Snatched

UNTIL recently, Fuad Hassan Ismail lived an ordinary life. His days were simple: He awoke early, ate a quick breakfast, and drove to the Seattle Yacht Club, where he performed janitorial and security work and helped with the landscaping. Born in Yemen to parents of Somali origin, Ismail was not an American citizen but had lived in the United States nearly half his life and had permission to work here. By all accounts, he was a model employee at the yacht club. He was well-liked and had never missed a shift since landing his job there in 1999. "I was working, paying taxes, saving money for a house," says Ismail, 41. "I was just like everybody else."

Like everybody else except that owing to a former drug habit, he had been classified by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) as a criminal alien and was therefore subject to deportation whenever the authorities saw fit.

And early last month, on a cool and cloudy Friday morning, Ismail was putting in a regular shift at the yacht club when three INS agents approached.

"I was in the parking lot, and they came up to me with a warrant and arrested me," Ismail says. "The club's general manager came outside to try and help me. But they took me away and put me in a detention facility. They wouldn't tell me why. The next day, they said they were deporting me to Mogadishu. Mogadishu? I couldn't believe it. I'd never even been to Mogadishu."

He had heard of it, however. Made notorious by the film Black Hawk Down, Somalia's capital is among the world's most dangerous cities. It is a lawless, war-torn place, rife with violence and kidnappings. Mercenary warlords command most of the territory, and their troops clash frequently with members of the country's unstable "transitional" government. In truth, there is no government, just anarchy.

Two days after his arrest in Seattle, Ismail and several other men of Somali origin were loaded onto a U.S. government jet, one in a fleet of aircraft used to transport people in federal custody. Ismail had in his possession $40, the clothes on his back, and little else.

From Seattle, the transport jet flew to several other U.S. cities, where more Somalis were boarded. The airplane then flew to Buffalo, N.Y., where the group—20 men and one woman—was transported to a large facility used to detain people in INS custody.

The following day, the prisoners were moved to a U.S. air base in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and boarded onto a Boeing 757 private charter bound for Amsterdam. Their feet were shackled and each prisoner had one arm tied to their seat. Six Somali citizens removed that day from various detention facilities in Canada joined them.

The Boeing 757 left Niagara Falls at 3 in the afternoon on Feb. 11. Fifteen private security officers and one medical doctor were also on board.

There were no U.S. or Canadian immigration officials on the flight, which is unusual in such deportation cases. "We didn't send our officers to Somalia because of the situation there," says Rejean Cantlen, a spokesperson with Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

He refused to elaborate, but he did not have to: Somalia is one of the most dangerous places on earth. The country is suspected of harboring Muslim terrorists, including members of the Al Qaeda network. Neither the United States nor Canada maintain a diplomatic presence in Somalia, and both governments warn its citizens against traveling there.

In a travel warning released on Feb. 21, 2001, long before Sept. 11, the U.S Department of State warned Americans against "all travel to Somalia. Interclan and interfactional fighting can flare up with little warning, and kidnapping, murder, and other threats to U.S. citizens and other foreigners can occur unpredictably in many regions."

After a brief stop in Amsterdam, the Mogadishu-bound prisoners were flown to the small African republic of Djibouti, on the Gulf of Aden. They spent one night there, crammed into a single jail cell with no toilet. The next morning, they were loaded into yet another aircraft, this one of Russian origin and piloted by a Russian crew.

Their last stop was a small airport just outside Mogadishu. The group was herded by Somali soldiers onto a bus and driven into the heart of the city. Trailing them were soldiers driving trucks with 50-caliber machine guns mounted on their roofs.

In downtown Mogadishu, the prisoners were pulled from the bus, released from their shackles, and abandoned, left to fend for themselves. Those with relatives in the area quickly scurried to safety. But Ismail had nowhere to go. His parents, of course, were Somali, and he is Muslim; but after leaving Yemen, he had lived in Somalia for only a few years before entering the United States on a student visa in 1984. He knew almost nothing about the country, except that it was extremely dangerous.

Mohammed Yusuf, 22, found himself in a similar predicament. Born in Somalia, he had moved to the United States with his family in 1982. Three years ago he was convicted of theft, and he'd been languishing in a Louisiana jail when he was deported with Ismail to Mogadishu, a city he does not know.