Jill Carroll's story | Part 2: The interrogation

I spent my first full day of captivity sitting in a plastic chair in the second-floor bedroom of a Baghdad house, while gunfire echoed around me.

I kept thinking, it's just Baghdad, that's the way it is. But the shooting, which had begun the night before, went on all day. Some of it was close. Abu Rasha, owner of the house, came into the room around dusk. He looked exhausted.

"I'm very, very tired, all day I'm fighting with the soldiers," he said. Then he made a gggggggg sound, in imitation of an automatic weapon.

He sat on the bed and sighed.

"They're right here. They're very near," he said. "Why, Jill? Why are the soldiers here? Why are the soldiers so near here?"

I realized he thought I was somehow telling the U.S. military where I was.

"I don't know! I don't know!" I said, my voice rising.

"You don't have a mobile phone?" he said. "Maybe in your hair?"

I ripped off my head scarf and shook my hair loose. This was completely inappropriate behavior that normally would have deeply offended a Muslim man as fanatical as he, but I was desperate.

His hands went through my hair, checking my scalp for whatever he imagined I might have hidden there. Finally, he was satisfied. He left the room.

I collapsed into the plastic chair and cried, silently, afraid he would be angry if he heard me.

But he suddenly returned. He rushed over, grabbed my hand, and kneeled next to me.

"I'm so sorry. No, Jill, don't cry. I'm so, so, so sorry," he said. "No, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm your brother."

He was overwrought. Why should he care I was upset? He'd kidnapped me, after all.

I knew I had just learned something important, something that might help me get through whatever was to come.

Much later, I learned that U.S. and Iraqi soldiers had raided the Um al-Qura mosque — one mile from Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi's office, where I had been kidnapped. The raid on Baghdad's largest Sunni mosque was prompted by a tip from an Iraqi civilian about my location. It was the closest U.S. forces would come to rescuing me over the next three months.

Often on the move

In the first minutes after the insurgents seized me and killed Alan, my kidnappers seemed shocked that they'd succeeded. They didn't appear to have a plan for what to do next. But a pattern soon developed that held throughout my captivity.

I was moved often. They provided meals Iraqis would think fit for guests, as well as small luxuries such as expensive toiletries. Yet I was a prisoner.

My captors would unexpectedly explode with bitter accusations that I was a spy, or Jewish, and hiding a homing device. They'd boast about their exploits fighting — and once sharing a meal — with American soldiers while I was in captivity.

In response, my mood would veer wildly. One moment I'd be sure they were going to kill me. The next I'd think they were going to let me go, that it was only a matter of time.

Overall, I just wanted it to be over with, whatever "it" was going to be.

A 6-year-old "warrior"

That first day, they were spooked by how close the soldiers had come to finding me. Abu Rasha said they had to move to the house of Abu Ali, his "brother." I thought he meant his real brother. Later, I realized this was just a reference to a fellow mujahedeen.

Abu Rasha packed my stuff but forgot to put in the toothpaste and shampoo that they'd given me the night before. I thought, maybe there's a reason he didn't put them in — desperately overanalyzing everything. I asked about them, and he put them in the bag. Abu Rasha removed my glasses (I'd found the missing lens in the car) and put two black scarves over my head and face so I wouldn't be able to see. Hanging on his arm, I stumbled out of the house and into a car, trying to suck fresh air through the suffocating layers of black polyester.

After a short drive we switched cars and I cowered, motionless in the strange new back seat. I soon realized there were children next to me, and men in the front. A cassette blared a recitation of the Quran, and every few minutes the nervous men would mutter "Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar," as we drove through the darkness.

One then said in Arabic, "What are you? What are you?"

A tiny voice next to me replied, "I'm a mujahid," a holy warrior.

It was a boy — I'd learn that his name was Ismael, and he was 6. Just a child, already indoctrinated.

After some 20 minutes the car stopped and a woman's gloved hand grasped mine, guiding me into a house. My heart was racing; the adrenaline hadn't stopped in 24 hours. Barely a day had passed and I was a broken, quivering, fearful shell.

She lifted the scarves. In a rush of air and light I saw her face, smiling and welcoming in a sitting room lined with cushions. Abu Rasha entered, and the woman flipped down one of the black scarves on her head, covering all but her eyes.

"This is Um Ali, and this is Abu Ali," a smiling Abu Rasha told me. Um is Arabic for mother; abu is father. But all my captors' names were fake, as each adopted a nom de guerre in my presence.

I looked to the left to a rotund man with a stubbly, salt-and-pepper beard and grandfatherly eyes. He was smiling, too, and looked friendly.

"Do you know Abu Ali?" Abu Rasha asked. "Do you know him from yesterday?"

"No," I said.

I looked again — and then I did know who he was. He was the man who held the gun on Adnan Abbas, my driver, during my abduction.

"Oh, no," I thought to myself. This was not OK.