Jill Carroll's story | Part 5: A captive audience to Iraqi jihad

One afternoon in the first week after I'd been taken — and been moved to yet another house near Abu Ghraib — Abu Ali called me into a big sitting room with green velveteen couches. On the far wall, above the TV, was a gigantic poster of waterfalls and rocks and trees.

It was beautiful. I could stare at it and get lost. I thought, I wish I was there, I wish I was there. But my captors wanted me to look at something else: DVDs of them waging war.

By their count, they were killing dozens or even hundreds of soldiers a day. They estimated that al-Qaida in Iraq had killed at least 40,000 U.S. soldiers. They could prove it, they said, with videos of their operations showing Humvees and tanks blowing up and snipers shooting soldiers.

So Abu Ali — the captor with a stubbly beard — sat me down and showed me the videos. They were in Arabic and were stamped with symbols of various insurgent groups, and included audio overlays of mujahedeen chanting in low, somber tones.

One video showed men who were going to be suicide car bombers. They were interviewed, and the video then showed a field, with cars lined up, and each man getting into a car — waving, euphoric — and then driving off.

Other videos had pictures of a moving American Humvee — and then it would blow up. The videos would cut to a graphic of a lightning flash, and thunder clapping.

Abu Ali would glance at me as I watched, asking what I thought. I couldn't say anything good, but I tried to say things that were true, such as "Oh, this is the first time I've ever seen this. I didn't know this was out there."

To Abu Ali, this was their mission, a righteous path; this was their work for God.

While I sat there, I felt the insurgents were sending a message: They hate Americans so much, they're proud of these attacks. They're normal to them.

They surely were going to kill me. How could they not?

Home-grown fighters

At the beginning of my ordeal, I had hoped my kidnappers were amateurs who wouldn't know what to do with me and would start to get nervous after a few days. Then they'd let me go.

I knew they were Iraqis, which was good. The foreign-born insurgents — such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — were the ones who beheaded hostages. My kidnappers seemed like a small group. They told me they had come together and forged their identity fighting the U.S. military for control of the restive city of Fallujah, in a Sunni-dominated area west of Baghdad.

But after about a week in captivity — about the time of the showing of the jihadi videos — it became increasingly clear to me that they were the real deal.

During the precious few hours when there was electricity, my captors would sometimes plug in a cassette player, and an angry voice would blare in classical Arabic from the room across the hall, where the guards slept.

I usually understood only a few words, such as "America," "Israel" and "occupation," but the point was clear.

"Do you know who that is?" one guard asked at one point. "That is Sheikh Abu Musab. Is he a good man? What is your opinion of Zarqawi?"

I dodged the question. But inside, I felt fear welling up. These were Zarqawi people! I was an American. Again, I thought there was no way I was getting out of this alive.