Will I see my parents again? Will I see Paul again? How could I do this to them? Will I get my cameras back? How did I get to this place?
Someone placed me in the backseat of a car. My mouth was cottony with fear, my hands were numb from the tight cloth around my wrists, and my watch was digging into my skin. A soldier opened the door and slid into the car beside me. He looked at me for a few seconds, and though I felt the weight of his gaze on me, I was too scared to look up and make eye contact. For a moment I thought perhaps he had arrived to offer me water. But instead he lifted his fist and punched me hard on the side of the face, bringing tears to my eyes. It wasn’t the pain that made me weep; it was the disrespect, the fear of what was to come, and the knowledge that a grown Arab man could have so little self-respect that he could punch a completely bound and defenseless woman in the face. I had worked in the Muslim world for eleven years and had always been treated with unparalleled hospitality and kindness. People had gone out of their way to feed me, to provide me with shelter in their homes, and to protect me from danger. Now I feared what this man might do to me. For one of the first times in my life, I feared rape.
Steve was placed in the car next to me, and I was relieved. Soldiers surrounded the car, looking at us and laughing, as if we were monkeys in a cage. They said things in Arabic—things I thankfully didn’t understand. Outside I saw Tyler and Anthony in another car about twenty feet away. Tyler and I had attended high school together. We’d known each other since I was thirteen years old. There was something comforting about his brave, calm, familiar presence.
I had lost all sense of time. I found the courage to look at our own car, the one Mohammed had been driving. One, or maybe it was two, of the doors of the gold four-door sedan were open, and a soldier was emptying our belongings onto the sidewalk. On the ground beside the driver’s door lay a young man, facedown and motionless, wearing a striped shirt, one arm outstretched. He appeared dead. I was positive it was Mohammed, and I was sick with guilt. No matter how he finally met his fate—either in a cross fire or executed by one of Qaddafi’s men—we had killed him with our relentless pursuit of the story. I began to cry, trying desperately to hold it together, and at that moment one of the soldiers put a cell phone to my ear.
“Speak in English,” he said.
“Salaam aleikum,” I stammered. (Peace be unto you.)
A woman’s voice spoke back to me in English. “You are a dog. You are a donkey. Long live Muammar.”
I was confused.
“Speak to my wife!” the soldier ordered me.
“Salaam aleikum,” I repeated.
She paused, perhaps wondering why an infidel would greet her with the traditional Muslim greeting. “You are a dog. You are a donkey.”
“I am a journalist,” I said. “New York Times. Ana sahafiya. I am a journalist.”
The soldier pulled the phone away from my ear and laughed into it, speaking softly and joyfully to his wife, proud of what he had accomplished that day.
We sat in those cars for hours—incoming artillery smashing and crackling and raining all around us—tied up and defenseless. The sky above us darkened. At dusk, the rebel attacks increased in intensity, bullets spraying the area around our car. Tyler managed to wriggle himself out of the electrical cord around his wrists, and a sympathetic soldier untied mine. We dived out of our car and onto the ground beside the door in search of cover. Steve and Anthony soon followed, and we huddled together on the ground like sardines.
“That’s outgoing tank fire,” Tyler explained after a long series of piercing explosions. “And that’s incoming machine-gun fire.” We recoiled every time we heard the crash of incoming explosions, certain we would get hit by shrapnel or a bullet. Soldiers surrounded us, and we pleaded with them to allow us to remain prostrate on the ground. In a rare moment of kindness a few of them came with thin mattresses, which they lined up behind the cover of a truck. They ordered us to lie down there, in the middle of the road. We curled together under a dirty blanket.
It was impossible to get a sense of who was in charge. All we had been told was that we would be delivered to “the doctor.” Some soldiers later referred to him as Dr. Mutassim, one of the more vicious of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons. Each son had his own militia, which seemed to operate on its own, with its own rules.
At 4 a.m. they woke us up. Nearby we could hear the troops speaking. Anthony, who was half Lebanese and the only one among us who spoke Arabic, closed his eyes to concentrate on what they were saying. “The rebels are amassing nearby,” he said. “The troops are saying they want to move us to a safer place.”