Maha el-Samnah

Maha el-Samnah
Maha el-Samnah, with her youngest daughter in her arms.
Born	1957 (age 59–60) Palestine
Residence	Toronto, Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Spouse(s)	Ahmed Khadr
Children	7

Maha el-Samnah (born 1957) has Canadian citizenship and is the widow of Ahmed Khadr, a prominent Egyptian-Canadian who allegedly worked for charities for Afghan refugees and was alleged to have been an al-Qaeda financier. They had two daughters and five sons, three of whom: Abdullah, Abdurahman and Omar Khadr attained notability in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Canada in relation to the war on terror by the United States and the George W. Bush administration. She moved to Toronto in 1977, where she met and married the Egyptian immigrant, Ahmed Khadr, in 1979. In the 1980s, together with her husband and first three children, Maha el-Samnah moved to Afghanistan, during the Soviet Occupation of that country. In 1995 El-samnah and her husband founded a Canadian charity with a mandate to provide aid in war-torn Afghanistan and Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Agencies.

Her husband, Ahmad, was later held by the Pakistani police without charge, due to suspicions that his daughter's fiance may have been involved in a plot to bomb the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan. El-Samnah received Canadian news coverage after pleading with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien on camera during a visit to Pakistan, to raise her husband's case with Pakistani authorities. She was again the subject of media coverage when her son Omar Khadr became the youngest detainee to be held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. As of 2008 he was the last Western citizen still being held there. He pleaded guilty in a plea agreement in October 2010, and was sentenced to eight years in prison. He was returned to Canada in 2012, where he will complete the remainder of his eight-year sentence.

As a teenager, Samnah moved to Saudi Arabia with her parents Mohammad and Fatmah. The family moved to Canada on August 1, 1974 when she was 17, and her parents opened a bakery at the intersection of Eglinton Avenue and Midland. She attended T. L. Kennedy Secondary School in Mississauga, and hoped to become a doctor. As the only Muslim, she became self-conscious about her niqab and compromised by wearing a scarf over her hair.