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By Karen Springen
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EXCLUSIVE
The Oregon Trail
The seven muscular men would have stood out in any hotel. All heavily bearded, they hung around the lobby, doing chin-ups from the rafters and sparring in the courtyard of the Chini Bagh Hotel in Kashgar, China, where I saw them in late October 2001, about 300 kilometers from the Afghan border. This month, three of them were named as part of the so-called Portland Six, which U.S. authorities allege is a group of Qaeda supporters who desperately tried to reach Afghanistan to join Osama bin Laden's men. Indeed, Jeffrey Leon Battle, 32, Patrice Lumumba Ford, 31, and Muhammad Ibrahim Bilal, 24--one half of the Portland Six--and four companions were closer to Afghanistan than authorities have so far disclosed.
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They appeared more like bumbling holy-warrior wanna-bes than professional terrorists. They made little effort to fit in. Aside from Bilal and a white man in his early 20s named Ibrahim, the Kashgar Seven were all burly black men, such a rarity in China that their every move through the local markets--where they queried Pakistani traders about transport to Afghanistan--attracted crowds of gawkers. More important, their stories just didn't add up. Ibrahim, from Oakland, California, talked hopefully of visiting Afghanistan. Yet his traveling companion, Battle, professed surprise at hearing the country's border was so near. "You mean where the fighting is? You're kidding," he said. "I had no idea we were anywhere near there."
Ford said they had all been touring China for two or three weeks after passing through Hong Kong. Separately, Battle insisted he had never been in Hong Kong. None of them had visited China previously, they all said. Yet Ford was later heard talking on a hotel phone in fluent Mandarin. When confronted, he confessed, "Actually, I lived for a while in Beijing." Every so often, one of them would boast of their intentions. "We're like a fighting squad," said Ibrahim one day, with a wink. "We're in training. Believe me, pretty soon we'll have our chance to prove ourselves."
Their sympathies were no secret, either. Battle expressed outrage over China's treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority and praised the Taliban. They had restored the "natural balance between men and women" and "society to righteousness," he declared. I brought the group and their comments to the attention of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Contacted late last week, the State Department said it would look into the matter.
Meanwhile, the Portland Six remain shrouded in mystery. Bilal's brother Ahmed was deported last week from Malaysia, pleading not guilty to charges of being part of a "sleeper cell." Ford, Battle and Battle's ex-wife, October Martinique Lewis, also denied any connection to Al Qaeda.
RUSSIA
Data Dumped
Citizens of most countries generally consider a census a mildly irritating obligation. But that doesn't begin to compare with the feelings of many Russians asked to take part in their country's first such citizen survey in the post-Soviet era. One man said he would comply only if the government provided him a cemetery plot. A Moscow resident was so upset by one question that he hit the census-taker in the face. And a young interviewer in Siberia was held by force in an apartment of drug addicts until being set free by police. Worryingly, these were the actions of the people who actually opened their doors.
The census, which ended last week, was supposed to answer questions about the Russian people. But the exercise rapidly became a referendum on the people's faith in their government, their neighbors and society in general. People in the southern village of Barysh refused to cooperate to protest their low standard of living. One group of Muscovites refused to take part until the government abandons construction plans near their home. And one man ate his questionnaire as a protest against U.S. policy on Iraq.
Despite the difficulties in monitoring a people who clearly wish to be left alone, the census has managed to produce some surprising results: one village in the eastern province of Kamchatka--officially registered as having 2,000 residents--now has only 100; in Chechnya, early results show a major population boom in the past three years. (Census critics believe the Chechnya numbers are suspiciously high, so as to present an image of peace in the region. And census-takers themselves have admitted to being ordered to make up information for unfilled forms.) Interestingly, throughout Russia, some ancient cultures seem to have re-emerged, with several people stating their ethnicity as "Scythian." (Presumably, they were being a little more serious than the handful of Russians who reportedly claimed to be "hobbits" and "elves.") But the biggest surprise of all? Some Russians were actually eager to take part in the census. "It's important to know how many Russians are still out there," says 66-year-old pensioner Natasha Pavlova. "People wouldn't be so apathetic if they realized their bus service or their pensions might improve because of this." Even model citizen Pavlova makes no claims to being perfect, though. She kept her moonlighting job as a housekeeper for a wealthy Russian family a secret. "I certainly couldn't tell the whole truth," she admits. Certainly not. That just wouldn't be in keeping with the one consensus on Russia's census.
