Bored with her life and fresh off a New Year’s Eve epiphany, a 24-year-old Canadian named Amanda Lindhout quits her job as a cocktail waitress and decides to become a journalist. To get famous fast, she’ll start in Afghanistan, landing in Kabul in May 2007. She moves on to Iraq in January 2008, and is held hostage for several hours in Sadr City before paying off her captors.
“Affirming that I have the world in the palm of my hand,” she has written in her journal. Amanda has no training and is using “TV Reporting for Dummies” as her manual. She gives an interview in which she says every other journalist in Baghdad, aside from herself, is too scared to leave the Green Zone. She’s so naive, she doesn’t realize her fellow reporters — “fancypants,” she called them — will see this boast online.
Her disdain and bravado make herpersona non grata among the press corps, many of whom are reporting from the Red Zone. She has to find somewhere else. She calls an ex-boyfriend, 36-year-old Nigel Brennan. He is Australian, a former photographer, and she asks him to come along to Somalia. Although he has a new girlfriend and no experience in war zones, he agrees; Amanda has enough confidence for them both.
No matter that there are no longer any international bases of operation in Somalia, or that Doctors Without Borders is just five years away from leaving, or that few journalists will venture in. For Amanda, this is a plus: “The truth was, I was glad for the lack of competition.”
On their third day in Somalia, Amanda and Nigel are kidnapped.
‘ALLAH WANTS A RANSOM’
Robert Draper, a journalist on assignment for National Geographic, remembers meeting “recklessly perky” Amanda Lindhout at the Shamo Hotel in Mogadishu in August 2008. She looks like Kate Middleton and asks Draper and his photographer, Pascal Maitre, where all the bombings are, because she wants to go there. Draper is horrified and that night sends an e-mail to his girlfriend. “She’s going to get herself or someone else killed,” he writes.
Later, Amanda would learn that her kidnappers had been watching the hotel, and that they’d initially planned to abduct the National Geographic crew. But after Draper and Maitre bulked up their security, the targets changed: Now it would be Amanda and Nigel, who would never know whether their fixer was in on it.
Saturday, Aug. 23, the two set out for “the Wild West of militia-controlled Somalia.” Even the bodyguards they’ve hired won’t go there, and when their fixer tells them they’ll need to drive a few miles alone, they go ahead. Nigel’s gut tells him to turn back, but he says nothing; Amanda admits her grievous naiveté. “It wasn’t like I could say, Well, last time I drove across the line where the Islamic militias battled the uniformed soldiers, here’s how we did it . . .”
Not a minute out from a checkpoint, there’s a blue Suzuki blocking their path, then 12 gunmen, the bulk of whom shove themselves into Amanda’s and Nigel’s SUV and drive them away. “Sister,” one says, “don’t worry. Nothing will happen to you.”
The first house is 45 minutes away. They put Nigel and Amanda in a room empty save for two mattresses. They announce themselves as jihadis, take what little money their captives have, then pull Amanda into another room, where one of them molests her. “This is wrong,” she tells him. “You are not a good Muslim.”
He pushes her down. “You think I need this?” he says. “I have two wives. You are ugly, a bad woman.” He orders her back to the room with Nigel.
The next day, a jihadi named Adan introduces himself as the commander and tells them they’ll be going home soon: “Allah has put it into my heart to ask for a ransom.” The price is $3 million for both.
Now they know — though they can’t yet admit it — that they are very likely going to die there. Nigel’s family is large and middle-class, all “mortgaged to the eyeballs” with about $25,000 in savings among them. Amanda’s parents are divorced, her father seriously ill and living on disability, her mother working for minimum wage. Governments refuse to pay ransom. None of this deters the jihadis: They are sure that the Canadians and Australians will find a way to pay.
THE CONVERSION
During their captivity, Nigel and Amanda are moved among so many houses that they begin to name them: The Electric House, Tacky House, Positive House, Beach House, Dark House.
In those first days, they chainsmoke and plot, agreeing that their best chance of survival is to convert. They tell their captors they want to become Muslim and are given Korans and a maddening, illogical tutelage: Yes, the jihadis agree, the Koran forbids Muslims taking money from other Muslims, but this is a special circumstance. Yes, they agree, a Muslim may not rape a Muslim woman, but this is a special circumstance. Yes, a Muslim may not kill another Muslim, but here there may be no choice.
Neither Nigel nor Amanda know what conversion means. Life immediately gets worse. Newly Muslim, they are now held in separate rooms. It is against the religion for an unmarried man and woman to share the same space. They are now to eat with their right hand and wipe with their left. They are to pray five times a day, and still they are beaten and starved. They cannot smoke.
They are told constantly that they might be sold to Al-Shabaab, the Somali offshoot of al Qaeda. Nigel curls up in the fetal position as he hears Amanda’s screams through the wall, her jihadi captors soon raping her nightly. During the day, Nigel and Amanda try to bond with their kidnappers, learning their names and asking their goals. One says he dreams of being a suicide bomber.
