It was a sunny spring day in April 2004, neither hot nor cold, and I had spent the wee hours of the morning photographing the funeral of a Shiite man who had allegedly been killed by Americans in Sadr City. I had returned to the bureau, and we immediately headed out again. Waleed, our driver, was six foot four when slouching, his head hanging huge over his body. His Sunni family was from an area near Ramadi, which was helpful for reporting the story; in Iraq tribes and familial ties mean everything. Khalid, a Sunni originally from Palestine, was our interpreter that day. He was barely in his twenties and overweight and proudly introduced himself to everyone in accentless English as “Fat Khalid” or “Solid Khalid.” He was always joking, as long as we didn’t interrupt the American movies he watched on his laptop or his incessant Internet chats with women from God knows where.
We set out at 11 a.m., heading west around the Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, around small towns marked by soda stands and little else, sunken green fields of crops and long grass surrounded by palms. Though the road was unfinished and bumpy, I was happy to be coasting down a small, quiet road out of Baghdad and through the lush farms. Matthew and I huddled in the back together. He commented on how serene the villages looked; I joked that we shouldn’t talk about safety until we arrived at our destination. The sky, approaching midday, was luminescent without being harsh. We were in rural towns, so the farms essentially made up the towns. There were no main city centers. Waleed and Khalid talked in the way they often did when they were trying to shield us from their concern about something.
And then they went silent. I noticed a few Iraqis with AK-47s standing along the side of the road. By now American checkpoints controlled so many roads and areas of Iraq that the presence of men in black with AK-47s could only mean one thing: lawlessness. There were no American troops in the area.
“We are on the smugglers’ route,” Khalid said.
What he was trying to say without sounding scared is that we should turn back. We went over our alibis again: that no matter what happened, I was Italian and Matthew was Greek. Under no circumstances were we American. There were more men with guns. It was too late.
We rounded a corner, and a lanky, scruffy man walked close to my window, gun in hand, like a hunter on the trail. He stared at our car: two foreigners in a Sunni stronghold. The Western enemy traveling in the heart of the insurgency. I looked at Matthew—his Americanness—and threw a shawl I had lying in my lap over his head. A sky-blue minivan careened out in front of us, cutting off the road. Dozens of armed men swirled around our vehicle, frenetic and edgy with their new find.
“We are going to die now,” I said.
I thought of the four journalists who had been ambushed along the road between Kabul and Jalalabad after September 11. They had been killed. Now it was us, encircled by gunmen in a village called Garma, about forty minutes from Baghdad.
I couldn’t see the green fields anymore. Men opened Khalid’s and Waleed’s doors, pulling them out of the vehicle and out of our view. Our own doors were locked, and our windows were blocked by men with faces wrapped in red-and-white-and black-and-white-patterned keffiyehs, who screamed and unleashed entire magazines of bullets into the air. Our car was armored, bulletproof, with windows as thick as encyclopedias but vulnerable to the arsenal of weapons in this village. One boy no older than twenty, a rocket launcher strapped to his back, vibrated with skittish energy, as if he himself might explode.
“We are going to die,” I said. “We are going to die.” I could think of nothing else to say. We were utterly defenseless.
A few men tapped on Matthew’s door with the tips of their AK-47s.
“Please don’t open your door,” I said. “Please don’t open your door.”
Khalid came to the window, all three hundred pounds of him panting and sweating, and said, “Matthew, get out of the car.”
They wanted the man. Matthew unlocked his door, and they led him out, hoisting their guns to his chest, leaving me alone in the backseat. Two men remained at my door, guns raised at me, but were clearly confused about how to proceed. I was a Mediterranean-looking American woman in full Iraqi Arab attire: Was I Iraqi? A Muslim? Did I speak Arabic? My olive complexion and almond-shaped eyes have afforded me relative anonymity in countless countries, and the kidnappers couldn’t tell whether or not I was one of them.