by Puk Damsgård
‘How has it been for all of you? How did they treat you?’ asked Diane afterwards.
The longing for just a tiny bit of information burned down the wire. They had been living in the dark for months.
‘James is better than he was in the beginning,’ said Daniel. He refrained from talking about the last two weeks, when the Beatles had been behaving violently and unpredictably. Instead, he told them about the Risk game and the chessboard and the Secret Santa scheme and how much strength their son had shown.
‘What do you think is going to happen, Daniel?’ asked Diane.
He took a deep breath and paused.
‘I don’t know, Diane. I don’t know any more than you do. It’s as if there’s a different plan for the British and the Americans.’
He told them about the video that had been recorded with James in which he had been forced to demand €100 million.
‘We’re groping in the dark. There’s no one who will help us,’ said Diane, referring to the US authorities. ‘Oh, Daniel, we’re so grateful – we know this is hard for you. You’re a huge help – we want you to know that.’
When he put the phone down after an hour and a half, he sat out on the lawn with Arthur, smoking cigarettes.
‘For Christ’s sake, Arthur, this is so damn sad,’ said Daniel. They just sat in silence a while.
‘I’m afraid you’re the last person that they’ll talk to who has seen their son alive,’ said Arthur.
Daniel went straight to bed and passed a restless night.
The barracks were intended to be a safe environment for four days, and there was a detailed plan in place that would help Daniel create a smooth transition to the life that awaited him outside the air base. He received the constant support of professionals who had experience of helping hostages return home.
One day he was taken to the hospital to be X-rayed and, in between appointments, he drove with his guardian to buy some more underwear. They went to H&M’s underwear department, which turned out to be for women only.
Daniel stared at the lingerie, the posters of half-naked women and the female customers, feeling like an eleven year old. He hadn’t seen an uncovered woman for more than a year and laughed at himself, telling his guardian that he could hardly remember what a pair of breasts looked like. He fled across the street to a hunting-and-fishing store, where he found a black balaclava and took a selfie with it on. He also bought an air rifle and got it wrapped up.
He often talked with Anita, who followed him closely in those early days. During their conversations, he asked frequently about Signe.
‘Isn’t Signe coming to Christina’s graduation party?’
‘Only if you two are still together, Daniel,’ said Anita elusively.
A few days later, when she said goodbye to him in the barracks’ car park, he was excited that Signe had said she would visit him.
Anita stared out of the window of the train from Aalborg to Odense. She finally had a moment to herself and the emotions overwhelmed her. In the middle of the train compartment, she burst into tears. Not so much over the suffering her brother had undergone in Syria, but over the pain he had to live through now. This time no one could make it easy for him. She could pick him up from kindergarten when he was little, raise money for his release and fill a toiletry bag with nice things, but she couldn’t mend his relationship with his girlfriend after such an ordeal.
· * ·
The wide pines encircled the lawn so that no one could see if Daniel ran around naked on the grass. The trees provided shade from the sun and a screen against the neighbours if you were sitting on the covered wooden terrace or on the sofa in the living room, which looked out over the garden through large, floor-to-ceiling windows.
Daniel loved being in the family’s summer house, which served as his second safe house in the weeks after his release.
He had found a picture on the Internet of the Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche, one of his guards, who had gone by the name of Abu Omar and who, by all accounts, was the perpetrator of an attack on the Jewish Museum in Belgium. Daniel had printed out a picture of Nemmouche’s face, which he had hung up in the garden. Together with Kjeld, he drank beer and used it as a target for his air rifle.
After a few days at the summer house, he went to collect Signe at the train station. He spotted her immediately when she stepped out on to the platform. She stood there with a large suitcase, dressed in pure white trainers, shorts and a tight blouse. She hadn’t changed a bit.
They embraced. Signe began to cry.
‘Well, what’s new?’ asked Daniel when they had arrived at the summer house and were sitting together in the shade on the terrace.
Signe told him about the chaotic night when she had waited for him at the airport and that she’d had a difficult time while he had been away. She had tried to be optimistic and to help where she could, and she had talked a lot with Kjeld and Susanne. But around Christmas time, when Daniel had been away for more than six months, she had tried to move forwards with her life. She had stopped doing gymnastics and had found peace in her new apartment. She finally felt that she had moved on.
Daniel couldn’t hold back the tears.
‘I can really understand,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been thinking about you so much.’
Signe had been his light in the darkness. His thoughts about her had kept him going. Suddenly it felt as if something inside him had become constricted and his sobs overwhelmed him. He wept and wept until there was nothing left but relief; relief that he knew what he had to deal with – and that Signe no longer had to worry about him.
They put Queen on the stereo and danced until they collapsed, exhausted, on the sofa, where they lay watching a dreadful film until her parents came to pick her up.
Daniel waved goodbye as Signe left in the car.
