The Horror Before the Beheadings
ISIS Hostages Endured Torture and Dashed Hopes, Freed Cellmates Say
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/world/middleeast/horror-before-the-beheadings-what-isis-hostages-endured-in-syria.html?&_r=3
The hostages were taken out of their cell one by one.
In
a private room, their captors asked each of them three intimate
questions, a standard technique used to obtain proof that a prisoner is
still alive in a kidnapping negotiation.
James
Foley returned to the cell he shared with nearly two dozen other
Western hostages and collapsed in tears of joy. The questions his
kidnappers had asked were so personal (“Who cried at your brother’s
wedding?” “Who was the captain of your high school soccer team?”) that
he knew they were finally in touch with his family.
It was December 2013, and more than a year had passed since Mr. Foley vanished on a road in northern Syria.
Finally, his worried parents would know he was alive, he told his
fellow captives. His government, he believed, would soon negotiate his
release.
What
appeared to be a turning point was in fact the start of a downward
spiral for Mr. Foley, a 40-year-old journalist, that ended in August
when he was forced to his knees somewhere in the bald hills of Syria and beheaded as a camera rolled.
Graphic
The Fate of 23 Hostages in Syria
At least 23 foreign hostages from 12 countries have been
kidnapped by Syrian insurgents, sold or handed over to the Islamic
State, and held underground in a prison near the Syrian city of Raqqa.
His videotaped death was a very public end to a hidden ordeal.
The
story of what happened in the Islamic State’s underground network of
prisons in Syria is one of excruciating suffering. Mr. Foley and his
fellow hostages were routinely beaten and subjected to waterboarding.
For months, they were starved and threatened with execution by one group
of fighters, only to be handed off to another group that brought them
sweets and contemplated freeing them. The prisoners banded together,
playing games to pass the endless hours, but as conditions grew more
desperate, they turned on one another. Some, including Mr. Foley, sought
comfort in the faith of their captors, embracing Islam and taking
Muslim names.
Their
captivity coincided with the rise of the group that came to be known as
the Islamic State out of the chaos of the Syrian civil war. It did not
exist on the day Mr. Foley was abducted, but it slowly grew to become
the most powerful and feared rebel movement in the region. By the second
year of Mr. Foley’s imprisonment, the group had amassed close to two
dozen hostages and devised a strategy to trade them for cash.
It
was at that point that the hostages’ journeys, which had been largely
similar up to then, diverged based on actions taken thousands of miles
away: in Washington and Paris, in Madrid, Rome and beyond. Mr. Foley was
one of at least 23 Western hostages from 12 countries, a majority of
them citizens of European nations whose governments have a history of paying ransoms.
Their
struggle for survival, which is being told now for the first time, was
pieced together through interviews with five former hostages, locals who
witnessed their treatment, relatives and colleagues of the captives,
and a tight circle of advisers who made trips to the region to try to
win their release. Crucial details were confirmed by a former member of
the Islamic State, also known as ISIS,
who was initially stationed in the prison where Mr. Foley was held, and
who provided previously unknown details of his captivity.
The
ordeal has remained largely secret because the militants warned the
hostages’ families not to go to the news media, threatening to kill
their loved ones if they did. The New York Times is naming only those
already identified publicly by the Islamic State, which began naming
them in August.
Officials in the United States say they did everything in their power to save Mr. Foley and the others, including carrying out a failed rescue operation.
They argue that the United States’ policy of not paying ransoms saves
Americans’ lives in the long run by making them less attractive targets.
Inside
their concrete box, the hostages did not know what their families or
governments were doing on their behalf. They slowly pieced it together
using the only information they had: their interactions with their
guards and with one another. Mostly they suffered, waiting for any sign
that they might escape with their lives.
The Grab
It was only a 40-minute drive to the Turkish border, but Mr. Foley decided to make one last stop.
