In Canada, an Outcast Family Finds Support

Khadr was a computer engineer, but he shuttled back and forth to troubled Muslim regions of the world, raising money for charities, he told officials. In December 1995, he was arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of helping finance the bombing a month earlier of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, which killed 17 people. In January 1996, Canada's prime minister at the time, Jean Chretien, visited Pakistan and appealed to the government to release the Canadian citizen.

After he was freed, Khadr moved his family to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, where they lived in the same compound as Osama bin Laden. In 1999, bin Laden attended Zaynab's wedding, family members acknowledge. Khadr's sons were sent to al Qaeda summer camps, according to Abdurahman, who described his father's fanatic devotion to Islamic jihad causes and attempts to persuade his son to become a martyr.

Zaynab and Maha Khadr say they were not members of al Qaeda, though they shared its radical world view. "I will say, yes, I am a fanatic Muslim," Zaynab said. "But even if in the public eye they are the same, I am not al Qaeda."

And bin Laden's attendance at her wedding? "It's not such a big deal over there," she said with a shrug. "He goes to everyone's wedding."

After Sept. 11, 2001, the family scattered. Maha eventually returned to Toronto. But the elder Khadr took his sons to the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan to carry on the fight. U.S. authorities, who identified him as a ranking aide to bin Laden, tried hard to find him.

On July 27, 2002, intelligence analysts asked U.S. forces on the ground near Khost in southeastern Afghanistan to check out a compound in a small village. They had picked up radio transmissions that might have been from Khadr, according to Sgt. Layne Morris, a Special Forces soldier with the National Guard in Utah, who was then operating near Khost.

U.S. forces surrounded the compound and sent in two Afghan translators. The Afghans were slaughtered in a hail of rifle fire. A fierce battle followed, with grenades being thrown both ways over the mud wall, according to Master Sgt. Hansen, who was crouched by the wall.

Incongruously, he started laughing. "Combat is awful loud," he recalled thinking.

Sgt. Morris was aiming his rifle when a grenade sent shrapnel through his eye. "I thought, dang, my rifle just exploded on me. Turned out it was a grenade," Morris, 43, said in an interview from Salt Lake City. "I thought I was dead. It was discouraging. All I could think was, man, I am not going to see my wife or kids again."

When air support arrived, F-16 cannons chewed through the mud and cement compound, and twin 500-pound bombs crushed what was left. But Omar Khadr was a surprise survivor. His grenade sprayed shrapnel over Sgt. Christopher J. Speers, who was not wearing a helmet, and he died nine days later at a military hospital in Germany.

Fifteen months later, Omar's father was killed in a shootout with Pakistani security forces in a remote region near the border. Omar's brother, Karim, then 14, was wounded and paralyzed in the shootout.

Omar was sent to Guantanamo. Earlier this year, U.S. lawyers who were allowed to interview him there said the youth reported being taunted sexually by guards, shackled in painful positions and dragged "like a human mop" over urine-soaked floors.

"I believe he has been tortured, beyond a doubt," said one of the attorneys, Richard Wilson, a law professor at American University.

In Toronto, the Khadr women are facing obstacles of their own. In March, when Zaynab Khadr returned to Canada from Islamabad for the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she was met at the airport by police investigators with a search warrant. They seized her laptop computers and address books, contending that she has "willingly participated and contributed both directly and indirectly" to al Qaeda's terrorist activities, according to the court affidavit filed for the warrant.

Zaynab professed to be unworried. "If they had anything, I wouldn't still be here," she said.

Her mother is defiant. "What is our crime?" Maha Khadr demanded. "Because we are different? And we do not want to change our morals? Time will prove we have never ever broken any Canadian law. Never."