Hostage struggled with desire to escape,
yet remain nonviolent during ordeal

Robert Rhodes
Mennonite Weekly Review

Forwarded by Nancy Hawkins

Practically from the start, Jim Loney wanted to escape, even if he had to use force and ask God’s forgiveness later.

“I don’t know what the right or wrong answer is,” Loney said in an April 25 interview from his home in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. “But I felt increasingly that we weren’t going to get out alive unless we took matters into our own hands.”

Chained and handcuffed in a 10-by-10-foot room with three other Christian Peacemaker Teams activists, Loney, 41, said he became almost preoccupied with plans for eluding his captors — Sunni Muslim militants who had seized the group on a Baghdad street Nov. 26.

Loney was freed March 23 in a British-led military raid after 118 days in captivity with fellow Canadian Harmeet Singh Sooden, 33, and British citizen Norman Kember, 74.  American Tom Fox, 54, was found shot to death in Baghdad on March 9.

Loney — a Roman Catholic who helped found Toronto’s Catholic Worker community — said the first chance to escape came on the fourth day of their ordeal, about the time their kidnapping was made public and the first video showing the four appeared on Aljazeera.

The CPTers had been left handcuffed individually, their hands in front of them, with only two guards in the upscale Baghdad house where they were being held. One of the guards was in a narrow courtyard, where he was busy drawing kerosene from a tank. The other was in the courtyard door, with his back turned. 

Loney thought if he could shove the guard out, then bolt the door, he and the others might have enough time to make a run for it. 

“I was debating, ‘Should I do it?’ ” Loney said in his first interview since being rescued. “But I was worried about the lock not sliding shut.” 

Unsure of his options, Loney let the opportunity pass, and soon was glad he did. When the guards came back, they only secured the sticky lock after considerable effort.

“Escape was, for me, one of the most difficult internal struggles I had,” Loney said. “I thought about escape really from the very beginning.”

During the long days the four spent bound to one another in a row of chairs, with only occasional bathroom or exercise breaks, Loney memorized his surroundings and the guards’ movements.

A recurring obstacle, however, was his commitment to nonviolence. Loney couldn’t imagine many escape scenarios where at least some use of force was not involved.

Still, as their captivity dragged on, Loney continued to ponder how he might incapacitate the kidnappers.

“I was prepared to use some force to get us out, and my limit was avoiding any permanent physical harm,” he said. “I felt like it would be wrong in a sense, but I was willing to live with this and to ask God’s forgiveness.”

Loney is still troubled by the dilemma. He wondered: “Can even a small amount of force be justified? When does the use of physical force become violence?”

Even the thought of using limited physical force affected his relationship to the captors.

“I didn’t like what it was doing to me,” Loney said. “I would look at them and be thinking, ‘This is how I could incapacitate them,’ and then I would think of Jesus’ call to love your enemy and it just seemed really incongruous. These thoughts interfered with my ability to love them, something which was already hard enough to do.”

* * *

There were four of them — three guards who rotated duty and another who was in charge, but who seemed to take orders from unseen superiors. They called themselves the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. None of them spoke English fluently, and none of the CPTers was adept in Arabic.

The hostages called their guards Uncle, Nephew and Junior. The leader, who brought Kember pills for his high blood pressure, was Medicine Man.

Loney said the kidnappers, who were well-armed and said they had been soldiers in Saddam Hussein’s army, were relatively kind to them. They also were liars.

From the start, their captors told the CPTers they would be released quickly.

“We were strung along on a big string,” Loney said. “They said, ‘We will release you soon to show we are not like Al Qaeda.’ ”

Sometimes, their captors would drop hints that negotiations were under way for their release. Then they would say the four would be freed as a goodwill gesture during the Iraqi elections. Then during Christmas. Then during New Year’s.

“It kept up the hope of being released,” Loney said. “That hope made us more cooperative, but it was clear after awhile that they were lying to us.”

Occasionally, the kidnappers themselves seemed to grow restless as the days and weeks passed.

“Medicine Man seemed frustrated at the length of time we were held,” Loney said. “They said to us that they were prisoners as well. They were probably nearly as bored as we were.”

Sequestered without books or newspapers, “we had a 118-day fast from the written word,” Loney said. “We started to have a daily worship service, and we would take a turn leading that.”

Though they lacked a Bible, the four had a daily Bible study, based on passages retrieved from memory.

“We would take turns, recalling as best we could a Scripture passage,” Loney said.

Occasionally, the discussions grew heated. Other times, they were more contemplative.

Fox, a Quaker, “introduced a kind of Quaker process where you asked, ‘What does this passage mean to me?’ . . . We would just sort of chew on that together. It was a good way to support each other.”

Though they were militant Muslims, their captors didn’t seem to mind such spiritual activities. Because of the language barrier, “I don’t know if they really knew what we were doing,” Loney said.

The kidnappers appeared to be observant Muslims, though with a narrow, fundamentalist view of Islam.