In Binesh, Syria, two years ago, Mr. Foley and his traveling companion, the British photojournalist John Cantlie,
pulled into an Internet cafe to file their work. The two were no
strangers to the perils of reporting in Syria. Only a few months
earlier, Mr. Cantlie had been kidnapped a few dozen miles from Binesh.
He had tried to escape,
barefoot and handcuffed, running for his life as bullets kicked up the
dirt, only to be caught again. He was released a week later after
moderate rebels intervened.
They were uploading their images when a man walked in.
“He
had a big beard,” said Mustafa Ali, their Syrian translator, who was
with them and recounted their final hours together. “He didn’t smile or
say anything. And he looked at us with evil eyes.”
The
man “went to the computer and sat for one minute only, and then left
directly,” Mr. Ali said. “He wasn’t Syrian. He looked like he was from
the Gulf.”
Mr.
Foley, an American freelance journalist filing for GlobalPost and
Agence France-Presse, and Mr. Cantlie, a photographer for British
newspapers, continued transmitting their footage, according to Mr. Ali,
whose account was confirmed by emails the journalists sent from the cafe
to a colleague waiting for them in Turkey.
More than an hour later, they flagged a taxi for the 25-mile drive to Turkey. They never reached the border.
The
gunmen who sped up behind their taxi did not call themselves the
Islamic State because the group did not yet exist on Nov. 22, 2012, the
day the two men were grabbed.
But
the danger of Islamic extremism was already palpable in Syria’s
rebel-held territories, and some news organizations were starting to
pull back. Among the red flags was the growing number of foreign
fighters flooding into Syria,
dreaming of establishing a “caliphate.” These jihadists, many of them
veterans of Al Qaeda’s branch in Iraq, looked and behaved differently
from the moderate rebels. They wore their beards long. And they spoke
with foreign accents, coming from the Persian Gulf, North Africa, Europe
and beyond.
A
van sped up on the left side of the taxi and cut it off. Masked
fighters jumped out. They screamed in foreign-accented Arabic, telling
the journalists to lie on the pavement. They handcuffed them and threw
them into the van.
They left Mr. Ali on the side of the road. “If you follow us, we’ll kill you,” they told him.
Over
the next 14 months, at least 23 foreigners, most of them freelance
journalists and aid workers, would fall into a similar trap. The
attackers identified the locals whom journalists hired to help them,
like Mr. Ali and Yosef Abobaker, a Syrian translator. It was Mr.
Abobaker who drove Steven J. Sotloff, an American freelance journalist, into Syria on Aug. 4, 2013.
“We
were driving for only 20 minutes when I saw three cars stopped on the
road ahead,” he said. “They must have had a spy on the border that saw
my car and told them I was coming.”
The
kidnappings, which were carried out by different groups of fighters
jousting for influence and territory in Syria, became more frequent. In
June 2013, four French journalists were abducted. In September, the
militants grabbed three Spanish journalists.
Checkpoints
became human nets, and last October, insurgents waited at one for Peter
Kassig, 25, an emergency medical technician from Indianapolis who was
delivering medical supplies. In December, Alan Henning, a British taxi
driver, disappeared at another. Mr. Henning had cashed in his savings to
buy a used ambulance, hoping to join an aid caravan to Syria. He was
kidnapped 30 minutes after crossing into the country.
The
last to vanish were five aid workers from Doctors Without Borders, who
were plucked in January from the field hospital in rural Syria where
they had been working.
The Interrogation
At
gunpoint, Mr. Sotloff and Mr. Abobaker were driven to a textile factory
in a village outside Aleppo, Syria, where they were placed in separate
cells. Mr. Abobaker, who was freed two weeks later, heard their captors
take Mr. Sotloff into an adjoining room. Then he heard the
Arabic-speaking interrogator say in English: “Password.”
It
was a process to be repeated with several other hostages. The
kidnappers seized their laptops, cellphones and cameras and demanded the
passwords to their accounts. They scanned their Facebook timelines,
their Skype chats, their image archives and their emails, looking for
evidence of collusion with Western spy agencies and militaries.