Nigel becomes obsessed with Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and beheaded by al Qaeda in January 2002. Amanda insists they stay positive, sometimes to Nigel’s great annoyance. They work out a system to communicate, stashing tiny notes in the disgusting bathroom, and once they realize that their barred windows are adjacent, they open their Korans and pretend to pray while quietly talking. Nigel is floored to learn that Amanda’s mother had, 11 years ago, joined a cult in Japan and been held hostage herself.
Amanda is careful about what she tells him, knowing he is powerless to help and mortified by that. They both know she is the stronger of the two. She does not speak of the rapes, but she does tell Nigel of one afternoon when their captors forced her to lie face-down on her bed, put an assault rifle to her head and played Russian roulette. “I can’t believe how quickly our circumstances have deteriorated,” he writes.
Forced to clean her contact lenses in fetid water, Amanda soon develops an infection, a fungus growing its way from her mouth to her cheek. Her toenails fall out. Nigel develops dysentery and begins bleeding. Their captors refuse to provide Amanda with sanitary napkins.
Finally, one day in November, packages arrive for both, their respective consulates having gotten supplies through: medicine, prescription eyeglasses and feminine products for Amanda, fresh underwear and, just as desperately needed, something to read other than the Koran: Hemingway for Nigel, Nelson Mandela’s memoir for Amanda. They are relieved and alarmed.
“The downside to receiving a package,” Amanda writes, “was that it made it clear to me that nobody — not our families, nor our governments, nor our captors — thought we’d be free anytime soon.”
One hundred nights in, Amanda is ripped from her bed and driven to the desert. She is made to kneel on the ground, her head yanked back by her thinning, shedding hair, a knife pressed to her throat.
Her captors fight loudly among themselves as she begs for her life and they throw her to the ground. “I sobbed in the dirt, sounding like an animal, like something wounded and incapable of speech.” They give her a phone and tell her to talk to her mother. One million dollars in one week, or Amanda dies.
GUN OF A MUSLIM
The next day it is decided: Nigel and Amanda will try to escape. He has noticed the loose bars on the bathroom window, and they decide they will shimmy their way out and make the 12-foot drop, then run and run and run. They make their escape within days, sneaking off to the bathroom mid-afternoon, hitting the ground, only one place to go.
They race toward a nearby mosque, screaming “Help me, I am Muslim!” in broken Somali. Everyone in their path turns away: With people this frantic, very bad men are soon behind, and by the time they reach the mosque, their most lethal captor awaits with his AK-47. They barge in, frantic, electric with fear.
The congregation freezes, and the lone woman present hugs Amanda, holding her tightly. A sympathetic worshipper hands Nigel an AK-47, telling him it is “the gun of the Muslim.” Nigel says he cannot kill anyone and gives it back.
An imam must be called, they say, to determine whether these two should live or die. Their captors pull them away, Nigel and Amanda clawing like animals. They are beaten savagely in public and placed in a new home. This one has rooms like coffins, three feet by seven, pitch black, prone to rats.
Now time disappears. Amanda is gang-raped and bleeds for a month. She is hogtied, gagged and beaten for days. She obtains a razor and contemplates suicide, and then she sees a bird in her window and opts for hope.
Neither has any idea what is going on behind the scenes; now they are no longer forced to make desperate calls to their families.
Both Nigel’s and Amanda’s families eventually decide to ignore their respective governments and hire a private security firm specializing in kidnapping and ransom, and though there are deep conflicts and resentments, they work together to get them out.
One of Nigel’s siblings flies to Somalia, risking jail for moving large sums of cash to terrorists, as well as her own life. One night, Nigel overhears Amanda on the phone, begging her mother to take the entire $500,000 that Nigel’s family has largely raised and using it to pay just for her.
He is devastated. “I don’t think I have ever felt so lonely and cheated in my life . . . I’m furious at myself for trusting her.” The bank account for their ransom, it turns out, is held in Australia, her mother unable to access it.
COMING HOME
On Nov. 25, 2009, Amanda and Nigel are freed in an off-road exchange. They are taken to Somalia’s most secure hotel, from which two French journalists had been kidnapped. The next day, they are driven right up to the door of their plane, which takes off immediately.
In 2011, Nigel publishes his memoir, “Price of a Life,” and otherwise returns to life as a private citizen. Today, Sept. 1, he will compete in London’s Clipper Round the World Yacht Race. “At the end of the day,” he said last week, “people are good.” He and Amanda no longer speak.
While in captivity, it’s reported that Amanda gave birth to a boy named Osama; she refuses to comment on that but has said she endured atrocities so unspeakable, she’ll never share them.
Her memoir, “A House in the Sky,” is out this week. She has since returned to Somalia on behalf of her organization, the Global Enrichment Foundation, which aims to improve the lives of Kenyan and Somali women.