My chief captor had an idea about how to prod the U.S. government into action: another video.
He said this one would be different, and left.
I turned to the two guards sitting on cushions a few feet away and started to panic. Really, really panic.
“Oh my God, oh my God, they’re going to kill me, this is going to be it. I don’t know when but they’re going to do it,” I thought.
I crawled over to Abu Hassan, the one who seemed more grown-up and sympathetic. His 9mm pistol was by his side, as usual.
“You’re my brother, you’re truly my brother,” I said in Arabic. “Promise me you will use this gun to kill me by your own hand. I don’t want that knife, I don’t want the knife, use the gun.”
I started to cry hysterically. By now I’d been held captive by Iraqi insurgents for six weeks. They’d given me a new hijab (the traditional head covering), a new name (Aisha), and tried to convert me to Islam. They’d let me play with their children – and repeatedly accused me of working for the CIA.
At night I’d fall asleep and be free in my dreams. Then I’d wake up and my situation would land on me like a weight. Every morning, it was as if I was kidnapped anew.
That particular morning I’d received a visit from Abu Nour, the most senior of my captors. As usual, the distinctive scent of his spicy cologne had announced his presence. As usual, I’d snapped my eyes to the ground to avoid seeing his face.
“We need to make a new video of you,” he’d said, in his high-pitched yet gravelly voice. “The last video showed you in good condition, and that made the government move slowly.”
The British government had moved quickly, he’d said, after a video had shown hostage Margaret Hassan in bad condition. They wanted to push the U.S. in the same way.
Margaret Hassan! An Irish aid worker married to an Iraqi, she’d been seized in Baghdad in October 2004, while on her way to work. Less than a month later, she was killed.
After the leader left, I sat and stared into the glowing metal of the propane heater, my knees drawn up under my red velveteen dishdasha robe. I was completely terrified.
If it was going to happen, I wanted it to be quick. So I crawled over to Abu Hassan and begged.
“I don’t want the knife!” I sobbed.
Neither Abu Hassan nor his fellow guard – the blubbery, adolescent Abu Qarrar – really knew what to do about my outburst.
“We’re not going to kill you. Why? What is this?” said Hassan.
His voice was flat and sounded insincere.
“Abu Qarrar, you speak English. You have to tell my family that I love them and that I’m sorry,” I implored.
I sat against the wall of a house whose location I didn’t know, under a window to an outside I couldn’t walk through, and cried and cried.
In Baghdad, Jan. 7, 2006 was a sunny Saturday. For me it promised to be an easy day.
Not that my life in Baghdad was easy. Freelance journalism is a tough business everywhere. But I didn’t want to sit in a cubicle in the U.S. and write, as I had, about the Department of Agriculture food pyramid. Here I was living my dream of being a foreign correspondent – even if that meant sometimes living in a hotel so seedy it was best to buy your own sheets.
First up were some routine interviews of Iraqi politicians trying to form a new government. Three weeks before, the country had chosen its first democratically elected permanent government. But Sunni politicians were dismayed at how few seats they’d won.
Later, I planned to leave my virus-ridden laptop (stashed in the trunk) with a techie friend of my interpreter, Alan Enwiya.
Alan was vital to my newsgathering process. We had been a team for almost two years. We were also friends – it felt as if we were almost siblings – who’d worked through Iraq’s difficult and increasingly dangerous conditions.
In our time together we’d eked out a living freelancing for the Italian news agency ANSA, USA Today, US News & World Report, and now The Christian Science Monitor. We had been threatened by militia members, mobbed after Friday prayers, and seen bullets rain down from passing police vehicles. We’d walked hours through Baghdad soliciting interviews from ordinary Iraqi voters.
During long days in traffic jams, Alan would tell me funny stories about his daughter and infant son, marveling at how fast they were growing. I would tease him that I was a spy for his wife, Fairuz, and would report to her if I caught him looking in the direction of a pretty girl.
The first interview on our list that morning was Adnan al-Dulaimi, a Sunni politician. While there was a handful of what Western journalists considered no-go neighborhoods in Baghdad – his office wasn’t in that category yet. But we had taken our normal security precautions. I was dressed, for example, in a black hijab that hid my hair and Western clothes. We’d been to Mr. Dulaimi’s office several times before without a problem. Our last trip had been two days earlier to set up this interview.
In retrospect, that was a fatal mistake; we had given someone 48 hours to prepare for our return.
Adnan Abbas, the Monitor’s longtime driver – who’d shared many of our harrowing experiences – guided his maroon Toyota sedan along the familiar route to Dulaimi’s office, dropping us off 20 minutes earlier than the scheduled time of 10 a.m.
Inside, Dulaimi’s aides steered us away from the usual waiting room full of men drinking sweet tea in tiny glasses, and into an adjoining room where we were alone. Alan and I noticed the strangeness of this move at the same moment.
“Well, it’s better,” Alan said. “You’re a woman and there are a lot of men in there.”
The minutes passed and aides walked through the room chatting on cellphones. I understood through my rudimentary Arabic that they were telling various people that a reporter was waiting to see Dulaimi. But a little after 10 a.m. the same aide who had made the appointment for us approached us.
“Sorry, Dr. Dulaimi has a press conference right now,” the aide said. “He can’t talk to you. Can you come back at 12?”
I wondered why I hadn’t heard about the press conference before now.
We agreed to come back later and stepped out into the bright sunny morning where Adnan was waiting for us.
As we walked to the car, Alan reminded me that we needed to call ahead to make sure our next interview was still on. He climbed into the front, and I handed him my phone from the back seat, my usual place. He began shouting into the phone, trying to make himself heard over Baghdad’s overloaded, spotty cellphone network.
Adnan had begun to pull away, but suddenly a large blue truck with red and yellow trim backed out of a driveway in front of us, completely blocking the road. Several men were standing around it, motioning to help it back out.
But in an instant they turned, trained pistols on us, and briskly approached the car.
Adnan hit the brakes, and he and Alan put their hands up. It was a routine we had become familiar with in Baghdad, where private security details often brandish weapons to clear a path for their clients.
But unlike the previous times, the men didn’t lower their weapons – and they kept advancing. The man closest to the car, a rotund person with salt-and-pepper stubble, had his gun aimed right through the windshield at Adnan.
My eyes were glued to him. I was confused about why he didn’t lower his pistol. At the same time Adnan and Alan opened their doors and began to get out of the car.
The gunmen ran at us. A whisper exploded from me into a scream, “No, no, NO!” as I tried to get out. The door closed on my right ankle as someone shoved me back in, pushing so hard that the right lens of my glasses popped out. Through the crack in the door – before the intruder slammed it – I saw the last moment of Alan’s life.
Adnan was gone. The rotund man was in the driver’s seat now. Other men jumped in sandwiching me between them. We sped away, out onto the main road, then turned right.
“Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!” my abductors shouted, excited and joyful. “Jihad! Jihad!”
