Part 3 • The first video

(Page 3 of 4)

(J.C.) Monday afternoon the kidnappers called me into the sitting room. Sitting against a wall was a man wearing a kaffiyeh - the traditional Arab men's headdress, made of checked fabric - wrapped around his head and face. All I could see were his ink-black eyes.

Ink Eyes addressed me in English. His voice had a familiar, gravelly quality.

	ILLUSTRATION BY JILLIAN TAMAKI

"Are you happy here?" he asked. "Is everything OK?"

I knew that voice - it was the interpreter, the man who'd grilled me about my background in the initial hours of my captivity. I soon learned that he was more than an interpreter; he was their leader.

He went on to say that his group had kidnapped a French journalist a year earlier, and that she'd asked why she was treated so well. "So you'll say you were treated well when you go home," he'd told her.

Another shock - these were the men who'd taken Florence Aubenas. A French foreign correspondent for the paper Liberation, she was kidnapped in Baghdad in January 2005.
(See story | Graphic | Interactive map.)

Well, at least she'd been released, though at the time I didn't know it was after a five-month ordeal.

Ink Eyes kept talking. "We need to make a video of you," he said. "We want your family to see this. We want to make them see you in a bad way so that they want to move quickly."

A vision flashed through my head: I was going to be one of those hostages surrounded by men with guns in a video broadcast on Al Jazeera. I'd always worried about becoming one of them.

Seeing my alarm, they said I didn't have to make the video if I didn't want to. I assured them I did want to. They were armed, I didn't want to know the consequences if I said no.

Then the man with the black eyes said, "Jill, where is your mobile [phone]? Yesterday, the American soldiers came very close, very close to this place where you were. Why did they do that?"

Again, they were accusing me of communicating with the US military. This was bad.

"I am the leader of this little group, and I'm a little more sophisticated than my friends here," he continued. "Do you have something in your body, something to send a signal to your government?"

Then he told me a story: He'd had a friend held at the US prison at Abu Ghraib. This friend claimed that Marines had given him medicine that put him to sleep, many times. After he got out, he went to the doctor, had an X-ray, and they'd found an electronic tracking device implanted in his body.

"If you have this in your body, tell me now and we'll go and take it out," Ink Eyes said, making a plucking gesture with his hand.

"No, I don't have this! I don't have this!" I nearly shouted through tears. "Bring a woman. We'll go in the bathroom right now, and I'll take all my clothes off and she can look at me and see that I don't have anything."

He waved his hand and said that wouldn't prove I didn't have a transmitter implanted in my body. Then he changed the subject, apparently letting go of the issue. Eventually, dinner for the men arrived - fish, an expensive treat in Iraq, in honor of me.

I left the room to go eat with the women and children. But it was clear that this suspicion was not going away.

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