Wife recalls hellish life with Islamic militant The International Herald Tribune

Wife recalls hellish life with Islamic militant
The International Herald Tribune - November 27, 2004, Saturday

By: Richard Bernstein

BREMEN, Germany: The first thing to realize about the woman known widely here as Doris Gluck is that Doris Gluck is not her real name. She won't tell you her given name, or even her official new name -- provided by the German police -- beyond her first name and initial, Regina S.

She won't say where she lives either, and when she meets you at the railroad station in this seaport town in northern Germany, she is clearly eager to get away quickly, lest she run into somebody who knows her.

About a month ago, under the pseudonym of Doris Gluck, she published a book in Germany called "I Was Married to a Holy Warrior," in which she describes how she fell in love with an Egyptian man, married him and, as the years went by, watched, appalled, as he became more militant and, finally, fully engaged in jihad, or holy war.

The worst moment came in the mid-1990s in Bosnia, where she and her now ex-husband had gone to help the Muslim side in the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. (In the book, she calls him by a pseudonym, Omar, to forestall any effort he might have made to block publication had she used his real name, Reda Seyam.)

One day, she was taken to a place near a mountain where, she says, she became an involuntary witness to the revenge execution of three Serb men, one of them by beheading.

After that, she came back to her native Germany, where, eventually, the German intelligence service gave her a new identity as Regina S., she said. Meanwhile, she undergoes regular debriefings as the German police collect information on Muslim militants in Europe.

"I can't travel on a plane or in a train," she said. "I'm nervous when I'm near a train station because many people know me, and also because my ex-husband lives in Germany, and maybe he will be visiting some place with his children. I don't fear that he will kill me, but if he went to friends of his and told them that he found me, they might torture or behead me."

Her voice trailed off and she looked out the window of the out-of-the-way restaurant that she had chosen for an interview for this article.

And then she told her story from the beginning, a story of love, politics and war, and how a woman who publicly calls herself Doris Gluck, which translates into English as Doris Luck, became an informant for the German criminal intelligence police.

"I wouldn't say that I was a spy," she said of her years living in close proximity to the Muslim struggle, especially in Bosnia, "but I started to pay attention to what was going on. That's why I'm in a witness protection program -- because I saw a lot."

Flashback to 1987: She was in a cafe in Bonn on a business trip, she lived in Mannheim and worked in cosmetic sales and she noticed a man with brilliant eyes, like Omar Sharif's, she said. They met, and the man, an Egyptian tourist, asked her for help in placing a newspaper ad seeking a German wife. She helped with the ad. Five weeks later, the two were married.

"My husband drank liquor. He had no beard. He didn't go to the mosque," she said of their first seven years of marriage.

But in 1994, the same year that he became a German citizen, he broke his arm in a bicycle accident. With time on his hands, he started going to a mosque in Heidelberg, the university town along the Rhine where they were living, and before his wife knew it he had committed himself to the Muslim cause.

Along the way, at Omar's request, Regina S. converted to Islam, taking the name Aysha, after one of the wives of the prophet Mohammed and also the name of her mother-in-law.

"Islam is a wonderful thing," she said, "but they destroyed that in me, because my ex-husband hates unbelievers. He thinks it's O.K. to kill unbelievers."

Indeed, Seyam is suspected by the German police of being an Islamic militant, though there is no evidence that he has broken any German law.

According to German news reports, he spent a year in prison in Indonesia, accused of links to terrorist groups, but as a German citizen who had committed no crime in Germany, he was able to return in 2003, and he has been living here ever since, under 24 hour surveillance, she said.

Seyam, reached by phone at his home in Berlin, was dismissive about the book. "What she has said about me does not disturb me very much, because I and the people who are near to me know what kind of a character I have. But what she has written about Islam, that's something that troubled me very much because it is untrue."

According to her, Seyam worked for a German aid agency, People Helping People, though his real purpose in Bosnia was to aid the Muslim cause, mainly by making videotapes of anti-Muslim atrocities and anti-Serb resistance.

"In Bosnia, he wanted me to wear a head scarf and long clothes," she said. After a while, she said, he brought her a burqa, the Muslim garment that covers the entire face and body, and she wore it even while hating it.

During their time in Bosnia, Seyam took a second wife, something, she said, that she protested furiously. In his phone interview, Seyam said that his wife had agreed to the second marriage because she was unable to have children herself. When the second wife gave birth, Regina S. wrote, it was she who took her to the hospital.

But one day in 1996, she said, she went with her husband and others to the place near a mountain where three Serbs were executed, an incident that her husband filmed. One victim was shot and killed by a group of women, whose husbands or sons, he told her, had been killed by Serbs.

"Then there was a second man, a Serb, on his knees," Gluck said. "I saw a big knife and then I saw his head cut off. I sleep with this memory every night. Afterwards, the muhajedeen played football with the head. Then a third Serb was shot by the men.

"I was so shocked," she continued, "that I couldn't tell where my husband was, if he was one of the men who shot, or if he only filmed." Seyam said that he had never taken his wife to see an execution, though, he said, she had watched videotapes of executions.

In any case, she returned to Germany. He visited her there from time to time, and after he moved to Saudi Arabia, where he opened a media production company, Gluck rejoined him at the end of 2000.

"I went with him to Saudi Arabia because he said he had changed his life, and then I saw that he hadn't changed," she said.

In January 2001, she decided to get a divorce and she returned to Germany, never to see him again.

**

Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting for this article.

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