The Most Wanted Woman in the World: Aafia Siddiqui’s Journey from Boston to Al-Qaeda
How does a once scholarly MIT student end up on the FBI’s most wanted list — let alone dubbed by US officials as “the most wanted in the woman in the world?’’
An article in the Sunday Boston Globe explores the background of Aafia Siddiqui, who remains in a Houston prison cell after her conviction for the attempted murder of two American agents in 2010. Siddiqui, accused of traveling to Afghanistan to fight against American troops there, recently came into the public eye again this year, when she was mentioned in a letter suggesting a possible prisoner exchange sent by ISIS militants to the family of beheaded journalist James Foley.
Born to a wealthy Pakistani family, Siddiqui came to the United States in the early 1990s to study biology at MIT and later received her doctorate at Brandeis. It was during her time in the United States that her views became increasingly radical, the Globe reports:
By the latter part of the 1990s, Siddiqui’s devotion had turned into a spiritual rage against those she considered hostile to her faith. Then married with children, she worked closely with activists later linked to Osama bin Laden’s organization, and she was a passionate speaker at local mosques and schools. At Brandeis University, where she earned a doctorate, she was repeatedly admonished for introducing the Koran in the classroom. At home in their Roxbury apartment, she begged her husband, a resident in anesthesiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to leave his work to accompany her to Bosnia or Afghanistan.
But what led Siddiqui, a highly intelligent woman who was from a prominent Pakistani family and whose options seemed limitless, to ultimately take up arms on behalf of Al Qaeda, as the FBI says she did, is something some experts and investigators still want to know.
You can read the full Globe report here.
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com