United States. It was also possible that she and her children had been abducted by a terror group and kept as hostages so they could be exchanged for those of their own that had been captured.
The place where she was found is also odd. Ghazni is a city set in the low mountain ranges of central Afghanistan, with a history that goes far beyond the episodic wars of recent memory. Before Islam came around in the early medieval age, the city was home to a large Buddhist and Hindu population whose relics remain strewn about on the dusty outskirts of town. Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, came to the sub-continent through Ghazni and the city was the capital of medieval Ghaznavid Empire. Those days of grandeur are long gone now but the minarets and mosques and walls of that medieval time can still be seen around the city, rising up out of the crowds of mud-brick single story homes in which most of the city’s population lives.
On the afternoon of July 17, 2008, a woman was found wandering the dusty streets around a mosque near Ghazni’s central market. She seemed to have no idea where she was going, walking in loops around the perimeter of the mosque, sitting down then getting up. With her was a boy who appeared to be thirteen or fourteen years of age. Covered in a blue burka in the Afghan style, she would cower when people tried to approach her, holding a black purse as a shield.
Eventually, the Imam of the mosque was told about the woman. Instead of offering her refuge in the mosque, as Imams are supposed to do with the destitute and desperate, he immediately got on his cell phone and called the Afghan police. Aafia S. was back in custody within hours of her bizarre re-appearance. She could only barely whisper her name and she said she did not know who the boy was. The boy said he was her son, grown in the five years since their abduction in Karachi. In a video played by Afghan television not long after the two were found, she appears dazed and confused, swatting away the microphones that are being shoved in her face. In Urdu, she murmurs, “Please leave us alone,” again and again.
The Afghan Police, lackadaisical in other matters of security provision, showed great alacrity in this matter and proceeded to take Aafia S and the boy into custody. They loaded the duo up into the back of a police van and headed off to the police station. The Governor of Ghazni, a newly elected man with grander political aspirations, soon figured out that this particular prisoner could yield some dividends. Here was a woman with American connections, who could, Wikipedia told him, be a famous missing woman who had been wanted for questioning by the FBI before she was abducted. To a man eager to rise, here was a route to the American kingmakers of Afghanistan. He ordered his men to keep the woman in custody, and he decided to go through her belongings himself. Before he began that task, he called his American counterparts at the Forward Operating Base in Ghazni and arranged a meeting for the next morning.