Zaynab Khadr

Early life and education

Zaynab Khadr was born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1979, the eldest daughter and first child of Maha el-Samnah and Ahmed Khadr, Egyptian-Canadian citizens. Her father was in graduate school.

The family moved to Pakistan in 1985, where her father worked for charities assisting Afghan refugees after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The children went to school there and were also home schooled by their mother. Zaynab has five younger brothers: Abdullah, Abdurahman, Abdulkareem (known as Kareem), Ismail (died), and Omar, and a younger sister.

In July 1995, her father arranged for the 15-year-old Zaynab to marry Khalid Abdullah, an Egyptian, in December. Her mother began preparing an apartment for the couple in the family's house in Pakistan.

On November 19, 1995 Ayman al-Zawahiri bombed the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan. Named as one of the conspirators, Zaynab's fiance Abdullah went into hiding. When police arrived eight days later to arrest her father on suspicion of involvement, Zaynab grabbed his rifle and screamed at them, while her mother barricaded the door.

Zaynab later recalled having celebrated the engagement of her friend Umayma al-Zawahiri at the girl's family house in an all-day party. Umayma's father, al-Zawahiri, had knocked at Umayma's door to ask the two girls to keep their singing and partying quiet as it was nighttime.

Marriage and family

In October 1997, Abdullah re-surfaced in Tehran and contacted the Khadr family to re-schedule the wedding. Khadr agreed to take his family on a long vacation, which they ended in Iran. They said farewell to Zaynab, by then reluctant, as she started a new life with Abdullah. Six months after the couple began living in a rented Tehran apartment, Abdullah phoned his father-in-law to report that Zaynab was inconsolable at being separated from her family. The marriage was not working out, and Zaynab returned to live with her family.

In 1999, Zaynab was introduced to Yacoub al-Bahr, a Yemeni who had fought in Bosnia. He was better-known as a wedding singer in Kabul, Afghanistan. Her father asked the boys of the family to vote on whether he should give his consent to the marriage, and did so after Abdurahman and Kareem voiced their enthusiasm; the younger Abdullah and Omar abstained. The wedding was in Kabul. Both al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden attended. Zaynab later explained that nobody was individually invited, and that word of mouth informed interested parties about the open invitation to their upcoming wedding. The couple moved into a separate wing of the Khadr household.

The following year, Zaynab and her mother returned to Canada for several months late in her pregnancy, where she gave birth to a daughter, named Safia. After returning to Afghanistan and introducing her new child to Rabiyah Hutchinson, Zaynab was advised to take her daughter to a doctor. Safia was diagnosed with hydrocephalus and required surgery, which Zaynab decided would be better performed at a Canadian hospital. Her husband disagreed, and insisted that a hospital in Lahore would be just as effective. When Zaynab insisted on taking her daughter to Canada, al-Bahr separated from her and left the household permanently.

In late 2001, Ahmed Khadr encountered al-Bahr in Kabul; he advised him that he should either return to his wife and daughter, or consent to a divorce. After receiving written reassurance from Zaynab that she would not seek any form of restitution, al-Bahr agreed to a formal divorce.

Life in post-invasion Afghanistan

In January 2002, Zaynab took Safia and Abdulkareem to Lahore for a stay at the hospital, where her daughter needed medical attention. Her brother Abdullah later joined them, since he required surgery to remove cartilage from his nose.

He disappeared later that year, as did their younger brother Omar, not yet 16; she learned later that they were both being detained by the United States as enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

In 2003, Zaynab, her daughter and her mother stayed at a house in Birmal, Pakistan for two days, before their hosts grew wary of American jets overhead. They moved further into the mountains of Waziristan. Her father was killed in October 2003. Zaynab moved to Islamabad, where she lived for some time in a rented apartment with her daughter and younger sister.

In her book Wanted Women Deborah Scroggins describes meeting Zaynab while she was a house-guest of Khalid Khawaja, in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2004.According to Scroggins, Zaynab told her that the time she lived under the Taliban were "the best five years of my life."

Permanent return to Canada

Although her passport had been revoked by the Canadian High Commission in Pakistan after her father was alleged to be a terrorist, Khadr returned to Canada on February 17, 2005 to be with her mother, and help the legal defence teams of her brothers Abdullah and Omar. Zaynab and her widowed mother Maha are both on passport "control" lists, meaning they will no longer be issued Canadian passports. This is due to the frequency with which they have reported losing their passports since 1999.

When Zaynab returned to Canada, security officials, including Konrad Shourie, met her at the airport bearing a search warrant. It was based on the statement that she "has willingly participated and contributed both directly and indirectly towards enhancing the ability of Al Qaeda." They seized her laptop, DVDs, audiocassettes, diary and other files. The security officials said that, through the computer files, they were able to determine the present locations of multiple al-Qaeda veterans, though they had no evidence to charge her. Zaynab said she had purchased the computer second-hand seven months before her trip. After the expiry of the three-month limit on holding the items, the court granted the RCMP a one-year extension on June 18.

On October 5, 2009, Isabel Teotonio, writing in the Toronto Star, reported on the extradition hearing for Zaynab's brother Abdullah Khadr. She wrote that Canadian officials had seized a hard drive from Zaynab that had belonged to her father. Although Zaynab has indicated a desire to one day return to Pakistan, her Canadian passport remains withheld, rendering her unable to leave the country.

Advocacy

In 2004, Zaynab appeared in a PBS Frontline documentary entitled Son of al Qaeda, during which she said concerning the September 11th attacks:

"We don't like seeing people killed...[a]t the same time, when you're seeing your people being killed and killed and killed, everyday, everyday, everyday, and then you see whoever is doing this...being killed, you don't want to feel happy. But you just sort of think, "They deserve it. They've been doing it for such a long time, why shouldn't they feel it once in a while?"

Most news stories reported only that she had supported the attacks, mobilizing public sentiment against the family. Zaynab has worked to arrange legal support for other Canadians accused of militant actions in the war on terror, notably attending the bail hearings and preliminaries for the men and youths arrested in Toronto in 2006. Her presence has caused a stir in the media, while she maintains that many of the accused were friends of the family.

In July 2008 clips from secret surveillance recordings at Guantanamo of Omar's first visit from Canadian officials were made public. The clips stirred controversy, as they showed Omar being pleased, when he thought he was finally going to get help from Canadian officials; and they showed him weeping uncontrollably when he realized these Canadian officials were security officials, interested only in helping the CIA exploit him as an intelligence source. Global TV interviewed Zaynab and her mother who described being "devastated" by Omar's distress.

In October 2008, Zaynab began an 18-day hunger strike on Parliament Hill, where she hoped to draw attention to the government's inaction in bringing her brother Abdurahman back to face trial in Canada.

Her brother Omar Khadr was released to Canadian custody at the end of 2012. In 2014 he was moved to a medium-security prison.