A week after Daniel had returned from Syria, he and the rest of the family stood waiting impatiently in the corridor at Rosborg High School. He was holding one long red rose and his little sister’s graduation cap.
She was behind the door, completing her very last exam in biology. In captivity Daniel had been so afraid that Christina would drop out of school.
The door finally opened and Christina came out to meet him in her sleeveless white dress, her curly hair hanging loose.
Daniel took his sister in his arms and cried on her shoulder as he hugged her so hard and for so long that his grip left marks on her arms.
Then he put the graduation cap on her head and toasted her with champagne for finishing high school, and for him being home to celebrate it with her.
Death in the Desert
Daniel dragged the bed from the small bedroom in the summer house into the living room, where the large windows let the sunlight flood in. Now and again, he went out on to the terrace and smoked a cigarette to soothe the restless quivering in his body. Otherwise, he spent most of his time in front of the computer, where he immersed himself in war documentaries such as Al-Qaeda in Yemen, Taxi to the Dark Side (about Afghan prisoners in US prisons) or Dirty Wars, about America’s secret wars. He was constantly looking for stories and films about the region in which he had been held captive.
Every evening before going to bed he checked the latest news about ISIS, which was now also going by the name, the so called Islamic State or IS.
In early July 2014 Daniel stumbled on a video circulating on the Internet in which IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared in public for the first time. Dressed in black robes and a turban, he went up the steps of the pulpit in the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul. The voluminous beard on his broad face had smatterings of grey. Young men in short-sleeved shirts stood facing Baghdadi and the black-and-white IS flag hanging on the mosque wall.
Before Friday prayers Baghdadi gave a speech about the Islamic caliphate, which now stretched across Syria from Aleppo to Raqqa, and from there eastwar
ds into northern Iraq through Mosul and to the north-eastern province of Diyala. Al-Baghdadi had been appointed the ‘Caliph’, the supreme leader of the caliphate, and appearing in public in the middle of Mosul was a sign of defiance to the outside world. The driver in Syria who had shown Daniel a graphic of the IS areas was right: they had taken control.
When Daniel finally fell asleep, he dreamed the same dream over and over again, in which he had been kidnapped and thrown into a dark room. And when he opened his eyes in the morning, his first thought was about how James and the others were getting on in the Quarry in Raqqa.
At that time he didn’t know that the hostages had been moved. It was only months later that it became public knowledge that, at around 2 a.m. on 4 July, US elite forces in Black Hawk helicopters had flown over the border to Raqqa to free the hostages. FBI agents had spoken to some of the released hostages to locate the site where they were being detained south-east of Raqqa.
According to an anonymous American Special Operations officer, who later spoke to The New Yorker, two armed drones had circled over the area in the middle of the desert while the operation was carried out. There was a gun battle and several IS fighters were killed, but there were no hostages in the building. The elite forces unit found traces of them, but it wasn’t surprising that the hostages had been moved sixteen days after the release of Daniel and Toni. It was a tactic the Beatles used deliberately. They knew that those who had been released would be questioned by their countries’ intelligence services. While Daniel had been in captivity the guards had twice faked moving the hostages, so that those freed would return home with incorrect information.
That failed mission was the first and only attempt to rescue James and his countrymen, Steven and Peter, together with their British fellow prisoners, John, David and Alan.
In the beginning Daniel was so restless that he took trips into town and began focusing on getting started with his photography again, but he soon had to admit that he couldn’t cope with too many impressions or experiences. Being with a lot of people who didn’t know his history made him feel drained. He felt that they were pointing at him and that he had to explain to them over and over again what he had been through.
‘How terrible,’ they said, looking at him as if he were sick.
For this reason, he usually stuck to smaller groups of people, where he didn’t need to explain himself, like when he and his old friends from boarding school sailed to an island for a few days where they could just hang out and drink beer.
He flinched when someone knocked on the door or slapped a hand against a table to emphasize a point during a conversation. He recoiled if a well-meaning person happened to take hold of his wrist or touch his ribs, or when his parents embraced him as if he were a child. They obviously tried to hold back, as they had been told to, so as not to go overboard with love and affection, but at times Susanne and Kjeld felt an almost morbid concern for their son.
When Daniel needed to talk, he called his psychologist, the one who had met him in Turkey. It was going to take a while for him to return to a normal life.
In early August, in an attempt to get back into the routines of daily life, Daniel took the train out to Hillerød to visit his old college, where he had learned photography. They had offered him a room and the opportunity to teach a photography course. He needed to be somewhere where it was once more only about photography.
While he sat on the train he read a news item: President Barack Obama had announced that the Americans were going to bomb IS in Iraq. After the capture of Mosul and the declaration of a united caliphate across the Iraq−Syria border, IS had moved forwards in a significant offensive in several places in Iraq and for a moment had even threatened Baghdad.
Daniel looked around. There was a mother with a crying child and a young couple who were holding hands. For them it was just a matter-of-fact news update, as it would have been for him no more than a year and a half earlier. But he knew that the president’s announcement about bombing Iraq could cost the lives of people he knew.
