Several years ago, when I was a young reporter and desperate to prove myself, I found myself barreling down a highway toward Falluja. This was 2004, when Iraq was beginning its descent into chaos. A squad of American Marines had just been killed and I was eager to get the story. I was new at The New York Times and took on what I now see was a stupid amount of risk.
The road was supposed to be clear. But as the highway bent to the left, a blue van shot across our path and screeched to a halt 50 feet in front of us, cutting us off. The van’s doors flew open. Our driver slammed on the brakes. We careened off the tarmac, and by the time we stopped, dust hanging in the air, we were surrounded by dozens of armed masked men.
“We’re dead! We’re dead!” screamed a female colleague sitting next to me in the back seat. I felt her fingernails dig into the flesh of my arm.
Dozens more gunmen flooded into the road, clutching assault rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers. Our car was bulletproof, but not that bulletproof, and when 20 masked men surround you, banging the tips of their rifles on your window and ordering you out, all you can think of is how exactly this will end.
Will they shoot you or saw off your head? Burn you alive? Who will find your body?
Carefully, I stepped out of the car.
A twitchy gunman hoisted a belt-fed machine gun up to his shoulder and leveled it at my chest.
Click.
The safety off, he closed one eye and squinted down the barrel. I didn’t even bother to put up my hands. I didn’t feel my pulse hammering in my neck anymore. I didn’t feel anything. That moment was the still point of my life. I looked beyond the gunman up at the sheet-metal sky.
I was about to die.
In seeing the news from Manchester this week, the panic and helplessness I felt that day more than a decade ago comes flooding back. The terrorists who captured me in Iraq were not simply in ISIS; they founded it. ISIS started in Falluja in 2004, specializing in car bombs and attacks on American forces, and now it controls territory across the Middle East.
More dangerously, it controls minds across the world. Salman Abedi, the young British man who killed 22 people this week in the suicide bombing in Manchester, seems to have been an indoctrinated follower of ISIS who had become disillusioned with his life in England.
Reporters aren’t supposed to lie. But that day back in 2004 it was a lie that saved my life. I’ve gone on to survive many hairy situations, especially in East Africa, where I’ve been covering wars for the past decade, but never again have I experienced the utter hopelessness I felt falling into terrorist hands.
As the gunmen drove us away, I reached deep into my front pocket, got my fingers around my passport, and slipped it to my colleague, who without any instruction stuffed it down the front of her jeans. I was praying our captors would still have some manners and not frisk her, at least not there. We raced through a little town, masked gunmen everywhere, and when we stopped at a small garage, my interrogation began.
I had 20 masked men with the muzzles of their rifles three inches from my face, shouting questions in a mixture of Arabic and broken English.
What are you doing here! Why did you come! Who sent you!
But most urgently, the gunmen wanted to know one thing:
Are you American?
I am. That passport in my colleague’s pants was an American passport.
But I knew they would kill me if I said that, so that’s when I dropped my lie.
“American?” they asked again.
“No,” I said.
“Where from?”
“I’m Greek.”
“Greek?”
“Yes.” I repeated it with a little more confidence. “Greek.”
I have a lot of different nationalities and ethnicities mixed in my blood — I’m basically a European mutt — but Greek is not among them. I made that up and uttered it on the spot. I figured none of the gunmen would speak Greek. And Greece has a pretty good soccer team and I knew Iraqis love soccer.
For the next several hours, I lied, with firearms in my face. And one of the most exhausting pastimes in the world is lying with firearms in your face.
Right as I was about to lose focus, a stocky, bearded man walked into the room where I was being questioned. All the gunmen respectfully stood up. Unlike the others, the bearded man didn’t wear a scarf twisted over his face. His eyes looked deep into mine. He immediately conveyed a more serious and potentially sinister vibe. Later, I was told he was the leader of the terrorist cell (the terms “terrorist” and “insurgent” could be interchangeable, but the resistance fighters in that part of Iraq were planting bombs and massacring civilians, so I don’t think “terrorist” is a stretch). Once more, he asked where I was from and, unbelievably, he seemed satisfied with my newfound Greekness.
What did I glean from my few hours trapped behind enemy lines? It wasn’t like I was allowed to conduct any interviews or take any notes. I can say, though, these men were organized, serious and passionate. Thankfully, they were also judicious.
Different from the ISIS of today that is gleeful about slaughtering innocents, even children, my captors seemed to hold some respect for human life or surely they would have shot us on the spot. I don’t know what explains that. My guess is that as wars go on, they get uglier. The few rules at the beginning are jettisoned, the gloves come off. These terrorists were just starting down their long violent road and hadn’t hardened toward all Westerners, thus the Greek pass I was given.
As the sun was about to set, the gunmen told us we could leave. We drove back to Baghdad in silence. When we pulled up to The Times’ bureau, our entire Iraqi staff was standing on the lawn, waiting for us. One after the other, the mustached guards, the cooks, the other drivers and translators — around two dozen people, most who usually resisted cracking a smile — hugged me so tight, eyes closed, jiggling with sobs. They looked at me like I had just come back from the dead.
When I finally walked back up into my room, alone, I didn’t feel exultant to be alive. I felt tremendously empty.
