On the 15th night of Ramadan in a suburb of Belize City, Majid Khan and his family of four sat down to a traditional iftar meal to break their daylight fast. There was a leg of lamb that Majid, a former Guantánamo detainee, had killed himself, candy brought by a sister in Maryland, dating back to Saudi Arabia.
The atmosphere was a little noisy, but not enough to disturb the sleep of baby Hamza, who was born two weeks earlier in a hospital in the Central American city. The talk was small talk, about whether the biryani dish was too spicy and how the lamb was perfectly grilled.
These are mundane matters, made more meaningful because Majid Khan, a former al Qaeda courier, was celebrating with his wife Rabia and daughter Manaal in their first home together, in Belize, their new adopted homeland.
For two decades, this family meal was not possible. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Khan joined Al Qaeda, agreed to become a suicide bomber, and handed over $50,000 to be used in the deadly hotel bombing in Indonesia. For his crimes, he was taken prisoner by the United States, tortured by the CIA and then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. He pleaded guilty and became a government collaborator, and all the while his wife waited for him in Pakistan.
“I’ve been waiting for it for 20 years,” Rabia Khan said with a satisfied sigh. “Everyone said, ‘You’re brave. You are strong'”. Circumstances required it. “Now I tell Majid: ‘Everything depends on you, not on me.’”
Big questions about life await this family. Will Majid, 44, be able to move forward with his fledgling business importing terracotta pots? Will Rabia, 40, need to take baby Hamza to Mexico to see a specialist for kidney disease? Where will 20-year-old Manaal go to college and then become a dentist?
But other struggles take on greater importance.
Majid still needs to find medical care for the damage he suffered in secret CIA prisons abroad. He still has to fit in with the country that welcomed his family. He has not been able to open a bank account because of his past.
“Life is a test,” he said, describing himself as a glass-half-full guy. He sees the next chapter of his life as an opportunity to make things right. He was hurt, he said, and did things that hurt others. He punctuates his comments with “May God forgive.”
Even among the 750 men and boys who have passed through Guantánamo prison, Majid Khan always stood apart.
Pakistani, he went to high school in suburban Baltimore and was radicalized there after his mother’s death in 2001. He went to Pakistan that year, after the 9/11 attacks, at age 21, and married with Rabia in an arranged relationship. marriage. He also joined al Qaeda members, including men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, and was recruited to be a suicide bomber in a never-before-done attack on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. His decisions, he says, were impetuous and wrong.
He was the first prisoner to be tortured in CIA custody into pleading guilty to war crimes, nearly a decade after his arrest as a “high-value detainee.” He spent more years isolated from other detainees than any other prisoner, much of that time as a government aid worker.
Sixteen months after a U.S. military jury condemned his treatment as “a stain on the moral fiber of the United States,” Belize allowed him to resettle there as a humanitarian gesture. At Belize’s insistence, the United States paid for his house, his car, and his telephone and provided him with a stipend.
Rabia Khan spent those years as a single mother with her parents and a house full of sisters and brothers, nephews and nieces, raising Manaal, her son who was born after Majid’s capture.
In Guantánamo, he prayed alone, slept for many days and ate alone. “You got used to it,” she said. Their Ramadan rations included three dates and sometimes a packet of honey.
They met two months after his release. She met her daughter for the first time in the VIP lounge at the Belize airport. Her husband and the wife who had been separated when they were in their 20s and 30s did not feel like strangers.
“I don’t know why,” Rabia said. “Maybe because of the lyrics?”
Manaal confesses that it has been an exciting year, starting with the sudden news that the father he never knew had been released from prison. Eight weeks later, she and her mother traveled 48 hours (from Karachi to Doha to New York to Miami to Belize City) and joined him.
There have been visits from his father’s family in the United States, tours of tourist spots along the Caribbean coast of Belize, and now, a little brother: all the ingredients for a most unusual gap year or two before going to school. university.
He glides through his family’s three-bedroom home with a fresh, ownership-like air. Hers She has her first bedroom all to herself, now adorned with strings of festive lights. She designed Hamza’s birth announcement, featuring the image of a heart-shaped balloon. She phoned it from the hospital to her family in three time zones just minutes after her arrival.
Outside the home, she and her mother wear robes and cover their hair with a hijab and their faces with Covid masks, a modern version of the austere niqab. She drives the family car, a used Chevy Equinox.
“I am a Pakistani at heart with an American touch,” he said. “So I’m a bit of a feminist. But I do believe strictly in Muslim modesty. And honor. I have to make sure my daughter is modest until she gets married.”