THE SNIPER
Shots in The Dark
Once again, a single shot, out of the darkness. Shortly after 8:30 on Saturday night, a 37-year-old man was gunned down outside a steak house in Ashland, Virginia, 90 miles south of Washington. Hit in the abdomen, the man was said to be in stable condition. Law-enforcement authorities couldn't be sure the sniper had struck again, but within minutes cruisers and helicopters were flooding the scene, setting up roadblocks. After a dozen shootings in three weeks, the police have had plenty of practice.
Law enforcement seemed stumped, with one promising lead evaporating after another. On Friday evening, a spent shell casing was found in the back of a white rental truck. But "the casing is as much as a quarter of a century old," a source close to the investigation told NEWSWEEK.
Naturally, people began wondering if the sniper was working for Al Qaeda. "It's a 50-50 chance," a high-ranking U.S. intelligence official told NEWSWEEK. Another top federal official confirmed that a Qaeda detainee held in Belgium had told investigators that teams of terrorists, practicing at Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan, trained to assassinate American public officials (in one exercise, U.S. senators on a golf course).
To help with the investigation, law enforcement has imported some high-tech help from the military: spy planes with sophisticated tracking cameras, radars and eavesdropping devices. But it remained a disturbing possibility that the sniper may never be caught. And if he is, it's discouraging to think that copycats, including those loyal to bin Laden, may be watching and learning.
DEAR LEADERS
How Could You Say No?
Mark Twain once said that whenever one finds oneself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. Perhaps now would be the time to whisper that in Saddam Hussein's ear. Last week every single eligible Iraqi voter (11,445,638 in all) struck "yes" in the box beneath Saddam's name in a national referendum. It's a personal best--Saddam got a meager 99.96 percent in 1995--and perhaps a historic one, too. Consider the past decade's most successful "democratic" despots:
Saparmurat Niyazov
1992
Turkmenistan
99.5 percent
Pervez Musharraf
2002
Pakistan
98 percent
Zine el Abidine Ben Ali
1999
Tunisia
99 percent
Hosni Mubarak
1999
Egypt
94 percent
Bashar Assad
2000
Syria
97.9 percent
HEALTH
New Hope in the War Against Breast Cancer
October is the official month for breast-cancer awareness, but too many women are already all too aware of the disease. In the United States alone, it will kill 40,000 women this year and be diagnosed in 200,000 more. The latest news:
ISRAEL
Lost and Found?
When the veteran Israeli journalist Hillel Halkin began hunting for the lost tribes of Israel four years ago, he thought the claim that a community of Indians on the Burmese border was descended from one of the tribes was either a fantasy or a hoax. The fate of Israel's 10 lost tribes--which, after being driven from ancient Palestine in the eighth century B.C. by Assyrian conquerors, disappeared into ethnic oblivion--ranks among history's biggest mysteries. But on his third trip to the Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram, Halkin was shown texts that convinced him that the community, which calls itself the Bnei Menashe, has roots in the lost tribe of Menashe. The documents included a will and words to a song about the Red Sea.
The argument, made in his new book, "Across the Sabbath River" (Houghton Mifflin), is not just academic. Some Israeli rabbis believe descendants of the lost tribes number more than 35 million around the world and could help offset the sharply increasing Palestinian population. As founder of the organization Amishav (My People Return), Eliyahu Avichail trots the globe in search of lost Jews, in order to bring them back to their religion through conversation and direct them to Israel. He's even hoping to make it to Afghanistan later this year. "I believe that groups like the Bnei Menashe are part of the solution to Israel's demographic problems," says Amishav director Michael Freund. The group has already brought 700 of the Bnei Menashe to Israel and believes thousands more are eager to come. Most have been put up in settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip--the main arena of Israeli-Palestinian fighting.
Early this month at Utniel, a hilltop settlement south of Hebron, a few of the recent Indian immigrants brought back by Amishav sat on the grass during a break from their Jewish studies, singing songs they learned in Manipur about redemption in Jerusalem. A day earlier, Palestinians had shot two Israelis in an ambush a few miles up the road from the settlement. "We feel good here; we're not scared," says one of the students, Yosef Thangjom. At Kiryat Arba, another settlement in the area, Manipur native Odelia Khongsai explains why she chose to leave India two years ago, where she had family and a good job. "I had everything a person could want, but I still felt something spiritual was missing."
Halkin plans to return to India in February with a team of Israeli and American doctors who will conduct genetic tests on the Bnei Menashe to determine scientifically if their ancestors hail from ancient Palestine. But this time it's the Bnei Menashe who are skeptical. "I think DNA testing is just hogwash," says Khongsai, who lives with her 6-year-old daughter in a trailer home in Kiryat Arba. "I know I'm a Jew from the Bnei Menashe tribe, and that's all that matters."
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