Junior appeared the most devout, and Nephew performed some of the five daily Muslim prayers. Uncle sometimes had prayer beads.

“They had a narrow view of their faith,” Loney said, especially when it came to sectarian differences. “They believed the Shia were no good. They didn’t see the Shia Muslims as Muslims really.”

Over time, Loney came to see them as “good people who had been infected with a toxic kind of religion.”

He also knew they were capable of violence.

* * *

Not long after they were abducted, Junior burst into the room where the hostages were asleep on the floor and accused them of trying to escape. Throwing back the blanket, he became violent, hitting Fox in the face and slapping Loney and Sooden.

After this, Loney said, the four would sleep handcuffed and then chained to one another, with Fox chained to the door and Kember chained to Fox.

They spent their days in much the same way, but sitting in chairs.

Each morning, one of the kidnappers would enter the room and open the barred window, the only fresh air and sunlight they could enjoy.

Because they were allowed to bathe only every few weeks, Loney said, “we weren’t smelling very fresh.” Their clothes were washed about once a month.

At one point, the four were separated. Fox and Kember were moved to a second house, where Loney and Sooden were taken about two weeks later.

At the second house, Loney recalled, the kidnappers confiscated their shoes, replacing them with cheaper, flimsier models.

Meanwhile, Loney’s thoughts about escape continued.

One evening, the four were taken downstairs, where they were shown a movie. On one occasion, they had watched an Arabic DVD about the life of Jesus. This time, it was the 1997 Nicolas Cage movie, Con Air, about a group of prisoners who take over a jetliner. When Loney saw a prisoner in the film spring his handcuffs with a piece of wire, it gave him an idea. Removing a small nail from the heel of his flimsy shoe, Loney discovered he could pop open his handcuffs.

Though this meant he and Sooden might be able to escape, it also meant they would have to abandon Kember and Fox, who were chained more securely.

“Tom was always chained,” Loney said, and Kember, he feared, was too old for the physical demands of escape, even if he could get loose.

For his part, Sooden wanted to stay put and remain together.

“For me, it was a struggle of solidarity and, I guess in a way, privilege,” Loney said. “I was less noble than Harmeet. My desire to live and be free was so strong that I was mentally prepared to escape, even with just myself.”

* * *

On Feb. 12, the kidnappers again told the CPTers their freedom was near and ordered Fox to gather his few belongings. They would all be taken back to the first house one at a time, and then released near the mosque in western Baghdad where they had been abducted.

Fox was to be moved first, followed by Kember, Loney and Sooden.

“We were excited,” Loney said. But after Fox was moved, no one came for the others.

On March 5, Medicine Man made a video of the remaining hostages and delivered some unsettling news.

Negotiations for their freedom were almost over, but to apply pressure, the kidnappers would announce that Fox had been killed. In reality, Medicine Man assured them, Fox would still be alive and would be released with the rest.

On March 10 — the day after Fox was found shot to death on a Baghdad street — the three were taken downstairs again, where they were shown an Arabic-language news broadcast. They saw what appeared to be a story about them, with the camera lingering on an image of Fox before cutting to a shot of an empty road.

When Sooden asked what they were seeing, the kidnappers told them it was simply a profile of Fox and not to worry. But no one was convinced.

“We had a very strong sense that he had been killed,” Loney said.

It would not be until early on March 23 that they would know for sure.

* * *

That morning, around 7:30 a.m., Loney was lying awake when he heard the distinctive whir of tank tracks on the street outside. He woke up Sooden and said, “I think there’s something weird going on.”

Of all the scenarios Loney had pondered, being rescued had been the most frightening. The kidnappers, they knew, were well-armed with rifles, grenades and rocket launchers and had vowed to fight to the death.

The next sound they heard was the rapid thud of boots on pavement and a voice with a British accent shouting, “Open the door!”

The front door was smashed and a burst of shots fired. The kidnappers were not there. The commandos from the British Special Air Service then started inching their way up the stairs, calling, “Mr. Kember, are you there?”

When the hostages responded, they were told to shut their door and wait. Suddenly, the commandos burst into the room, “bristling with weapons and body armor,” Loney recalled.

Wielding a bolt cutter, one of the soldiers freed the three and assured them they were safe.

The hostages quickly asked about Fox, and before whisking them to an armored personnel carrier outside, one of the soldiers told them, “Mr. Fox was killed.”

* * *

Since returning to his hometown in Ontario, Loney has been trying to regain his hold on life.

“I just feel pulled in different directions,” Loney said, adding that he plans to return to his work in CPT’s Toronto office. “I never understood what freedom was until I was deprived of it. I just ached for the most basic things in God’s creation — blue skies, breezes.”

As for returning to Iraq, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police advised Loney he is a marked man and would probably be murdered if he returned.

Still, the travails of the Iraqi people, and the work of CPT there, remain important to him.

“I love Iraq, and I love the people there,” he said. “And I think the suffering that’s happening there now . . . is something that really affects me deeply.”