When the kidnappers arrived at Simona Torretta’s office in Baghdad, some instinct made the 29-year-old relief worker greet them in Arabic. “Salaam,” she said, “peace.” It was an incongruous word, given the men’s guns and the hand grenades she found herself resting her feet on minutes later in their getaway car. But it may have helped to save her life.
“I understood immediately that we were being kidnapped,” she says, “and making them respond to my greeting of ‘Salaam’ was for me a way of working out whether they were simply criminals who wanted to kill us at the next street corner, or whether there was something more to them. Also, I wanted to make them understand that we were people of peace.”
Then, and in the terrifying weeks that followed, she did her best to maintain a relationship with her captors: “In a situation in which your abductor is also your executioner — the one who gives you food but also the one who can kill you — anyone would try to do the same, however difficult it is.” Then she adds with a nervous laugh: “It’s a question of, ha, saving your skin.”
Torretta was seized along with her friend and colleague Simona Pari, also 29, on September 7 and held captive for three weeks. The intelligence services believe they were held, at least some of the time, in the same facility as Kenneth Bigley, the murdered British hostage. But while he and Margaret Hassan, the Irish aid worker, were paraded on television and later killed, the two Simonas survived because of an unprecedented campaign in both Italy and Iraq and — perhaps more importantly — a reported ransom payment of $5m (£2.7m).
After shunning publicity for several months, Torretta recently started talking about her experiences in Iraq to volunteer associations in Italy. A once extrovert arts graduate, she sits in a huddle in a corner of the Rome offices of A Bridge To Baghdad, the non-governmental humanitarian organisation for which she works, her arms folded as a protective shield. She unclasps herself only to reach for a cigarette or to finger her long black hair.
She made her first visit to Iraq in 1994 at the age of 19: “The sanctions against Iraq were in force then and I had never before seen kids of three or four suffering from leukaemia and deformed.” Four years later she settled in Iraq and helped to set up elementary schools, to provide drinkable water for remote areas and to bring in medical supplies.
Torretta stayed in Iraq during the 2003 invasion but by last summer she and Pari were privately debating whether life in Baghdad was too risky. Enzo Baldoni, an Italian journalist, had been taken hostage and killed. But Torretta’s organisation was one of the few which was managing to bring water to residents in Najaf, which was under siege: “Najaf was an emergency. There was no time to stop and think things through. Anyway, in a war situation you breathe insecurity day in, day out.”
Torretta was blindfolded and interrogated by her kidnappers. She soon realised that they had no idea who she was or what she and her friend were doing in Baghdad. One of her guards held a knife to her throat and told her: “If you don’t tell the truth, we will kill you.”
She is silent for a long time before she explains how she kept going: “In periods like that you have to find the strength somewhere. I’m a Catholic. I prayed. I found strength in so many small things. I thought of my family, of many people I knew. I answered the questions as precisely as I could.”
Once they were satisfied that the pair were indeed relief workers, the guards became less aggressive and told them about jailed brothers and sisters, as if they needed to justify the kidnapping to their victims. Torretta was reassured to hear the guards describe themselves as a religious group. Surely they would not harm women?
The blindfolds came off after a few days but she and Pari were told to wear veils and keep their heads down whenever a guard entered. They had no news from outside.
Torretta made her friend laugh by joking about a book that she would write after it was all over, entitled Handbook for the Good Hostage. Pari, in turn, would invent long stories and narrate them to her friend.
After three weeks the guards bundled them into a car and told them that they would be released. They were given presents: some laundry and books about Islam. They were dropped at the edge of a road. Awaiting them was a Red Cross envoy.
On that last trip the guards asked their forgiveness but Torretta refuses to pardon them: “Simona and I were there, working to help Iraq. So why take us?” She is torn over what secured their release. The rapport that she established with her guards was a factor, but obviously it was far from enough.
“The fact that we were women, and relief workers, must have helped too,” she says, “but what got us free was the mobilisation of so many people in Iraq and outside. I found out afterwards that women and handicapped people in their wheelchairs had demonstrated in Baghdad.”
They did the same for Hassan a few weeks later but that did her no good. So was it the ransom? “I don’t know. That must have had its weight, too, but I never found out whether there was a ransom or not.”
If there was a ransom, was it justified? “As rule it’s probably not the best thing,” she says, “but if it serves to save a life, I would have no problem paying one. Clearly it has consequences.”
Hassan’s death hit her hard: “Margaret’s death meant a lot to me, because she was a friend. Margaret was someone we all looked up to because she had been in Iraq for so many years.”
She is racked by irrational guilt that she survived and Hassan did not. “I would like to know why, but I don’t. Probably we were lucky with our captors and Margaret was seized during the fighting in Falluja, which was a more difficult time. But perhaps there’s also the fact that the Blair government didn’t show a readiness to consider the terms that her captors set.”
She is pessimistic about Iraq’s future and sceptical about today’s elections. “I don’t expect the result to be very representative of what the Iraqis want, because many won’t vote or won’t be able to vote. All the Americans want to do is destroy this country. Look at the way they destroyed Falluja,” she says.
“The worst scenario is a civil war. The best is that things remain as they are. War never solves problems, but then again there are new associations being created, for example for women’s rights, which didn’t exist before.”
What keeps her going today is her work, her family and her talks across Italy: “I tell people what is happening in Iraq. I want to bear witness about what people there are going through.”
She is thinking of writing a book about Iraq, from which she feels forcibly exiled. In the plane after her release she cried as she looked down on Baghdad: “My whole life is dedicated to Iraq, I want to go back. My life had a meaning, I felt useful. Part of me is still there.”
