By the next day, I was dragging my carry-on through the busy Terminal 2 of Mohammed V International Airport, outside Casablanca, looking for pastilla, a chicken-and-werqa-dough pie that, after seventeen hours of travel, was the only thing I craved. Greasy bag and pile of paper napkins in hand, I sat near a large family of six children and two wives, watching how the patriarch, a heavy, grizzled man, sat with his knees open, his gut hanging over his groin, and a phone pressed hard into his cheek, talking quietly while chewing a toothpick. One of his wives sat on a bag “nexting” (as Rashid called it) with N3XU5, or Nexus, the social media app that boasted absolute privacy—no GPS tracking, encrypted text and video, and no message retention in the cloud—and had become ubiquitous outside North America, to the delight of Gilbert Powell’s shareholders. One of the children, a boy, hung over his mother’s shoulder, half asleep, half reading her messages.
I was thinking about that visit with my brother back in 2000. Haroun had been older and more worldly, having served in the army with C Company when Operation Uphold Democracy got rid of the military regime in Haiti, and after 9/11 he reenlisted for two tours in Afghanistan. But during those in-between years he’d fallen into a funk. He’d had trouble finding work and spent his free time reading political news and growing cynical. The idea of a trip to Western Sahara had been mine, casually tossed out over drinks, but it had given him something to work toward. He took it and ran. “Look, Abdul—before you disappear into some hole at Harvard, you need to see the world.” I saw how energized the idea made him, and so I let him take control of the trip. He struck up conversations with strangers using our desert Arabic that, more often than not, earned us replies in English. To the cosmopolitan citizens of Rabat, I imagined, our slurred dialect made us sound like drug addicts. But that never slowed Haroun, and even after getting mugged and deciding to cut the trip short, not even having laid eyes on our ancestral homeland, he was already making plans for future trips.
My phone bleeped—Rashid was nexting me. Though I’d resisted, Laura had pushed for Rashid to have a phone. It was a way for her to always know where he was, which, in an age of school shootings, felt like a necessity. He wrote:
When are you getting home dad?
Soon, Monster. Late tomorrow or Friday. Everything ok?
Had a test. I was shook.
“Shook” was Rashid’s word for describing any little trauma at school.
Did you do well on it?
Ok.
I suddenly realized what time it was in DC.
Wait. You’re not allowed to use your phone in class!
Haha gotta go.
An hour before my connecting flight was scheduled to take off, over the speakers I heard the muezzin’s call to prayer. Most travelers, including the grizzled patriarch, stayed where they were, but a few men got up and followed signs to the prayer rooms. After a moment’s hesitation, I took my bag and joined them.
While that long-ago trip to Rabat had blunted my desire for adventure in the wider world, Haroun’s was only enhanced. He became a student of Africa and after returning from Afghanistan went to work for Global Partners, advising Western corporations on the potential benefits and downsides of investing in the region. He traveled extensively, writing reports and sending me emails full of passion and excitement, littered with photos of camels and locals, tourist shots all. He got to know so much of West Africa that even after I started with CIA I sometimes quizzed him about on-the-ground knowledge our files sometimes got wrong. Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia—he knew these hot spots like the back of his hand. And he was, in a way, the inverse of me. Where I needed silence and study to comprehend the world, he required noise and stink and human contact. Haroun was having the time of his life before it ended.
In August 2009, he was in Mauritania, working up an analysis of the feasibility of petroleum exploration in Taoudeni Basin, when he returned from the field to meet with his French clients. Nouakchott was one of his favorite capitals, an assessment I’d never understood. With Dakar to the south and Marrakesh to the north, why love a city so crushed by poverty that it couldn’t even keep its harbor in working condition? But he found things to love, even choosing to rent rooms from locals rather than hide away in the air-conditioned modernity of the Semiramis or Le Diplomate. So on that day he took a taxi from run-down Sebkha to reach the French embassy.
August 8 was a hot day, though I suppose he was used to it. Outside the embassy, I understand, there was only a little foot traffic. A couple of gendarmes out jogging, a few passersby, and a young man, a jihadi, in a traditional boubou robe that hid his suicide belt.
The gendarmes and one passerby were injured. Only the terrorist and my brother were killed. That was ten years ago, and when I thought of West Africa I still pictured Haroun outside the French embassy, under the hot Mauritanian sun. I suppose I always will.
Beside strangers in the prayer room of Mohammed V International, I bowed and prostrated myself before God and, for the first time in many years, prayed.