His therapist advised him not to rehash the events to overcome the trauma.

"It's clear that I didn't listen to her at all," told AFP the man who now runs a bar in Paris, the Dissident Club, where he welcomes refugees like him.

"Dissident Club" is also the title of his autobiography in comics, to be published Wednesday by Glénat editions, co-signed with Hubert Maury, a former French diplomat stationed in Pakistan.

The story opens in January 2018, when men dressed in white extract him from a taxi "in broad daylight" and throw him into another car.

What awaits him perhaps, he thinks: kidnapping, torture, death.

Two strokes of luck saved Taha Siddiqui.

He convinces the man who is squeezing his neck to let go, promising to behave himself, and notices that the door to his right is not locked.

He opens it, starts running on a congested road, escapes the bullets, and manages to alert his friends in the media to quickly organize a press conference about the attack.

Convinced atheist

It is only after his arrival in Paris that he discovers that he is on the list of people to be eliminated from the Pakistani army, and that he will never be able to set foot in his country again.

The graphic novel goes far beyond this incident and the author's journey, to explain the extension of religious extremism and conflicts in the region, through the history of his rigorous upbringing in Saudi Arabia and the Pakistan.

"I chose to tell my story in comics because I couldn't have one in my youth," says this exile.

"It will certainly annoy my father. I hope he does not see it".

Not that they're on good terms.

This father's reaction to the kidnapping attempt was that it was divine punishment for not praying enough.

A story seen and re-seen, a la Romeo and Juliet, caused Taha Siddiqui's Muslim faith to crumble, when his family opposed his marriage to a Shiite woman he had met while studying.

In Pakistan, the Sunni-Shia schism is a delicate, if not impossible, fault line to cross.

"It really provoked something in me to tell me that there was a problem with our way of life", he explains, he who has become a convinced atheist.

“dysfunctional” country

The failed kidnapping puts an end to a busy career as a journalist.

Taha Siddiqui has collaborated with numerous foreign media, and won the Albert Londres Prize for an investigation into the Taliban's polio vaccine ban.

His relentless criticism of an all-powerful Pakistani military makes him a target, especially after a New York Times front-page story about his secret prisons.

His career "is a bit crazy", according to Hubert Maury, the designer.

But "that's what's really interesting: if it wasn't crazy, we wouldn't have made the book. He took a lot of risks".

"I find it quite impressive and remarkable. It's his country, so he risked not just death, but also exile and cutting himself off from his family," he adds.

The Pakistani says he has no regrets: "I chose this life but I didn't choose the reaction (of the soldiers). It's their fault, not mine".

"Sometimes I'm sad. I really believed in this country at one time in my life, but now less and less. Pakistan is a very dysfunctional country," he says.

© 2023 AFP