“They
took me to a building that was specifically for the interrogation,”
said Marcin Suder, a 37-year-old Polish photojournalist kidnapped in
July 2013 in Saraqib, Syria, where the jihadists were known to be
operating. He was passed among several groups before managing to escape
four months later.
“They
checked my camera,” Mr. Suder said. “They checked my tablet. Then they
undressed me completely. I was naked. They looked to see if there was a
GPS chip under my skin or in my clothes. Then they started beating me.
They Googled ‘Marcin Suder and C.I.A.,’ ‘Marcin Suder and K.G.B.’ They
accused me of being a spy.”
Mr. Suder — who was never told the name of the group holding him, and who never met the other hostages because he escaped before they were transferred to the same location — remarked on the typically English vocabulary his interrogators had used.
During
one session, they kept telling him he had been “naughty” — a word that
hostages who were held with Mr. Foley also recalled their guards’ using
during the most brutal torture.
It
was in the course of these interrogations that the jihadists found
images of American military personnel on Mr. Foley’s laptop, taken
during his assignments in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“In
the archive of photographs he had personally taken, there were images
glorifying the American crusaders,” they wrote in an article published
after Mr. Foley’s death. “Alas for James, this archive was with him at
the time of his arrest.”
A
British hostage, David Cawthorne Haines, was forced to acknowledge his
military background: It was listed on his LinkedIn profile.
The
militants also discovered that Mr. Kassig, the aid worker from Indiana,
was a former Army Ranger and a veteran of the Iraq war. Both facts are
easy to find online, because CNN featured Mr. Kassig’s humanitarian work prominently before his capture.
The punishment for any perceived offense was torture.
“You
could see the scars on his ankles,” Jejoen Bontinck, 19, of Belgium, a
teenage convert to Islam who spent three weeks in the summer of 2013 in
the same cell as Mr. Foley, said of him. “He told me how they had
chained his feet to a bar and then hung the bar so that he was upside
down from the ceiling. Then they left him there.”
Mr.
Bontinck, who was released late last year, spoke about his experiences
for the first time for this article in his hometown, Antwerp, where he
is one of 46 Belgian youths on trial on charges of belonging to a
terrorist organization.
At
first, the abuse did not appear to have a larger purpose. Nor did the
jihadists seem to have a plan for their growing number of hostages.
Mr.
Bontinck said Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie had first been held by the
Nusra Front, a Qaeda affiliate. Their guards, an English-speaking trio
whom they nicknamed “the Beatles,” seemed to take pleasure in
brutalizing them.
Later, they were handed over to a group called the Mujahedeen Shura Council, led by French speakers.
Mr.
Foley and Mr. Cantlie were moved at least three times before being
transferred to a prison underneath the Children’s Hospital of Aleppo.
It was in this building that Mr. Bontinck, then only 18, met Mr. Foley. At first, Mr. Bontinck was a fighter, one of thousands of young Europeans
drawn to the promise of jihad. He later ran afoul of the group when he
received a text message from his worried father back in Belgium and his
commander accused him of being a spy.
The
militants dragged him into a basement room with pale brown walls.
Inside were two very thin, bearded foreigners: Mr. Foley and Mr.
Cantlie.
For the next three weeks, when the call to prayer sounded, all three stood.
An American Named Hamza
Mr.
Foley converted to Islam soon after his capture and adopted the name
Abu Hamza, Mr. Bontinck said. (His conversion was confirmed by three
other recently released hostages, as well as by his former employer.)
“I
recited the Quran with him,” Mr. Bontinck said. “Most people would say,
‘Let’s convert so that we can get better treatment.’ But in his case, I
think it was sincere.”
Former
hostages said that a majority of the Western prisoners had converted
during their difficult captivity. Among them was Mr. Kassig, who adopted
the name Abdul-Rahman, according to his family, who learned of his
conversion in a letter smuggled out of the prison.
