It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (35 page)

You Will Die Tonight

L
IBYA,
M
ARCH 2011

Three weeks into the Libyan uprising—a revolution that quickly became a war—I was kidnapped. My colleagues—Tyler Hicks, Anthony Shadid, and Stephen Farrell—and I had been covering an antigovernment revolt started by ordinary Libyan men, and Qaddafi saw us journalists as the enemy. Along with Mohammed, the quiet, twenty-two-year-old engineering student we had hired to be our driver, we had run directly into a military checkpoint. Now we were at the mercy of Qaddafi’s soldiers, our hands and feet bound, and blindfolded.

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.”

“That’s a promising sign,” I said.

Several soldiers approached us, and one by one they tied blindfolds around our eyes and refastened our arms behind our backs. A large, muscular soldier lifted me like a pillow into his arms and loaded me into the back of the armored personnel carrier—a vehicle resembling a giant tin beetle. I tried to remain as still as possible, to draw as little attention to myself as I could, when I felt a soldier climb into the vehicle and position himself with his front pressing tightly against my back. There was a lot of movement, and soon I heard Steve’s voice: “Is everybody here?”

One by one we all answered yes.

The vehicle began to move, and within seconds the soldier spooning my back started tracing his fingers across my body. I prayed he wouldn’t find my money belt with my passport. I squirmed and pleaded, “Please, don’t. Please. I have a husband.” He covered my mouth with his salty fingers and ordered me not to speak as he continued groping me. I could taste the salt and mud from his skin on my lips as he continued grabbing at my breasts and butt, clumsily tracing my genitals over my jeans.

I knew that the armored personnel carrier, a common military vehicle used to transport troops, was full of men, and I wondered how long I would have to endure this torment before someone came to my rescue. I heard one of my colleagues groan in pain—I thought it was Anthony but later learned it was Steve getting a bayonet shoved in between his butt cheeks, not quite ripping through his pants—and I knew we were all being abused simultaneously.

“Please. You are Muslim,” I said. “I have a husband. Please.” He ignored my words and kept his hands on my breasts for the thirty minutes or so we drove, until miraculously another soldier pulled me into the protection of his embrace. He was trying to shield me from the groping. The salty-fingered guy pulled me back against him. The savior pulled me back. Someone had a conscience.

The vehicle finally slowed and pulled over to the side of the road. The door opened, and I was roughly pushed out. With our arms tied and eyes blindfolded, they shifted us to the back of a cramped Land Cruiser. Inside, Anthony was moaning loudly.

“My shoulders,” he said aloud, his voice drenched in pain. “My arms are bound so tightly, it’s killing my shoulders.”

My shoulder with the titanium plate that reset my collarbone after my car accident also ached. Anthony and Steve began to speak a smattering of Arabic to a soldier, pleading with him to retie our arms in front, rather than behind our backs. One by one the soldier untied our arms, and the relief was immediate. I was eerily calm in the back of the truck: My hands now tied in front, the close proximity to my colleagues, and the hope that we would all remain together were enough to get me through the night.

I kept my eyes closed under the blindfold and tried to slow my breath, to distract myself from my fear, my thirst, my need to pee. That’s when I felt another hand on my face, caressing my cheek like a lover. Slowly he ran his fingers over my cheeks, my chin, my eyebrows. I lowered my face into my lap. He raised it, tenderly, and continued with his caresses. He ran his hands over my hair and spoke to me in a low, steady voice, repeating the same phrase over and over. I kept my face down, ignoring his touch, his words. I didn’t understand what he was saying.

“What is he saying, Anthony?”

Anthony took his time answering. “He’s telling you that you will die tonight.”

I was numb. Since the moment we’d been taken that morning, I’d resigned myself to the likelihood that I was going to die, and every minute since then had felt like a gift. I focused on the moment, on staying alive, on not getting overwhelmed by emotion.

Tyler suddenly said, “I need some fresh air. Anthony, could you please ask them if I can step outside for some fresh air?”

