The car’s engine roared as the gunman punched the accelerator and we crossed into the open Afghan desert. I was seated in the back between two Afghan colleagues who were accompanying me on a reporting trip when armed men surrounded our car and took us hostage.
It was November 10 last year and I had been heading to a meeting with a Taliban commander along with an Afghan journalist, Tahir Luddin, and our driver, Asad Mangal. The commander had invited us to interview him outside Kabul.
The longer I looked at the gunman in the passenger seat, the more nervous I became. His face showed little emotion. His eyes were dark, flat and lifeless. I thought of my wife and family and was overcome with shame. An interview that seemed crucial hours earlier now seemed absurd. We reached a dry riverbed and the car stopped. “They’re going to kill us,” Tahir whispered.
Tahir and Asad were ordered out of the car. Gunmen from a second vehicle began beating them with their rifle butts and led them away. I was told to get out and take a few steps up a sand-covered hillside.
While one guard pointed his Kalashnikov at me, the other took my glasses, notebook, pen and camera. I was blindfolded, my hands tied behind my back. My heart raced. Sweat poured from my skin.
“Habarnigar,” I said, using a Dari word for journalist. “Salaam,” I said, using an Arabic expression for peace.
Moments later I felt a hand push me back towards the car and I was forced to lie down on the back seat. Two gunmen got in and slammed the doors shut. The car came to a halt after what seemed like a two-hour drive. Guards took off my blindfold and guided me through the front door of a crude mud-brick home perched in the centre of a ravine.
I was put in some type of washroom. After a few minutes the guards opened the door and pushed Tahir and Asad inside. We stared at one another in relief. About 20 minutes later a guard opened the door and motioned for us to walk into the hallway.
“No shoot,” he said, “no shoot.”
For the first time that day I thought our lives might be spared. The guard led us into a living room decorated with maroon carpets and red pillows. A half-dozen men sat along two walls of the room, Kalashnikov rifles at their sides. I sat down across from a heavyset man with a patu — a traditional Afghan scarf — wrapped around his face. Sunglasses covered his eyes and he wore a cheap black knitted winter cap. Embroidered across the front of it was the word “Rock” in English.
“I’m a Taliban commander,” he announced. “My name is Mullah Atiqullah.”
For the next seven months and 10 days, Atiqullah and his men kept the three of us hostage. We were held in Afghanistan for a week, then spirited to the tribal areas of Pakistan, where Osama Bin Laden is thought to be hiding.
Atiqullah worked with Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of one of the most hardline factions of the Taliban. The Haqqanis and their allies would hold us in territory they control in North and South Waziristan.
During our time as hostages I tried to reason with our captors. I told them we were journalists who had come to hear the Taliban’s side of the story. I told them I had recently married and that Tahir and Asad had nine young children between them. I wept, hoping it would create sympathy, and begged them to release us. All of my efforts proved pointless.
Over those months I came to a simple realisation. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping I viewed the organisation as a form of “Al-Qaeda lite”, a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.
Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learnt that the goal of the hardline Taliban was far more ambitious. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al-Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.
What follows is the story of our captivity. I took no notes while I was a prisoner. All descriptions stem from my memory and records kept by my family and colleagues. Direct quotations from our captors are based on Tahir’s translations. Undoubtedly, my recollections are incomplete and the passage of time may have affected them. For safety reasons, certain details and names have been withheld.
In October 2008 I arrived in Afghanistan on a three-week reporting trip for a book about the squandered opportunities to bring stability to the region.
To be as fair as possible I decided that I needed to get the Taliban’s side of the story.
I flew to Kabul on November 9 to meet Tahir Luddin, a journalist known to be able to arrange interviews with the Taliban.
Tahir told me that a Taliban commander named Abu Tayyeb would agree to an interview the next day in Logar province. We could meet him after a one-hour drive on paved roads. Tahir had already interviewed Abu Tayyeb with two other foreign journalists and said he trusted him. “Yes,” I told Tahir. “Tell him yes.”
I slept poorly the night before the interview. I got out of bed early and put on a pair of boxer shorts my wife had given me emblazoned with dozens of “I love you” logos, hoping they would bring good luck.
