Diary of a terrorist: Fazul’s journey to Pakistan

The second Gulf War was about to break out because Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and occupied it in a cowardly and unprecedented operation.

He had barely had time to rest from his war with Iran when the Zionists schemed to get him into another conflict with Kuwait so that there would be a pretext for the United States to enter the region.

I began to bid people farewell, not forgetting my Shaykh Sadiq and all the relatives and neighbours. Whoever heard the news could not believe it immediately and people thought that I was joking, especially when I told them that I was going to Pakistan.

Most of them knew nothing about Pakistan other than that it was a Muslim country and a big rice exporter. But I knew something about that country, the Afghan jihad and the state of Afghanistan and about the Palestinian issue.

Further studies

As far as education was concerned, there were two groups of people: those who go to Europe or North Africa and those who go to Saudi Arabia for further studies. Those opting for Saudi Arabia went to study religion.

The Pakistan era began in our time and many young men from Comoro went to Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore to study. I was accepted at a Lahore university.

Comoro youth in Pakistan learned a lot about the Ummah’s causes and about sensitive legal issues such as governance and legal policy. They acquainted themselves with many books, some of them banned in other Islamic countries. In fact, these young men are the ones who changed a lot of things in the country on their return.

Nearly two years later, in 1992-93, the Sudanese school of thought emerged. It consisted of a mixture of Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist ideas. The important thing is that they worked with each other and I helped them a lot with their ideas. We used to get together and plan for the future of Comoros.

Political tranquility

The atmosphere was a little cool and relative political tranquillity prevailed in the Comoros when I bade my brothers and sisters farewell and got into the car with my mother.

Sadness showed on the face of my mother who didn’t know what would happen to me on the way because the trip was long and it was not a direct flight to Lahore.

We got into the departures hall and filled out the necessary travel documents. My mother kept on urging me to be courageous, to be wary of thieves and not to mix with foreigners I did not know.

Before boarding the Madagascar Airlines plane, I looked at my mother who was watching me from the airport’s waving bay, and bade her farewell a last time as I entered the world of adventure.

In the plane was another student from Comoro going to the same university.

The plane took off at about 10.40am. It is then that I realised that I had become a man and was no longer a child.

The plane landed in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, at noon. We boarded another plane and touched down at the Mauritius airport in the evening.

We stayed in Mauritius for a week, during which we worked hard to get the visas. We kept on going to the Pakistani embassy until we acquired them, with Allah’s grace.