Waleed was back in the driver’s seat of our car, waiting for us to be transferred from the minivan to our armored car on the side of the road.
We grabbed our things and started across the street toward Waleed. I whipped around.
“Commander!” I called out to the man in AmberVision sunglasses who had just authorized our release. “Can I take pictures?”
He stared at me. “No! Go. Now!”
“But I am a journalist . . . ,” I said. “And you are attacking the Americans.”
I was somewhat shocked at my own request, but the words flew out of my mouth before I even had time to think about them. The fact was that we were genuinely trying to show their side of the story, and we were sitting in an insurgent’s den in the midst of a very photogenic battle. I only half-expected to get permission, but I would have been disappointed in myself had I not asked.
He smiled. And then he refused.
I ran back toward the car.
Gareib again led us out of town in a separate vehicle as the commander had instructed. His car moved suspiciously slowly. About two hundred yards down the road, Gareib’s driver pulled over, got out, and motioned to Waleed and Khalid. Matthew and I sat in the backseat, too scared to talk.
“You cannot leave this evening,” Gareib said. “You must spend the night somewhere in the village, and you can leave in the morning.”
“No way,” Matthew said. He was fiddling, anxious, almost angry. “We are leaving. The commander told us we can leave. We have been released. Let us go!”
Gareib explained that the insurgents had just launched an attack on the Americans, and if the Americans happened to counterattack—and fire on the area from which they had received fire—everyone in the village would assume it was us who told the Americans where to bomb.
Matthew was getting angry. “That is ridiculous. We are leaving. We are not spending the night. No. Way.”
I whispered softly, “I don’t think we have a choice. We are kidnapped, remember?”
Gareib called me out of the car. He leaned in close. “You better tell your friend to relax and keep his mouth shut.”
I apologized and said that we were scared.
“Just tell him to stay quiet. He is pissing me off.”
I turned to Khalid and Waleed. “This is your country, your culture. You understand the situation much better than we do. What do you guys think we should do?”
“We are leaving,” Matthew said again.
“Matthew, just be quiet for one minute. Khalid and Waleed will tell us what to do—they speak Arabic, they know these guys, they will tell us what to do. We really don’t have much of a choice.”
“If we spend the night, they will kill us in the morning,” he said. He was losing it. “It’ll give them time to think and plot. They will kill us.”
He was probably right.
“I think we should do whatever they tell us to do,” Khalid said. “They know where our house is in Baghdad, and Gareib is saying that if the Americans really counterattack, the guys from this village could bomb the New York Times bureau.”
We closed our doors, Gareib got back into his car, and we continued driving along the narrow streets, farther and farther into the residential area of Garma. We pulled up to a house, where the gates opened almost immediately, and pulled right up to the living room door. There was no chance any neighbors even witnessed our arrival.
The owner of the house, a short, stocky man with a tightly trimmed beard and dark brown eyes that showed the exhaustion of war, greeted us in the driveway. Gareib handed us off to a new captor and disappeared.
The room was a typical Iraqi sitting room, with a rug-lined floor and long, overstuffed cushions against the wall. I had been in Iraq long enough to know that they would try to separate me from the men and put me in a room full of women who spoke no English and whose questions revolved around whether I was married and had babies. I couldn’t handle the thought of such mundane conversation when our lives were all at stake. When the inevitable offer came, I refused politely, explaining that I just wanted to stay with my husband and that I would sit with the men. I wanted us to be together. The owner’s son, no more than eight, brought us tea and cookies—the irony of hospitality while being detained in Iraq.