I walked outside and met Tahir and Asad Mangal, a friend he had hired to work as a driver and lookout.
We arrived at the meeting point in a town where farmers and donkeys meandered down the road. But none of Abu Tayyeb’s men was there. Tahir called Abu Tayyeb, who instructed us to continue down the road. Moments later, I felt the car swerve to the right and stop. Two gunmen ran towards our car shouting commands in Pashto, the local language. “Tell them we’re journalists,” I said. “Tell them we’re here to interview Abu Tayyeb.”
Tahir translated what I said, and the gunman who had taken over at the wheel — a bearish, bearded figure — started laughing.
“Who is Abu Tayyeb? I don’t know any Abu Tayyeb,” he said.
By the time I met face to face later that day with Atiqullah, our kidnapper, I still did not know which Taliban faction had abducted us.
A large man with short dark hair protruding from the sides of his cap, he appeared self-assured and in clear command of his men. With Tahir translating, we explained that we had been invited to Logar province to interview Abu Tayyeb, the Taliban commander. Atiqullah remained unmoved. He controlled our fate now, he announced.
He produced one of our cellphones and announced that he wanted to call The New York Times’s office in Kabul. I gave him the number, and Atiqullah briefly spoke to one of the newspaper’s Afghan reporters. He eventually handed me the phone. Carlotta Gall, the paper’s Kabul bureau chief, was on the line. I said that we had been taken prisoner by the Taliban.
“What can we do?” Carlotta asked.
Atiqullah demanded the phone before I could answer, turned it off, removed the battery and announced that we would move that night for security. As we waited, I thought Carlotta would be calling my family and editors at any minute to inform them that I had been kidnapped.
I awoke before dawn to the sound of the guards performing a prayer with Tahir and Asad. We had been taken to a small dirt house and then spent the day trapped in a claustrophobic room with our three guards.
One introduced himself as “Qari”, an Arabic expression for someone who had memorised the Koran. He later said he was one of the “fedayeen”, an Arabic term the Taliban use for suicide bombers.
Food arrived at mealtimes, and no one was beaten. Yet Tahir grew increasingly worried. “These guys are really religious,” he whispered to me. “They’re praying a lot.”
Several hours after sunset, we were hustled into a station wagon.
“We have to move you for security reasons,” said Atiqullah, who was sitting in the driver’s seat, his face still concealed behind a scarf. Arab militants and a film crew from Al-Jazeera were on their way, he said.
“They’re going to chop off your heads,” he announced. “I’ve got to get you out of this area.”
As we drove away, I told Atiqullah we were worth more alive than dead. He asked me what I thought he could get for us. I hesitated, unsure of what to say. I was desperate to keep us alive.
I knew that in March 2007, the Afghan government exchanged five Taliban prisoners for an Italian journalist after the Taliban executed his driver. Later, they killed his translator as well. My memory of the exchange was vague, but I thought money was included. In August 2007, the South Korean government had reportedly paid $20m for the release of 21 Korean missionaries after the Taliban killed two members of the group.
“Money and prisoners,” I said. “How much money?” Atiqullah asked. I hesitated again. “Millions,” I said, immediately thinking I would regret the statement.
Atiqullah and one of his commanders looked at each other.
For the next four days, we lived with Qari, the suicide bomber, in another small dirt house. On one afternoon, he allowed us to sit outside in a small walled courtyard.
He even let Tahir play a game on a cellphone. But when Tahir asked for the phone a second time, Qari turned suddenly enraged, denouncing us as liars. He picked up his Kalashnikov, pointed it at Tahir’s chest and threatened to shoot him.
Tahir stared back, unmoved. Pashtunwali — an ancient code of honour practised by ethnic Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan — prevented each man from showing fear and losing face.
Asad and I stepped in front of Tahir. “Lutfan, lutfan,” I said, using a local expression for “please”. Qari lowered his weapon but motioned for Tahir to step into an outer room.
Through the wall, I heard Tahir begin praying in Arabic. I heard a thump and Tahir cried out, “Allah!” A second thump and “Allah!” Several minutes later, Tahir walked back into the room, crawled under a blanket and began moaning. Qari had beaten him on the back with his rifle. Qari unnerved me. Earnestly reciting hugely inaccurate propaganda about the West, he seemed utterly detached from reality. Other guards joked that he had mental problems.