The nation of Belize, with about 415,000 residents, is the size of New Jersey, with about 5 percent of its population. The official language is English, which helps. But for Majid Khan, a man in a hurry, integrating has been a challenge.
“It has yet to synchronize with the laissez-faire of Belize,” said its mosque leader, Kaleem El-Amin, who calls himself Brother Kaleem. “I think he needs a little more time.”
Majid has not yet set up shop for his business, selling painted pots from Pakistan, nor has he found a large commercial buyer.
Part of the problem is that no bank has been willing to open an international account for the man who gave $50,000 to an al Qaeda affiliate, without knowing, he said, its purpose. He was already in US custody when the money was used in an attack that killed a dozen people at a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, on August 5, 2003.
Belize blames global financial regulations imposed after 9/11. A government official who discussed the issue on condition of anonymity because it involves sensitive diplomatic relations said the issue was outside the Belize government’s purview, calling it an “obstacle” for Majid’s government. establishing a sustainable business.
The family’s utilities are on the credit card of their father, who has visited them for long periods. Any business you do requires cash and sometimes a Belizean partner.
If his wife needs to take their baby abroad for medical care, he cannot accompany her. He has Belizean residency and a path to citizenship, but at the request of the US government, he does not have travel documents.
He also needs medical attention for a colorectal disease and back pain that he attributes to years spent in CIA black sites, where he was brutally interrogated, kept in solitary confinement and became so desperate that he refused to eat. His American captors broke his hunger strike by inserting a “puree” of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts and raisins into his rectum, according to a declassified document.
His wife has told him that he sometimes stirs in his sleep, he said, but he doesn’t remember having nightmares. She had two free visits to a psychiatrist, but decided not to continue treatment, for $100 a visit. The doctor had no experience in the trauma of torture and “didn’t know what prison life was like,” he said.
“I need to get revenge,” he said. “Mentally, physically.”
Every Friday, he makes the 30-minute trip to the mosque to pray in a community of Muslims, something he was denied during his stay in US custody. Some are Belizeans who converted to Islam or their descendants. Others are immigrants, many of them from Sri Lanka.
The community welcomed him from day one, no questions asked, said Brother Kaleem, the imam, who converted to Islam in the 1970s and trained in Saudi Arabia. That’s the Belizean way: calm, acceptance.
“If you stay here long enough, maybe your kids will understand this place,” he said.
Rabia Khan says her husband is a “softer” version of the man she married. In her words, he is part American, part Pakistani and part Arab: an apt description.
He prefers California dates to Saudi dates to break his fast. He has a basketball hoop for when a nephew from the United States visits. She calls American visitors, including one old enough to be her mother, “Dude.”
For the holiday, he found a Belizean with cattle, brought a ritual knife, and sacrificed a sheep. The couple then stored the portions in the newly acquired freezer. The carnage was disheartening. At home, a halal butcher made it.
One night, before dinner at a Lebanese-style restaurant, he called the owner to ask if he could bring him his own lamb. It was a religious thing, Majid explained, and he called it “kosher.” The restaurateur agreed.
When Majid talks about his life, his philosophy is no different from what he told a military jury in 2021. His actions with Al Qaeda hurt people and were wrong, he said. May God forgive him. So was the torture, which he described to the panel. It was his first public account of what was done to him and he said he forgave his captors.
“The reason I forgive is because I did a lot of bad things,” he said, sitting on his couch, the baby sleeping in the crook of his arm. “The point is that I have no resentment. He could have been paralyzed for 20 years from a car accident. God decided: ‘I’m going to give you that test.’”
His time in detention was a struggle, but a formative one. He learned that he could be mean, rude and write poetry. He also spent years away from other detainees, in the company of guards and federal agents, who sometimes passed the time playing poker and smoking cigars.
One night, sitting by the Old Belize River, Rabia tells a story:
Majid had been missing for years. His family did not know if he was dead or alive until the White House announced in September 2006 that he was among a group of CIA prisoners transferred to Guantánamo.
From there, in a moment of deep desperation, he wrote her a letter: You have my permission to start over, to find a new husband.
He cried first, he said. She hid the message from her family. Then she sent him an angry response.
“She told me that if I did that, I would never see Manaal,” he recalled, shuddering. “Never.”
Manaal was born in the seventh month of his detention. He had no hope of being released, he still had to take responsibility for his crimes, cooperate with the US government and plead guilty.
That happened later, in 2012, more than a decade before he was released in Belize.