Part 5 • Mujahideen movies
A first-person account by Jill Carroll (J.C.) with contextual narrative by Peter Grier (P.G.)
Jill discovers these are hardcore Islamic militants who follow Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
By Jill Carroll and
Peter Grier
| Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor
(J.C.) One afternoon in the first week after I'd been taken - and been moved to yet another house near Abu Ghraib - Abu Ali called me into a big sitting room with green velveteen couches. On the far wall, above the TV, was a gigantic poster of waterfalls and rocks and trees.
It was beautiful. I could stare at it and get lost. I thought, I wish I was there, I wish I was there.
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AL QAEDA IN IRAQ:
About a week into her captivity, Jill was shown videos of attacks like this one on July 21, 2003 in Baghdad.
MANISH SWARUP/AP
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But my captors wanted me to look at something very different: DVDs of them waging war.
By their count, they were killing dozens or even hundreds of soldiers a day. They estimated that Al Qaeda in Iraq had killed at least 40,000 US soldiers. They could prove it, they said, with videos of their operations showing Humvees and tanks blowing up and snipers shooting soldiers.
So Abu Ali - the captor with a stubbly beard - sat me down and showed me the videos. They were in Arabic and were stamped with the symbols of various insurgent groups, and included audio overlays of mujahideen chanting in low, somber tones.
One video showed all these men who were going to be suicide car bombers. They interviewed them, and then showed a field, with cars lined up, and each man getting into a car - waving, just euphoric - and then driving off.
Others had pictures of an American Humvee driving along - and then it would blow up, and they'd cut to a graphic of a lightning flash, and thunder clapping.
Abu Ali would glance over at me as I watched the videos, asking me what I thought of them. I couldn't say anything good, but I tried to say things that were true, like "Oh, this is the first time I've ever seen this. I didn't know this was out there."
To Abu Ali, though, this was their mission, a righteous path; this was their work for God.
While I sat there watching them, I felt the insurgents were sending me a message: They hate Americans so much, they're proud of these attacks. It's normal to them.
Surely they were going to kill me. How could they not?
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