In my mind, Qari and Atiqullah personified polar ends of the Taliban. Qari represented a paranoid, intractable force. Atiqullah embodied the more reasonable faction: people who would compromise on our release and, perhaps, even on peace in Afghanistan.
I did not know which one represented the majority. I wanted to believe that Atiqullah did. Yet each day I increasingly feared that Qari was the true Taliban.
The following day, Atiqullah arrived to move us again. During the ride, he said we would be taken to a place where I could receive bottled water and we could call our families. He promised to protect me.
“I will not kill you,” he said. “You will survive.”
The following evening, Atiqullah announced that we would have to walk through the mountains. On November 18, we arrived in Pakistan’s tribal areas, an isolated belt of Taliban-controlled territory. We were in “the Islamic emirate” — the fundamentalist state that existed in Afghanistan before the American-led invasion of 2001. The loss of thousands of Afghan, Pakistani and American lives and billions in American aid had merely moved it a few miles east, not eliminated it. This was arguably the worst place on earth to be an American hostage. The United States government had virtually no influence and was utterly despised.
We arrived in a large town, and I spotted a sign that said “Wana” in English. Wana is the capital of South Waziristan, the most radical area of the seven administrative districts that make up the tribal areas. We stopped in the main bazaar, and I was left alone in the car with the young driver. Outside the car, dozens of Pakistani tribesmen and Afghan and foreign militants milled around. Each carried a Kalashnikov rifle and had a long, thick beard.
A man with a large turban stopped, peered at me and asked the driver a question in Pashto. The driver looked at me and said a sentence that I thought included the word for martyr. I told myself that the driver had said I was on my way to heaven.
Atiqullah got back into the car, and I felt relief. He had kidnapped us, but more and more I desperately viewed him as my protector, the man who would continue to treat us well as other militants called for our heads.
Our first Pakistani home was in Miram Shah, the capital of North Waziristan. Two large sleeping rooms looked out on a small courtyard. One even had a small washroom, separate from the toilet, for showering.
On the first day there, I went to the bathroom and returned to find Tahir with a fresh cut on his calf. It looked as if someone had drawn a line across his leg in red ink. A Waziri militant had taken out his knife and tried to cut off a chunk of Tahir’s calf, saying he wanted to eat the flesh of an Afghan who worked with westerners. One of Atiqullah’s guards had stopped him.
All day, a parade of random Pakistani militants stopped by the house to stare at us. I felt like an animal in a zoo. Among them was a Taliban commander who introduced himself as Badruddin. He was the brother of Sirajuddin Haqqani, who led the Haqqani network, one of the most powerful Taliban factions in the region. Miram Shah was its stronghold. Their father was Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan mujaheddin leader whom the US and Pakistan backed in the 1980s when he battled the Soviets. In the 1990s, the US ended its relationship with the Haqqanis and many other hardline Afghan fighters. With Pakistan’s help, the Taliban movement emerged and the Haqqanis joined them.
Badruddin, a tall, talkative man who appeared to be in his early thirties, said he was preparing to make a video of us to release to the media. He smiled as he showed me a video on his camera of a French aid worker, Dany Egreteau, who had been kidnapped a week before us as he walked to his office in Kabul. He was in chains and appeared to have welts on his face. He implored his family and friends to save him.
“It’s a nightmare,” he said. “I really beg you to pay.”
I asked if Tahir and I could speak alone with Atiqullah, and I told him we should not make the video. The American and Afghan governments were more likely to agree to a secret prisoner exchange, I said, than a public one.
Trying to reduce their expectations, I told him it would be far easier to get prisoners from the main Afghan-run prison outside Kabul, known as Pul-e-Charkhi. If the Taliban demanded prisoners from the American-run detention centres at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Bagram, Afghanistan, they would never succeed.
I was not worth that much, I told him, and he should compromise. I did not say it, but I also wanted to spare my family the pain of seeing me in a video. To my surprise, Atiqullah agreed.
“I am one of those kinds of people,” he said at one point. “I am one of those people who like to meet in the middle.”
