I was offended by the idea of young men who intentionally chose the path of insurgency asking for alms. It was an injustice. When, I wondered, would this practice end in communities like this? Morning Star had been working here for seven years. The insurgency hadn’t stopped. The Taliban influence continued.
I was too upset by these thoughts to continue my conversation with Rafiq. As we walked silently back to the community center, I glanced at the village schoolhouse that sat adjacent to the compound. In the previous three years insurgents had targeted both the school and the community center in attacks from neighboring mountains. On several occasions rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) had hit the community center, shattering windows. Once, a rocket hit the side of the water tower situated on top of the health clinic. I’d been told that the insurgents wanted the school shut down, citing the usual justifications that girls did not need to be educated and a few hours a week of schooling was enough for boys.
I returned to the clinic feeling discouraged, but I’d already dismissed thoughts of the men across the valley. I trusted that we were taking adequate precautions. A personal encounter with the Taliban was the last thing on my mind.
Later that morning the local police chief invited Rafiq, Farzad, the local doctor, and me to lunch. No matter how poor or remote the village, meals in Afghanistan are always an elaborate affair. This day was no exception. At the chief’s home we sat cross-legged on long cushions. On the floor in front of us lay a leather mat spread as a tablecloth. A young boy approached with a steel bowl. The bowl was placed in front of each person to catch water poured onto our outstretched hands. The routine continued until everyone seated had finished washing his hands. Given the ever-present dust in this country, the practice made perfect sense and added to the sense of hospitality that Afghans are famous for.
To my surprise, more young boys appeared, each walking in from the front door and carrying sumptuous servings: pilau rice, mutton and chicken, celery shoots, onions, and tomatoes. Everything was delicious.
Immediately after lunch our hosts served tea and pomegranates. As I cracked open and tasted my pomegranate, I realized that my skill in handling this fruit was lacking. My shirt was soon covered with red stains. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought I’d just emerged from a complicated surgery. The marks on my shirt looked exactly like blood.
Once we finished eating, we talked for a few more minutes, then climbed into the Hilux for the drive back to the community center. I understood very little Pashto, and not everything was translated for me, but I gathered that part of the conversation was about security. Only months later did I learn about some of the questions raised at this time: Should we wait for an escort before driving back? Should we wait for approval from the district police chief?
At the time, Rafiq did tell me that the village police chief said, “Why don’t you spend the night?” It was customary in Afghanistan to invite guests to stay for the next meal and then spend the night, so I didn’t place any extra meaning behind his request. I didn’t connect it to concerns over our safety. Rafiq and I politely turned down his invitation. The others decided it was safe for my colleagues and me to begin our journey back up the mountain road to Kabul.
At about two thirty we dropped off the chief and local doctor at the community center, said our good-byes, and headed out of the village. Rafiq drove faster than usual.
I still felt frustrated over my earlier conversation with Rafiq about the Taliban practice of intimidating the villagers and asking them to give up their precious resources. When talk in the pickup turned again to the insurgents, I said, “Man, if these guys want so badly to be involved in the community, maybe we should just give them the community center and let them handle it.”
I didn’t mean it. I knew that Taliban fundamentalism had taken what was a stable and prosperous nation in the 1960s and 70s back to medieval times. I certainly didn’t wish for the Taliban to control the people in the villages even more. I was simply angry at the situation.
Rafiq and Farzad were silent.
It was only a few minutes later that my anger at these unseen extremists turned to shock over confronting them in person. As men holding AK-47s forced me to march up the hill toward more armed insurgents, one question pounded in my mind like a sledgehammer. It was a question I was afraid to answer.
Am I about to die?
* Multiple Taliban groups claimed responsibility for the killings.
CHAPTER THREE
ANGUISH AND PEACE
3:50 P.M., WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5
MOUNTAIN RANGE EAST OF KABUL, AFGHANISTAN
MY HEART WAS HEAVY AS I TRIED TO KEEP MY BALANCE ON the steep and winding mountain trail. With my hands tied behind me, it wasn’t easy.
Rafiq, Farzad, and I, along with our four Taliban captors, had been hiking single file up the mountain for twenty minutes. The men I’d spotted above us when we began the hike had just joined us. Now we were outnumbered seven to three. Each kidnapper carried a Kalashnikov. Whenever my gait slowed too much for the liking of the captor behind me, I felt the barrel of his weapon nudge me in the back.
The weather did not match the desperation I felt. It was a sunny day, a comfortable fifty-plus degrees. The terrain, however, was desolate—dusty and rocky, the predominant colors gray and brown. I saw no trees, only a few green shamshoby shrubs attempting to add life to our sparse surroundings. The mountains loomed over us, stretching to the horizon in an uneven and endless pattern.
I noticed up ahead, to the left of our trail, a break in the bleakness around us—a pool of water, nearly three feet in diameter. Rafiq, in front of me, called out in Pashto, “Could we have a drink?”