Tyler’s request was strange to me; he had endured the previous hours without so much as a whimper, and now he was asking for fresh air. I would later learn that Saleh, the soldier who kept telling me I would die as he caressed my cheeks, had told Tyler repeatedly that he was going to “cut his pretty head off,” and Tyler had been nauseated.

 • • • 

S
OMEHOW WE ALL FELL
asleep sitting up in the back of the Land Cruiser. It was light out when we awoke, stiff and sore, to the sound of soldiers banging on the door. We were thrown into the back of a pickup truck. Bound, blindfolded, and lying on the bed of the hard metal pickup, we drove west for two hundred fifty miles along the Mediterranean coast under an unforgiving sun. I imagined what we looked like, being paraded through the streets like medieval trophies of war from one hostile checkpoint to another. I was so tired of being scared, of wondering what was next. The unknown was more terrifying than anything. Tyler was our eyes: He was able to see out from beneath his blindfold and narrated the scene to us in a hushed voice as we drove along the endless road. Anthony was our ears: He translated the slurs and shouts, like “Dirty dogs!” (a grave insult in Islam). For most of the time I crouched in a fetal position to shield myself from the street and rested my head against the metal arch of the wheel, my bound hands covering my face. My collarbone and shoulder ached with every bounce of the truck, but I thought if I could dig myself deep into the flatbed, no one would notice I was there.

At each checkpoint one of us was beaten. I heard the thump of what I imagined was an AK-47 or a fist to the back of my colleagues’ heads, and a whimper of contained agony. At one checkpoint I felt a soldier sidle up next to me alongside the truck, and immediately afterward he poured the weight of his body onto my cheek with his fist. Tyler, in a gesture that would get me through the next few days, managed to move his bound hands over to me and hold mine while I wept in misery.

“You are OK,” he said. “I am with you. You are going to be OK. You are going to be OK.”

“I just want to go home,” I said aloud as hot tears dampened my blindfold. I found reassurance only in the fact that we were all still together.

It was afternoon when we arrived in Sirte, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, which lies halfway between Benghazi and Tripoli. We were still blindfolded when they led us downstairs into an area that felt, smelled, and sounded like a prison. The man leading me put me up against a wall and told me to place my hands above my head and spread my legs. I imitated the position I had seen so many times on police TV shows. We were being searched again. Like all the other Libyan men before him, he rested his hands on my breasts for a bit too long while he checked my pockets. I had a small container of saline for my contact lenses that I was able to convince the previous soldiers to let me keep for medical reasons, but this soldier confiscated it immediately. He took the plastic watch off my wrist. The man felt me up one last time and walked me into a cell.

“Is everybody here?” Steve asked.

“Yes,” we all replied.

Eventually they untied our hands and undid our blindfolds and brought us a dinner of orange rice and plain white bread rolls. Our cell was about twelve feet by ten. There was a small sliding window in the upper left corner, four filthy foam mattresses on the floor, a box of dates, a giant bottle of drinking water with some plastic cups, and a bottle for urine in the corner by the door. I was too distressed to eat and, despite my thirst, too terrified of needing to use the restroom to drink. I had a splitting headache from caffeine withdrawal, and my contact lenses were dry and irritated. My eyesight was -5.5; I was nearsighted and almost blind without them. My glasses had been stolen with our gear. If I cried a few times a day, I thought, I could keep my contacts moist.

The men took turns urinating into the bottle in the corner, and I longed for a funnel, or a penis. There was nothing to do but sleep, talk, and wait. They came to take Anthony away for questioning a few times, and we couldn’t decide whether the men in the prison in Sirte had gotten word of who we were from Tripoli or whether they still had no idea we were
New York Times
journalists.

“Do you think anyone realizes we’re missing?” I asked.

Anthony, Steve, and Tyler were sure. “The
New York Times
is a machine,” Steve said. “They will be doing everything they can to find us.”

“Really?” I asked skeptically. I couldn’t imagine that anyone even realized we were missing in the chaos of the front line. I had been so immersed in my own head, in staying alive, that I hadn’t once thought about the mechanisms in place for trying to rescue us.

“Four missing
New York Times
journalists is a big deal,” Tyler stepped in.