Tahir, Asad and I would be allowed to call our families that night to prove we were alive, said Atiqullah. Atiqullah told me to emphasise during the call that he wanted to reach a deal quickly.
I spent the rest of the day nervously scribbling a list of things I wanted to say to my wife, Kristen. I wanted to ease my family’s fears that I was being tortured, but I also wanted to do everything possible to free the three of us. I wasn’t sure I would have another chance to speak to her.
Late that night, Atiqullah and Badruddin drove us out of town. Atiqullah stopped the car in a dry riverbed and turned off the engine. He left the headlights on, and we used them to see the number pad on a satellite phone. I dialled my wife’s number.
“Hello?” she said. “Kristen?” I said. “Kristen?” “David,” she said, “it’s Kristen. I love you.” She sounded calm.
“Kristen?” I asked. “Yes?” she said.
“I love you, too,” I said. “Write these things down, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. She sounded remarkably composed. “I’m, we are, being treated well,” I said. “Being treated well,” Kristen repeated.
“No 1,” I said. “Uh-huh, No 1,” Kristen said.
“No 2,” I said. “Deal for all three of us, all three of us, not just me. The driver and the translator also; it has to be a deal for all three of us.” “Deal for all three of us,” she repeated.
“Do not use force to try to get us,” I said. “Do not use force,” Kristen repeated.
“Four,” I said. “Yes,” Kristen said.
“Make a deal now or they will make it public,” I said. “They want to put a video out to the media. It will make it a big political problem.”
Atiqullah told me to tell her that this was my last call.
“They said I can’t call you again,” I said. “They want a deal now and I can’t call you again.”
“You cannot call me again,” she repeated. “I love you. I love you, honey.” “I love you, too,” I said. “Tell my family I’m sorry.”
“Your family is here, Lee’s here with me,” she said, referring to my older brother. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m sorry.” “It’s going to be all right,” Kristen said calmly. “I love you. I am praying for you every day.”
Kristen said she wanted to make sure she understood what the Taliban wanted. “What is the deal?” she asked.
Atiqullah told me to tell her that he would call The New York Times’s Kabul bureau with demands. “We are very concerned about you,” Kristen said. “And we love you, and we’re praying for you.” The phone beeped and went dead. Kristen was gone.
Standing in the remote darkness of Waziristan at the mercy of Taliban militants, I felt at peace. I had spoken to my wife for the first time in nine days. Her words “It’s going to be all right” would linger in my mind for months. Her composure would sustain me.
We arrived at a new house, and I was again surprised by the good conditions. It had regular electricity, and we could wash ourselves with buckets of warm water. I received a new set of clothes, a toothbrush, toothpaste and shampoo. Guards allowed us to walk in a yard, and the weather was surprisingly warm. We received pomegranates and other fresh food and Nestlé Pure Life water bottled in Pakistan.
The tribal areas were more developed and the Taliban more sophisticated than I expected. They browsed the internet and listened to hourly news updates on Azadi Radio, a station run by the American government. But then they dismissed whatever information did not meet their preconceptions.
Atiqullah said he needed to return to Afghanistan, but two of his men stayed behind to guard us. “I will return in 7 to 10 days,” he promised, then disappeared.
That week, to help us pass the time, we received a shortwave radio and a board game called checkah, a Pakistani variation of Ludo. To my amazement, the guards even brought me English-language Pakistani newspapers. Instead of beating us as I expected, our captors were at least trying to meet some of our needs.
But as in so much of our seven months in captivity, reasons for optimism would be overtaken by harsh realities. For the next several nights, a stream of Haqqani commanders overflowing with hatred for the US and Israel visited us, unleashing blistering critiques.
Some of their comments were factual. They said large numbers of civilians had been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories in aerial bombings. Muslim prisoners had been abused and sexually humiliated in Iraq. Scores of men had been detained in Cuba and Afghanistan for up to seven years without charges.
To Americans, these episodes were aberrations. To my captors, they were proof that the US was a hypocritical power that flouted international law.
When I told them that I was an innocent civilian who should be released, they responded that the US had tortured Muslims in secret detention centres for years. Why should they treat me differently?
