The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr

Ahmed said Khadr, Omar's father, always said he did not want to die in bed. He wanted to be killed. When his children were very young, he told them, "If you love me, pray that I will get martyred." Three times he asked Omar's older brother Abdurahman to become a suicide bomber. It would bring honor to the family, he said. Abdurahman declined. Later, when Ahmed sensed that Abdurahman's faith was weakening, he told him, "If you ever betray Islam, I will be the one to kill you."

Omar and his brothers attended madrassahs and Islamic schools. His mother and two older sisters covered their bodies and completely veiled their faces. At home, the Khadr children were warned that the purity of Islam was being compromised, from within and without. The quest to repurify it diminished to insignificance everything else in life. Purity was the simple measure by which good and evil were distinguished, and the means of destroying evil were equally simple. The Khadr children were raised to serve a purpose. Their fealty was sounded every day.

In 1988, when Omar was two, the Khadrs left Toronto for Peshawar, Pakistan, so Ahmed could take a job with a charity called Human Concern International. In those days, Peshawar was an operational base for Islamist insurgents fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden had gone there to recruit, fund and train mujahedeen. Intelligence sources claim that many of the orphans and refugees aided by Khadr later became fundamentalist guerrillas under the guidance of bin Laden.

In 1992, not long after Omar had begun his studies at a madrassah in Peshawar, Ahmed nearly died after stepping on a land mine in Logar Province, Afghanistan. (Intelligence sources say he had gone there to fight with predecessors of the Taliban in the Afghan civil war.) Ahmed was evacuated to a hospital in Toronto, and the rest of the family returned to Canada with him. It would take him two years to recover.

Of the Khadr children, Omar was the closest to his father. He was seven when Ahmed got hurt. It was hard to keep him away from his father's bedside. In Toronto, he proved to be one of those unusual children who take it upon themselves to care for their families -- he seemed to want to hold his father's place until Ahmed recovered. "He was always there for us," his sister Zaynab recalled later. When someone wasn't feeling well, Omar would always bring them the comfort food they liked best. He was hypersensitive to tension in the family and instinctively dispelled it: He often did an impersonation of Captain Haddock, the spluttering character from the Belgian comic-book series Tintin, which Omar loved: "Buh-buh-billions of bl-bl-blistering bl-bl-blue barnacles!" he would say, or "Ten thousand thuh-thuh-thundering typhoons!" It always broke everybody up.

Donations collected at the Khadrs' mosque paid the rent while Ahmed was in the hospital. The Isna Islamic School waived tuition for the Khadr children. At school, Omar did well in everything. He began memorizing the Koran, in Arabic, at age seven. He seemed to know that his successes could counterbalance the underachievements of his brothers. On Abdurahman's report card, his Islamic-studies teacher wrote, "May Allah help him." Omar's teachers made it clear that they were grateful to have him in their classes. "He was very smart, very eager and very polite," one recalled.

As soon as Ahmed was well enough to walk with a four-pointed cane, he moved the family back to Peshawar and resumed working for Human Concern International. Not long after they arrived, when Omar was nine, terrorists led by Ayman al-Zawahiri suicide-bombed the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. According to Pakistani intelligence, much of al-Zawahiri's operational funding had passed through Human Concern International. One of the vehicles used in the attack had been purchased by a Sudanese man living with the Khadrs. The entire Khadr family was detained, their compound was raided, and Ahmed was imprisoned and tortured.

When the family was finally allowed to visit Ahmed in prison, they found a crippled old man primitively confined alongside murderers and armed robbers. Omar seemed unable to recover from this sight. Ahmed, maintaining his innocence, went on a hunger strike and was hospitalized. Omar spent every night at the hospital, curled up on the concrete floor beneath his father's bed.

Omar had not reached the age of reason; his nine-year-old imagination could not yet accommodate the world's layers. But he had been trained, with special care, to divide the universe into the province of righteous work and the forces arrayed against it. Twice now he had watched his father nearly die in the service of righteousness. The forces Omar Khadr had been warned against must have seemed, from beneath his father's second hospital bed, very real: omnipresent and irrational, destroying the sacred for its very sanctity. If Omar's kind disposition seemed to dissent from the hardness of his family's beliefs, then witnessing his father's suffering ended it. Ahmed's identity subsumed Omar's own; the son accepted the price and necessity of the father's cause. Omar did not lose his uncommon altruistic compassion, but he acquired, unavoidably, a fixed fervency he seemed ready to act on. The Toronto imam who had known him when he was seven said Omar's experience in Pakistan left him "radicalized."

After four months in prison, Ahmed Said Khadr was released at the request of the Canadian government. He moved his family to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to live with Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden and his many wives and children occupied a large dirt-wattle compound surrounded by military training camps. The Khadr family denies being part of Al Qaeda, but the U.S. government says that Omar was soon sent to join his older brothers, Abdullah and Abdurahman, at a military camp outside the town of Khalden. The camp provided instructional units on handguns, sniper tactics and marksmanship, assault rifles, bombmaking and combat tactics.