+ "Faisal Town"

7 September, Faisalabad
from Marcela Gaviria

Faisalabad, the third largest city in Pakistan, is a bustling agricultural center that reminds me much of Peshawar except for its Indian accents. There are camel-driven tongas and Punjabs instead of Pashtuns.

The town was named after its main benefactor, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. It is a fitting name. Faisalabad is a deeply conservative and religious town that serves as a home base to every radical Islamic fundamentalist group in Pakistan. Here are the headquarters to Sipa-e-Sahaba, Lashkar-e-Jangvi, Jaamat-e-Asumet, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Jaish-e-Muhammad.

	Abu Zubaydah

Shabaz cottage, in Faisal Town, became the home of Abu Zubaydah and a handful Al Qaeda members from places like Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. Neighbors say Zubaydah rarely ventured out into the streets of Faisalabad. One neighbor wondered why the lights of his imposing house were on 24 hours a day.

But that wasn't the give-away. Abu Zubaydah's cover was blown by a soccer ball. At least that is the story we are told by a neighbor through choppy translation. A child's soccer ball fell in the wrong place and one of the Arabs in the house yelled at the children in Arabic. Rumor has it that this happened as a police constable was driving by. He was surprised to hear Arabic, in an Urdu-speaking town, and hoping to secure a raise, or get promoted, or perhaps just do his duty, he reported the incident to his superiors. Soon a cloud of FBI agents had every radar pointed at the Shabaz cottage. Zubaydah's satellite calls to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Palestine were monitored for days.

We are hearing this story as we make our way to the Shabaz cottage late one evening. It is pitch black outside and we are lost in some neighborhood in the outskirts of Faisalabad looking for the house. Out of the corner of my eye, a dozen men jump out of a Hi Lux jeep with their machine guns. My heart skips a beat. The men are wearing black caps, black T-shirts, black sweatpants, and are carrying heavy duty submachine guns. It's hard to tell in the darkness of night if these are radical extremists out to scare a group of foreigners or some paramilitary police force trying to heard us back into our hotel rooms. The logo on their T-shirts says "No Fear."

Abu Zubaydah's house in Faisalabad.

The next two days are spent trying to corroborate the details of Abu Zubaydah's capture and arrest. The reporting is complicated by the language barriers. We shake hands with various police officers, drink tea at a handful of houses, work the system. Nobody can understand our questions and we can't understand the answers.

For instance, during one interview, after I asked if there were any Arabs arrested in the raid, this is the note our fixer handed over: "Attached in this house a rental family leave that house. There were five persons arrested in that person leave here."

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