Other accusations were paranoid and delusional. Seven years after 9/11, they continued to insist that the attacks were hatched by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to create a pretext for the US to enslave the Muslim world. They said the US was forcibly converting vast numbers of Muslims to Christianity. American and Nato soldiers, they believed, were making Afghan women work as prostitutes.
Their hatred for the US seemed boundless.
Ten days passed, but Atiqullah did not return as promised. Badruddin now seemed to be in charge.
He moved us to a far smaller, dirtier house. The space we were allowed to walk in was the width of a pavement and ringed by high walls. The food was unclean and made me sick.
Alarmed by the worsening treatment, Tahir and I began a hunger strike in early December. At first, the guards panicked and begged us to eat. We refused.
After two days, the guards said Atiqullah had called and told them that a deal for our release was nearly complete. He said he was waiting for approval from President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. Fearing that our continued defiance would anger our captors and scuttle the deal, we began eating again.
Instead of releasing us, Badruddin moved us to yet another house. It was larger than the previous one but felt more like a prison. Twenty-foot-high concrete walls surrounded a small courtyard where I spent my days walking in circles. For the first time in my life, I began praying several times a day, and I found that it centred me.
We started preparing our own meals. The food was cleaner and fresher, but cooking for ourselves gave a worrying sense of permanence to our imprisonment.
Badruddin visited us several days later and promised that negotiations were continuing. But he was increasingly casual. Any sense of urgency about our release seemed to be fading. Before leaving, he told me the Taliban would not kill me.
“You are the golden hen,” he said, clearly expecting me to lay a golden egg.
Several days before Christmas, Atiqullah finally returned. He announced that he had spectacular news. “We are here to free you,” he said, wearing no scarf over his face for the first time.
At first, I was euphoric. My confidence in Atiqullah had not been misplaced. Here was a more moderate and reasonable Taliban leader who would persevere and release us.
Then, later that night, the conversation turned menacing.
The American military had mounted an operation to arrest Abu Tayyeb on the morning that we were to interview him, Atiqullah said, referring to the Taliban leader we had been travelling to meet when we were kidnapped. Shocked, I told Atiqullah I knew nothing about a military operation.
I had sent text messages from my cellphone to Saudi Arabia before the interview, Atiqullah claimed, to tip off the American military about Abu Tayyeb’s location. Again, I told him I had no idea what he was talking about.
Finally, he announced that I was a spy, along with other employees of The New York Times in Afghanistan. Our imprisonment, I thought, had reached a low point. Atiqullah’s talk of our imminent release seemed farcical.
The following morning, Atiqullah insisted that there was, in fact, a deal. At one point, he said we would be exchanged within “days”. He toyed with me, asking which flights I would take back to the US and how many television cameras would be at the airport. He asked me what I would say to my wife when I saw her.
By this point, I began to doubt everything he said. Then I learnt that he had lied to us from the beginning.
In conversations when our guards left the room, Tahir and Asad each separately whispered to me that Atiqullah was, in fact, Abu Tayyeb. They had known since the day we were kidnapped, they said, but dared not tell me. They asked me to stay silent as well. Abu Tayyeb had vowed to behead them if they revealed his true identity.
Abu Tayyeb had invited us to an interview, betrayed us and then pretended that he was a commander named Atiqullah.
I was despondent and left with only one certainty: we had no saviour among the Taliban.
Down a rope to freedom
On June 19, 2009, after more than seven months, David Rohde escaped the Taliban. As their captors slept, he and his translator Tahir scrambled down a rope that they found on the roof of the building where they were held and made their way to a Pakistani army base in Miram Shah. They left their driver Asad behind because they feared that he would betray their plan. Five weeks later, he returned home.
After his escape, Rohde learnt that a virtual news blackout meant his abduction had been kept out of the public eye, as part of the efforts to secure his release. Details of the efforts have not been made public. Although the relative ease of the getaway provoked speculation about covert deals, Rohde insists that American government officials paid no ransom and exchanged no prisoners. Pakistani and Afghan officials say the same.
However, Rohde has written that “security consultants who worked on our case said that cash was paid to Taliban members who said they knew our whereabouts”.
His captor, Abu Tayyeb, is now believed to be in Karachi, southern Pakistan.
Extracted from an article that first appeared in The New York Times
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