The kidnapper who’d driven the commandeered Hilux, apparently the group’s leader, raised his hand. Everyone stopped. Our hands were untied—thankfully, they remained untied for the rest of our captivity.
A gunman motioned us toward the pool.
Rafiq and Farzad, along with some of our captors, cupped their hands in the cool water and drank. My medical background made me more cautious, however. I did not want to be hiking and dealing with diarrhea from an unwelcome parasite. I chose not to drink, a decision I would come to regret.
After another few minutes of hiking, we stopped again. This time the leader demanded that I hand over my backpack. He had a knife tucked into his waistband. I couldn’t see the blade, but from the size of the curved hilt, it must have been huge. Only later did I learn that this man had participated in multiple kidnappings and beheaded many of his captives. His nickname was the “Butcher.”
After rifling through my backpack during our initial confrontation, our captors had returned it to me for the hike. Now they wanted a closer look. My heart sank when the Butcher pulled out my passport. Though I had no need to bring it to the clinic, I’d forgotten to take it out before leaving Kabul that morning. My hopes of being mistaken for a traveler from India were gone. There was no hiding the prominent United States of America typed next to my photo.
The Butcher held out my passport to another captor, saying what must have been something like, “Look, American.” The man next to him examined the passport closely.
To my surprise, however, my captors seemed even more intrigued by a booklet of family pictures. Cilicia had put together a mini album of photos after a recent visit with my father and given it to me for the trip. Now the kidnappers looked closely at each image and through Rafiq’s translation asked me about them: “Is this your wife? Are these your children? Who is this man?”
Their intense interest could be at least partly explained by Afghan culture. Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in the country, comprising roughly 40 percent of its people.1 They are fiercely loyal to family and tribe. They think of themselves primarily not as Muslims or Afghans but as members and representatives of their extended families and the people who make up their tribe. In Afghanistan, to understand another’s family is to understand that person at the core.
The gunmen h
ad already taken my cell phone during their first search. Now, after also removing my passport, the Butcher returned the backpack to me. It was time to move on.
One of my original captors—the tall one who sat with the leader in the Hilux—had not joined in the latest examination of my backpack. As we walked, he pointed to Rafiq and asked me, “Is he the ferengi [foreigner]?”
Clearly these men had been looking specifically for me, the American. Someone had alerted them about our visit to the village.
“Nay, nay,” I said in answer to the question about Rafiq. “Jalalabad wallah [That guy’s from the Jalalabad area].”
If there had been any remaining confusion among the kidnappers about which of us didn’t belong here, it was erased now.
A half hour later, we reached a plateau at the highest peak in the area. From there we could see miles of hills and looked down into one brown valley after another.
I wasn’t enjoying the scenery, however. I strained to spy a compound or hut, anything that might signify the presence of human life. I was crestfallen when I realized there was nothing out there. We were alone in the middle of nowhere.
Is this it? Are they going to shoot us now and roll our bodies down this hill?
Our captors, instead, spread out a blanket, sat down, and produced a loaf of naan, the local bread. Apparently it was time for a snack break.
The Butcher motioned for Rafiq, Farzad, and me to sit also. He offered each of us a piece of naan. Since the three of us were still full from the feast at the police chief’s house, however, we all politely declined. As our kidnappers continued to talk, I wondered if they were deciding when and where to dispose of us.
Then it was time for namaz, or prayer. Two of our captors took off their headscarves and laid them on the ground. Then four of them dropped to their knees, all apparently facing Mecca, and began the Muslim ritual of bowing, chanting, and praying.
Anger surged through me. How can they pray to Allah when they are holding hostages at gunpoint just a few feet away? If Allah is merciful and just, as the Koran says, how is this action merciful and just?
Their passion for their spiritual beliefs was clear, but I struggled to see how it connected to a life-giving faith. It seemed to me that these men were more willing to take life than give it. They believed that killing others was their only path to salvation. I felt it was an example of traditionalism, a dead faith of the living, rather than tradition, a living faith passed on by one’s ancestors.
And yet my own faith and upbringing demanded that I not judge these men. I knew nothing about their backgrounds, nothing about the experiences that had led them to this point. As tempted as I was to give in to anger and even hate, I sensed in that moment that I needed to adopt a different attitude.
Can I do it? Can I show them compassion, even love, despite what I’m feeling right now? I wondered if I would even get the chance.
From my spot on the ground, just a few feet from the circle of kidnappers, I tried to speak as inconspicuously as possible to Rafiq: “Do you have any idea what they might be thinking?”
His whispered reply was so soft I could barely make it out: “No idea.” Then he offered some advice: “If they ask if you are a Christian, just tell them you’re a Hindu.”
I hadn’t even contemplated this potential dilemma yet. If asked, would I deny my faith, or would I stand up for my beliefs and perhaps be executed on the spot? Under the circumstances this didn’t seem the time to start a discussion about it. I whispered back, “Okay, okay.”