Only
a handful of the hostages stayed true to their own faiths, including
Mr. Sotloff, then 30, a practicing Jew. On Yom Kippur, he told his
guards he was not feeling well and refused his food so he could secretly
observe the traditional fast, a witness said.
Those
recently released said that most of the foreigners had converted under
duress, but that Mr. Foley had been captivated by Islam. When the guards
brought an English version of the Quran, those who were just pretending
to be Muslims paged through it, one former hostage said. Mr. Foley
spent hours engrossed in the text.
His
first set of guards, from the Nusra Front, viewed his professed Islamic
faith with suspicion. But the second group holding him seemed moved by
it. For an extended period, the abuse stopped. Unlike the Syrian
prisoners, who were chained to radiators, Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie were
able to move freely inside their cell.
Mr.
Bontinck had a chance to ask the prison’s emir, a Dutch citizen,
whether the militants had asked for a ransom for the foreigners. He said
they had not.
“He
explained there was a Plan A and a Plan B,” Mr. Bontinck said. The
journalists would be put under house arrest, or they would be
conscripted into a jihadist training camp. Both possibilities suggested
that the group was planning to release them.
One day, their guards brought them a gift of chocolates.
When
Mr. Bontinck was released, he jotted down the phone number of Mr.
Foley’s parents and promised to call them. They made plans to meet
again.
He left thinking that the journalists, like him, would soon be freed.
A Terrorist State
The
Syrian civil war, previously dominated by secular rebels and a handful
of rival jihadist groups, was shifting decisively, and the new extremist
group had taken a dominant position. Sometime last year, the battalion in the Aleppo hospital pledged allegiance to what was then called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Other factions of fighters joined forces with the group, whose tactics were so extreme that even Al Qaeda expelled it from its terror network. Its ambitions went far beyond toppling Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president.
Late
last year, the jihadists began pooling their prisoners, bringing them
to the same location underneath the hospital. By January, there were at
least 19 men in one 20-square-meter cell (about 215 square feet) and
four women in an adjoining one. All but one of them were European or
North American. The relative freedom that Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie had
enjoyed came to an abrupt end. Each prisoner was now handcuffed to
another.
More
worrying was the fact that their French-speaking guards were replaced
by English-speaking ones. Mr. Foley recognized them with dread.
They
were the ones who had called him “naughty” during the worst torture.
They were the ones the hostages called the Beatles. They instituted a
strict security protocol.
When
they approached the cell holding Mr. Suder, the Polish photojournalist,
they called out “arba’een”: Arabic for the number 40.
That
was his cue to face the wall so that when the guards entered, he would
not see their faces. Several hostages were given numbers in Arabic,
which appeared to be an effort to catalog them — not unlike the numbers
American forces had assigned to prisoners in the detention facilities
they ran in Iraq, including Camp Bucca, where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the
leader of the Islamic State, was briefly held.
“When
the Beatles took over, they wanted to bring a certain level of order to
the hostages,” said one recently freed European captive.
The jihadists had gone from obscurity to running what they called a state.
In areas under their control, they established an intricate bureaucracy, including a tribunal, a police force and even a consumer protection office, which forced kebab stands to close for selling low-quality products.
That focus on order extended to the hostages.
After
months of holding them without making any demands, the jihadists
suddenly devised a plan to ransom them. Starting last November, each
prisoner was told to hand over the email address of a relative. Mr.
Foley gave the address of his younger brother.
The group sent a blitz of messages to the families of the hostages.
Those who were able to lay the emails side by side could see they had been cut and pasted from the same template.
Triage
By December, the militants had exchanged several emails with Mr. Foley’s family, as well as with the families of other hostages.
After
the first proof-of-life questions, Mr. Foley was hopeful that he would
be home soon. As his second Christmas away from home approached, he
threw himself into organizing a jailhouse version of Secret Santa, a
tradition in the Foley household.
