Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [141]
Just when I was feeling more kindly toward my father, certain cruelties came to light that solidified my aversion to al-Qaeda and my father’s life’s work forever.
My brothers and I had kept puppies as pets from the time of our youth in Khartoum. After Mullah Nourallah presented me with my first pup in Afghanistan, Bobby, our dog population increased. There was no such thing as intentionally controlling pet populations in the world where we lived. In fact, in my culture, it is considered cruel to “fix” dogs so that male dogs cannot have the pleasure of mating and female dogs miss out on the pleasure of mother-hood. The Muslim mind-set is such that we leave nature as God made it. Therefore, puppies became abundant around our compound.
Shortly after we moved to Kandahar, I heard that my father’s training camps had become more sophisticated, with the men testing deadly chemical and biological weapons.
One day when I was tending to my female dog and her young pups, several of the fighters came and asked to borrow my puppies. I didn’t like that idea, but thought they were searching for pets for themselves. So I allowed them to take the puppies, who were old enough to survive without their mother’s milk.
Such requests became commonplace and raised my curiosity as to where all my puppies were going. I had lived in Afghanistan for a number of years by that time, and had noticed few people had affection for dogs. In fact, most Afghans actively looked upon dogs as pests in the manner that many people think of rodents. Rather than running to embrace a cute puppy, they would shoot it. My world had no connection to the great love I am told that people in the West have for their pets.
A friend soon confided that the puppies my siblings and I adored were being sacrificed for the Jihadi cause. My father’s soldiers were using our puppies as test subjects, gassing them to see how long it would take them to die.
Shock ran the length of my body. I wept, but nothing could move my father or his men. They must have test subjects, I was told, and our puppies were ideal for that purpose. My father gave no indication of concern that I cared deeply enough to plead for the lives of my puppies. Several of the new soldiers, young men who had been born without sensitivity, enjoyed describing the death throes of those cute little animals. They insisted on telling me of their trem-bling terror, sitting tied in a cage, suffering throughout the ordeal. The gas was not as fast as one might have imagined.
I never again allowed myself to become attached to any newborn puppies, because while looking at their cute faces, I realized they were dead, they just didn’t know it yet. The gas tests were ongoing even as I left Afghanistan.
After I learned about the puppies, I turned even further away from my father, recognizing that his path led to nothing but pain, disappointment, and death. In fact, the image of suffering dogs was so painful that I pushed it to the deepest corner of my mind. Today I am speaking about this story for the first time in my life.
My emotions were tossing about as if in a fierce wind. I decided that my only chance at happiness lay in becoming independent and finding a suitable bride with whom to start my own family. In March of 1998, I turned seventeen, which was a landmark because I had always believed that would be the age that I should marry. Perhaps this age stuck in my mind because my father had married at seventeen, as had my brother Abdullah. Both Abdul Rahman and Sa’ad wanted to marry, too.
The three of us asked our friends what fighters had daughters of an appropriate age for marriage, as puberty is considered a requirement. At that time, there were no suitable prospects on the compound. My greatest desire