Tangled Tale of American Found in Afghanistan

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: October 11, 2010
The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — As an American military patrol walked through a rural, Taliban-dominated district of Kandahar Province recently, a man wearing local clothes came toward them shouting, “Don’t shoot, I am an American!”

He asked for their protection, saying that he had been abducted by the Taliban and held for months but had finally managed to escape, according to Western officials in Kabul.

That is one version of his story.

It is not the one told by local villagers, elders and Taliban in the Zheri District of Kandahar. They say that he sought out the Taliban and was treated less as a hostage than as a supporter, and that he openly traveled with them on motorcycles around the district. A tall African-American, he cut an unmistakable figure, they said.

Much remains mysterious about the man, identified as Takuma Owuo-Hagood, not least his motivations for going to Afghanistan. The Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Mr. Owuo-Hagood entered the country June 23, a little more than three months before he surfaced.

He is now back home, in the Atlanta area. Family members reached there said Mr. Owuo-Hagood, a 25-year-old husband and father, was a baggage handler for Delta with business aspirations. They said that he had tried to make money traveling to China and Turkey to buy clothes for resale back home, and that he had been drawn to Afghanistan by revelations of its untapped mineral wealth.

“He thought that might be a good place to seek out business opportunities,” said his father, Mikell Hagood, asserting in a telephone interview that his son had not been a willing guest of the Taliban.

“I am just happy that he is back home and praying that he got some valuable lessons from this,” Mr. Hagood added. “And praying there will be good coming out of it.”

Western officials in Kabul say they remain uncertain of Mr. Owuo-Hagood’s motivations. An internal memorandum circulating among Western officials cautiously says that Mr. Owuo-Hagood “traveled to Kandahar and was then ‘abducted’ and held for several weeks.”

“On Oct. 2,” it continues, “he ‘escaped’ and flagged down U.S. forces in RC-South.”

The American Embassy would say little other than to confirm that a private American citizen sought assistance from United States forces on Oct. 2 in southern Afghanistan and that the embassy flew him to Kabul and returned him to the United States.

“We are pleased that this individual has been safely reunited with his family,” said Caitlin Hayden, the embassy spokeswoman. “We do not feel it is appropriate to provide further details.”

Ms. Hayden said she could not say whether he had been in custody.

After arriving in Kabul, Mr. Owuo-Hagood made a call to his family. But after weeks without any further word, the family contacted the State Department, his father said.

“They said they would look for him,” he said. “I was praying for the best and fearing the worst.”

Mr. Owuo-Hagood apparently went to Kandahar in late June or early July and found his way to a bazaar held each week on the outer perimeter of Kandahar airbase. He befriended a merchant from the Taliban-held districts west of Kandahar city, according to both a local government official and a Taliban commander. It is unclear whether he actually went into the bazaar, which is within the base’s perimeter or met the merchant just outside.

He asked the merchant to take him to the Taliban and the merchant hid him under a burqa and then put him in a vehicle with at least two burqa-clad women and drove away.

“We heard from elders and villagers that he left the airport with an Afghan colleague from Pashmoul in Zheri District,” said Haji Agha Lalai, a member of the Kandahar provincial council who is from Panjwaj District, adjacent to Zheri. “The American went in a burqa with women so that he could not be seen.”

“First they went to the colleague’s house in Pashmoul and then they went into the Taliban,” he said.

Mr. Owuo-Hagood’s rationale for seeking out the Taliban is hard to gauge; it is also unclear whether he was motivated by ideological or other reasons.

The Taliban were excited and even boastful about his arrival in their midst in Zheri District, an area that Gen. David H. Petraeus described recently as an entrenched Taliban safe haven.

A Taliban commander from the area, who is related to several of the Taliban who lived with Mr. Owuo-Hagood, said that the visitor said he was a convert to Islam.

“He said to them, ‘I am very much interested in learning about Islam and I want to live side by side with Muslims,’ ” said a Taliban commander from Zheri, who goes by the name Mullah Basir.

“This black American was telling the Taliban, ‘We were told untrue information about the Taliban and the Muslims and now that I have come to you, I see that the reality is different,’ ” said Mullah Basir, adding that the Taliban appeared to believe him.

They also believed he had military knowledge that could help them — although whether he actually did is unclear. The information the villagers and the Taliban commander said he gave did not seem particularly insightful.

“He was giving the Taliban a lot of information on a military level,” Mullah Basir said. “For example, where you have to shoot the American.”

“Like they wear bullet-proof vests,” he said, “so you have to shoot a part that is exposed, that your bullet can penetrate and the other thing was how to shoot on a helicopter, you should shoot on the front, not the back, and he was helpful in explaining maps and directions.”

A landowner named Mohammed from the Sang-i-Sar area of Zheri described seeing him in the villages dressed in Afghan garb.

“I saw him on a motorbike with other Taliban, wearing a turban and shaalwar kameez,” said Mohammed, referring to the Afghan tunic. “Other villagers told me he was American.” He said Mr. that Owuo-Hagood had an American gun that fired “big bullets with flames,” and that “the villagers were saying he was teaching the Taliban how to fire rockets into the American base.”

Mr. Owuo-Hagood’s father said that sometime in August, he received an e-mail supposedly from his son, but written by someone whose first language was clearly not English, saying he was “under control of the Taliban.”

The Hagoods wrote back that he was “a family man and that he had wife and daughter,” said the father. “We told them it was Ramadan to please be forgiving and emancipate him.”

A few days later, a brief message arrived, this one apparently written by Mr. Owuo-Hagood. It said that he was “learning the language” and memorizing chapters of the Koran. He said that the Taliban suspected him of being an American soldier and planned to detain him until they could verify that he was not, his father said.

Then, a few weeks ago, Mr. Owuo-Hagood phoned to say he would be released soon, and asked his father to explain his absence to Delta.
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Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting from Kabul, and Dan Frosch from Denver.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 11, 2010

An earlier version of this article said that family members reported Mr. Owuo-Hagood trying to make money by traveling to Turkey and India to buy clothes for resale back home. In fact, they said he traveled to Turkey and China.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 12, 2010, on page A13 of the New York edition.

SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/world/asia/12taliban.html