The Disappeared of Iraq

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Hooded and lying on the floor of the car, Waddah had no idea where he was being taken. He thinks his captors drove for at least an hour before stopping. He was yanked out of the car and, still hooded and bound, taken into a house and dumped on the floor. He could dimly hear a conversation in another room but could not hear what was being said. After a few minutes, he was pulled up and practically dragged outside. This time he was pushed into what he thinks was the back of a van, which smelled of engine oil and urine. The second drive was shorter than the first, no more than 30 minutes. Again he was pulled out and taken into a house. The wait was longer--perhaps two hours--before he was dumped back into the van for another half-hour drive.

Why all the stops? The U.S. official says the first switch was probably a handoff to a second group, which would hold him and claim the ransom. "It's not unusual for more than one group to be involved," says the official. "As in any organized business, there's specialization. Some gangs do the snatching and then pass on their captive, for a fee, to another gang." The money changing hands at this stage may be no more than a few hundred dollars; the muffled conversation Waddah heard at the first house may have been a quick round of bargaining.

At the third house, Waddah was taken indoors, then down a flight of stairs and through a doorway and pushed roughly to the floor. He felt several kicks to his chest and thighs, followed by rapid- fire questions: What was his name? Where did he live? Where did he work? What was his family's phone number? "They said, 'The sooner you give us a phone number to call, the sooner we contact your family, negotiate a ransom and let you go,'" Waddah says. A common persuasion technique employed by kidnappers is to call the family of the victim and let them hear him screaming during torture. That usually gets the family's attention and makes them more likely to pay a ransom quickly. It upset the captors' plans, says the U.S. official, that Waddah's family didn't own a phone. "Kidnappers tend to be simpleminded people," the official says. "They have a fixed plan, and when something unexpected happens, they don't know how to deal with it."

Waddah's interrogation lasted hours, with long breaks during which his captors would leave the room. There were at least two of them at all times, but Waddah remembers several different voices. Toward the end of the interrogation, his hood was taken off, and he was able to see his captors for the first time. They were two bearded men, one of them armed. When he saw they were not masked, Waddah's heart sank. "If they were willing to show me their faces, it meant that they weren't afraid I would identify them. In other words, they meant to kill me eventually."