Each
prisoner gave another a gift fashioned out of trash. Mr. Foley’s Secret
Santa gave him a circle made from the wax of a discarded candle to
cushion his forehead when he bowed down to pray on the hard floor.
As
the weeks passed, Mr. Foley noticed that his European cellmates were
invited outside again and again to answer questions. He was not. Nor
were the other Americans, or the Britons.
Soon,
the prisoners realized that their kidnappers had identified which
nations were most likely to pay ransoms, said a former hostage, one of
five who spoke about their imprisonment in the Islamic State’s network
of jails on the condition that their names be withheld.
“The
kidnappers knew which countries would be the most amenable to their
demands, and they created an order based on the ease with which they
thought they could negotiate,” one said. “They started with the
Spanish.”
One
day, the guards came in and pointed to the three Spanish captives. They
said they knew the Spanish government had paid six million euros for a
group of aid workers kidnapped by a Qaeda cell in Mauritania, a figure
available online in articles about the episode.
As
the negotiations for the Spanish prisoners progressed rapidly — the
first was released this March, six months after he had been captured —
the militants moved on to the four French journalists.
The
European prisoners went from answering additional personal questions to
filming videos to be sent to their families or governments. The videos
became more and more charged, eventually including death threats and
execution deadlines in an effort to force their nations to pay.
At one point, their jailers arrived with a collection of orange jumpsuits.
In
a video, they lined up the French hostages in their brightly colored
uniforms, mimicking those worn by prisoners at the United States’
facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
They
also began waterboarding a select few, just as C.I.A. interrogators had
treated Muslim prisoners at so-called black sites during the George W.
Bush administration, former hostages and witnesses said.
With
time, the 23 prisoners were divided into two groups. The three American
men and the three British hostages were singled out for the worst
abuse, both because of the militants’ grievances against their countries
and because their governments would not negotiate, according to several
people with intimate knowledge of the events.
“It’s
part of the DNA of this group to hate America,” one said. “But they
also realized that the United States and Britain were the least likely
to pay.”
Within
this subset, the person who suffered the cruelest treatment, the former
hostages said, was Mr. Foley. In addition to receiving prolonged
beatings, he underwent mock executions and was repeatedly waterboarded.
Meant
to simulate drowning, the procedure can cause the victim to pass out.
When one of the prisoners was hauled out, the others were relieved if he
came back bloodied.
“It was when there was no blood,” a former cellmate said, “that we knew he had suffered something even worse.”
As the negotiations dragged on, conditions became increasingly grim.
During one extended stretch, the hostages received the equivalent of a teacup of food per day.
They
spent weeks in darkness. In one basement, their only illumination was
the finger of sunlight that stretched under their locked door. After
dusk, they could not see anything, spilling food on themselves until
their guards eventually gave them a flashlight.
Most
of the locations had no mattresses and few blankets. Some of the
prisoners took discarded pants, tied one end and filled the trouser legs
with rags to create makeshift pillows.
The prisoners turned on one another. Fights broke out.
Mr. Foley shared his meager rations. In the cold of the Syrian winter, he offered another prisoner his only blanket.
He
kept the others entertained, proposing games and activities like Risk, a
board game that involves moving imaginary armies across a map: another
favorite pastime in the Foley family. The hostages made a chess set out
of discarded paper. They re-enacted movies, retelling them scene by
scene. And they arranged for members of the group to give lectures on
topics they knew well.
Execution Deadlines
This
spring, the hostages were moved from below the hospital in Aleppo to
Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate. They
were incarcerated in a building outside an oil installation, where they
were again divided by sex.
By March, the militants had concluded the negotiations for the three Spanish journalists.
When
the first deliveries of cash arrived, the guards discovered that some
of the bills were damaged. They complained to the remaining hostages
that their governments did not even have the decency to send crisp
notes.
By
April, nearly half of the captives had been freed. There had been no
progress, however, on the ransom demands the jihadists had made for
their American and British hostages.