Once our captors finished their prayers, they talked among themselves a few more minutes. Then four of them marched down a side trail, leaving three Taliban with the three of us. I am not a violent person, nor am I trained in any kind of hand-to-hand combat, but for the briefest of moments I thought we might have a chance to surprise them and escape. Then I remembered they all had guns while we had nothing.
Two of the three remaining captors were part of the group that initially abducted us—the tall one, whom I began to think of as “the Hopeless guy” because of the forlorn expression that was always on his face, and the stocky, younger insurgent the others called Ahmed.
The new member of the group seemed to be in charge now. He had fairer skin than the rest and held his left arm out stiffly, as if it were frozen in place. They called this one Haqqani, apparently because he’d been trained in Pakistan. It also might have been because he was part of the Haqqani network, the insurgent group believed to be based in Pakistan near the Afghan border. Founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani, once an ally of the United States and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden, the network was tied to both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Its members were reportedly responsible for multiple kidnappings, assassination attempts, and some of the most audacious attacks in Afghanistan, including assaults on hotels, the 2008 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, a 2011 attack on the U.S. Embassy, and several attempted truck bombings.
Jalaluddin Haqqani was in fact the original link between the Taliban and what became al-Qaeda. Bin Laden joined Haqqani in 1984 to provide funds and engineering advice for his operations. They developed a close friendship. When bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988, he established his first training camp in the mountains of Afghanistan’s Khost province, on the border with Pakistan and Haqqani’s homeland. The Taliban then hosted bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps for years.
I did not want to think about how the Haqqani with us now might be connected to this dark history. With a frown, this Haqqani told us to get up. It was again time to walk.
Step after step after step. At least I was in decent shape. Back home I played an occasional set of tennis and often took afternoon walks along the trails near my workplace. Even so, I now struggled to keep up and often fell to the back of our procession—or nearly so, as Haqqani always brought up the rear. He continued to let me know when he felt my pace was too slow by a poke in the back with his AK-47.
I did have comfortable footwear—Faded Glory walking shoes I’d purchased at a Wal-Mart. Farzad, in tennis shoes, and Rafiq, in dress shoes, seemed to be keeping up fine. The Taliban were all fit and moved at a steady rate. Each wore American-style tennis shoes that reminded me of Converse.
No one spoke as the minutes and miles passed. It gave me a chance, for the first time, to gather my thoughts, really consider where I was and what was happening. Nothing focuses your thoughts quite like the expectation that you will be killed in the next few hours or even moments.
What, I wondered, had I truly accomplished in my life to this point? Had I had the kind of effect that would be remembered by anyone besides my family and a few friends? What kind of legacy would I leave behind, especially to my children?
I pictured my family’s faces: beautiful Cilicia, Asha, Jaron, Tobi, and little Eshaan. I’d spent enough time with each of my three eldest children to get to know them and their personalities. They would remember me, at least, if I died today. But Eshaan?
Unlike his brothers, Eshaan had been calm and quiet when he was born, more like his sister. There was something comforting about his demeanor right from the beginning. The name we chose for him had special meaning. In Arabic and Egyptian, Ishaan means “guidance and direction.” For me, it was a way to commemorate the work I did among Muslims in Afghanistan. Additionally, in Sanskrit Eshwar translates to “Almighty God.” I felt that in this combination of names, we were honoring the work that God would do in Eshaan’s life.
Now I wondered if I would miss it all.
Thinking about Eshaan pierced my soul in a way that nothing else could. I choked back a sob. Eshaan, you are so young. I’m so sorry that you may have to grow up without a father. I am so sorry.
That moment of lonely anguish was one of the lowest of my life. Strangely, however, it also became the moment when my attitude began to shift.
Yes, I have been kidnapped by the Taliban. Yes, I am marching deeper into a remote Afghan mountain range with a gun at my back, almost certain to die soon. But I do no
t want to die a victim.
It’s no one else’s doing that you’re here right now, I tell myself. You made this choice. You’ve always known about the risk. You do this work for a reason.
My father, a church historian, taught me a story in my youth that came to mind at this moment. In an ancient Babylonian kingdom three young Jewish refugees refused to bow down and worship a statue erected by the king. When the king threatened them with execution in a fiery furnace, they replied, “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”2 The king had the three tossed in the furnace, but after a few minutes all three emerged unharmed.
Wow! I think. That is a solid faith. They believed completely that God would be with them even in that furnace.
Well, the God of those three young men is walking with me right now too. These could be my last hours. I don’t want to regret how I handle this. If I am going to die here, I want to thank God through it all. I want to express my faith and gratitude in a way that will have a lasting, positive impact. Others may have reason to gripe, but I don’t. I have so much to be grateful for.
In my mind I begin to list the highlights of my life. Growing up in a family that taught me to reach out and help make life better for others. Moving to the States. Completing high school, college, and graduate school. Traveling to many countries and experiencing many different cultures. Joining Morning Star and having the opportunity to bring medical help and training to Afghans. Marrying Cilicia and beginning to raise my own family.
Kidnapped by the Taliban: A Story of Terror, Hope, and Rescue by SEAL Team Six Page 4