While he sat there on the train, somewhere between Copenhagen and Hillerød, he lost all hope for James and the other remaining hostages. Obama’s political decision was a death sentence. He grabbed his mobile and called Pierre.
‘Have you heard?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ replied Pierre.
They didn’t need to say anything else.
· * ·
The United States was drawn back to the war zone in Iraq less than three years after its forces had left the country at the end of 2011, following a lengthy campaign that began in 2003. The first bombings by American aircraft took place on 8 August 2014. Obama had prided himself on having ended the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now the Americans were back at the invitation of the Iraqi government and a failed army that needed help. The Kurds’ otherwise effective defences in northern Iraq had also been overrun several times. Moreover, Mosul, which IS had captured, wasn’t far from the Kurdish capital of Erbil.
The American military presence could also be interpreted as a tidying-up campaign following the recent war. The United States had itself played a role in creating the leader of the organization that they were now bombing, when Baghdadi had been held in their prison at Camp Bucca. Beyond that, the long-standing US policy failure regarding the Ba’ath Party and the Iraqi army had added fuel to the flames, which were fanned by the Shia Party’s exclusionary policy towards the country’s Sunni Muslims.
There were now several former Saddam supporters at the head of the IS leadership. At the same time the Sunni insurgency and the Shia rulers had both effectively marginalized anyone outside their own sect in the struggle for power that had pushed Iraq over the edge.
The Americans wanted to eliminate IS in Iraq, to which the Islamists responded promptly. IS was going to take revenge on President Obama and his policies in the Middle East.
· * ·
Arthur walked around restlessly, thinking about the wording of the next message to be sent. After a long silence, James’s family had finally received an email from the kidnappers. It was 12 August, just four days after US planes began bombing IS in Iraq.
On the basis of the email, Arthur judged that it had to have come from the same people who had previously written to the Foley family and to Daniel’s parents. The email contained a message to the US government and the family that they would kill James as a consequence of the bombs raining down on Iraq. It didn’t sound like either an attempt at extortion or an aggressive proposal for negotiations. It just sounded like a statement of fact, thought Arthur. Yet the family had to try to persuade the kidnappers to change their minds.
IS had succeeded in illustrating the difference between the European approach to hostage negotiations and the usual position of the United States and the United Kingdom, which was also why Arthur couldn’t do anything. In Daniel’s case, he had had a free hand to act without government interference.
In James’s case, the US authorities had been trying to bulldoze the investigation and had wasted valuable time looking for James in Damascus; and when there had finally been an opportunity in December 2013, the family had nothing to negotiate with, because they weren’t allowed to pay – or collect money for – a ransom.
Arthur feared the worst, in which case James would be the first hostage he had ever lost in his career.
· * ·
While in the United States they were battling for James’s life, Daniel was settling into his seat on a plane to Paris. He was going to meet Pierre. They wanted to drive around England and Scotland together for a month. It was going to be just the two of them – along with the shared experience that only they could fully understand. Daniel was also looking forward to seeing Pierre in the surroundings he had talked so much about during his captivity, rather than as a hostage with a grey blindfold hanging around his neck, waiting for a cell door to be flung open.
> At the airport Daniel came out into the arrival hall and immediately spotted Pierre, who was standing slightly back, behind the other people waiting. They gave each other a long hug.
He was the same as ever, in a thick black jacket, black jeans and leather shoes. His hair was shorter and he had shaved off his beard.
They drove to a house where some of Pierre’s anarchist friends lived and spent the night in the garage. The next day, they took the train to his parents’ house north-west of Paris, on the roaring river just outside the city of Rouen.
Pierre’s mother picked them up in a car with their dog Olaf, who always came for the ride. She drove them along narrow roads until they turned down a dirt track at the end of which stood Pierre’s childhood home. Olaf was jumping up around their legs as they made their way to Pierre’s father, who was waiting in the living room. Daniel could speak neither French nor Spanish, so Pierre translated during a dinner of delicious French food that his mother had prepared.
Pierre’s world was exactly as he had described it in prison. His father’s sculptures towered above Daniel’s head as he came into the workshop, where tools and gadgets were scattered between metal formations that looked like a mixture of animals and humans. There was an old boat and some rusty motorcycles that Pierre wanted to refurbish, and in the shed behind the house was Tonton the donkey.
‘I felt bad about leaving you all,’ Pierre told Daniel when the conversation turned to their captivity.
He still felt it was wrong to be bought out of the hands of the Islamists.
‘The worst thing is that I accepted it,’ said Pierre. ‘I wasn’t a human being any more, but an object that could be sold.’ After his return Pierre had agreed to illustrate a children’s book that he and their fellow former prisoner Nicolas Hénin were writing. It was about a daddy hedgehog who disappeared from his hedgehog family.