During
the triage phase, the guards identified the single Russian hostage, a
man known to the others as Sergey, as the least marketable commodity.
Identified
in the Russian news media as Sergey Gorbunov, he was last seen in a
video released in October 2013. Stuttering, he said that if Moscow
failed to meet the kidnappers’ demands, he would be killed.
Sometime this spring, the masked men came for him.
They
dragged the terrified prisoner outside and shot him. They filmed his
body. Then they returned to show the footage to the surviving hostages.
“This,” they said, “is what will happen to you if your government doesn’t pay.”
Goodbyes
Mr. Foley watched as his cellmates were released in roughly two-week increments.
As
the number of people in the 20-square-meter cell in Raqqa grew smaller,
it was hard to stay hopeful. Yet Mr. Foley, who had campaigned for
President Obama, continued to believe his government would come to his
rescue, said his family, who learned this from recently freed hostages.
On May 27, the few remaining hostages were reminded that different passports spelled different fates.
Those
who had been taken together were, in most cases, released together. Not
so for the Italian and British aid workers for the Agency for Technical
Cooperation and Development, a small French organization, who were
grabbed less than a mile from the Turkish border after returning from a
refugee camp where they had gone to deliver tents.
In
late May, the Italian, Federico Motka, was told he could go, according
to a fellow captive, allegedly after Italy paid a ransom. (The Italian
government denied the claim.) But his co-worker, Mr. Haines, was left
chained inside. Mr. Haines was beheaded in September after being forced
to read a script blaming the British government for his death.
By
June, the cellblock that had once held at least 23 people had been
reduced to just seven. Four of them were Americans, and three were
British — all citizens of countries whose governments had refused to pay
ransoms.
In an article recently published in an official Islamic State magazine, the jihadists described the American-led airstrikes that began in August as the nail in those hostages’ coffins.
At the same time, they laid out the role European and American ransom policies had played in their decision to kill Mr. Foley.
“As
the American government was dragging its feet, reluctant to save
James’s life,” they wrote in the magazine, Dabiq, “negotiations were
made by the governments of a number of European prisoners, which
resulted in the release of a dozen of their prisoners after the demands
of the Islamic State were met.”
Fifteen
hostages were freed from March to June for ransoms averaging more than
two million euros, the former captives and those close to them said.
Among
the last to go was a Danish photojournalist, Daniel Rye Ottosen, 25,
released in June after his family cobbled together a multimillion-euro
ransom, three people briefed on the negotiation said. He was one of
several departing hostages who managed to smuggle out letters from his
cellmates.
“I am obviously pretty scared to die,” Mr. Kassig wrote in a letter recently published by his family. “The hardest part is not knowing — hoping, and wondering if I should even hope at all.”
Mr.
Foley seemed to sense the end was near. In his letter, amid expressions
of love, he slipped in a sentence instructing his family on how to
disburse the money in his bank account.
In
August, when the militants came for him, they made him slip on a pair
of plastic sandals. They drove him to a bare hill outside Raqqa. They
made him kneel. He looked straight into the camera, his expression
defiant. Then they slit his throat.
Two weeks later, a similar video surfaced on YouTube showing Mr. Sotloff’s death. In September, the militants uploaded Mr. Haines’s execution. In October, they killed Mr. Henning.
Only three from the original group of 23 remain: two Americans, Mr.
Kassig and a woman who has not been identified, as well as a Briton, Mr.
Cantlie.
The militants have announced they will kill Mr. Kassig next.
Across
Europe, those who had survived gasped when they saw the footage of
their cellmate’s death: The cheap, beige-colored plastic flip-flops
splayed next to Mr. Foley’s body were the same pair the prisoners had
shared.
They had all worn those sandals to the bathroom.
Those who survived had walked in the same shoes as those who did not.
Correction: October 25, 2014
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misspelled the given name of a British aid worker who was beheaded. He is David Cawthorne Haines, not Davis Cawthorne Haines.
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