After shrine blast, Shiites — not U.S. — become captors' No. 1 enemy

Blind again under the black scarves — a now familiar routine after nearly two months in captivity — I was herded into a car, headed for another change of houses.

I didn't recognize the two men in the front seat until I heard a voice. "Abu Rasha is very tired. It was a very busy day," said Abu Nour's No. 2, speaking in the third person, as night fell like its own black scarf.

Abu Rasha was a large man, one of the organizers of my guards. His Baghdad house — or what I took to be his house — was one of the first places I'd been taken after the kidnapping. I'd spent a lot of time in his presence. But I'd never encountered him in this state.

"Today was very, very bad," he said. "All day, driving here, and driving there, with the PKC and the RPG," he said, referring to Russian-made machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. It had been a day of hard fighting, but they hadn't been confronting U.S. or Iraqi soldiers. Today, they had had a different target: Shiites.

Two days earlier, on Feb. 22, an important Shiite mosque in Samarra, Iraq, had been blown up. Shiites had attacked Sunni mosques in retaliation — the result being a vicious cycle of attack-and-response that had altered the world of my Sunni Islamist kidnappers.

We arrived back at the place I called the "clubhouse," near Abu Ghraib, that night. Slumped in a plastic chair in a room lit by a fluorescent camping lantern, another mujahed told me their new bottom line.

"Aisha," he said, calling me by my Sunni-given nickname, "now our No. 1 enemy are the Shias. Americans are No. 2."

Sectarian violence

The wave of sectarian violence that overtook Iraq after the destruction of Samarra's Askariya shrine had a huge impact on the nature of my captivity. That was because the level of activity of the mujahedeen group that had seized me greatly increased. Many members were fighting their new war almost every day.

At first, I thought this a bad thing for me. It was destabilizing the status quo — under which I at least was alive. I didn't want to be killed just because I was a burden. And I certainly didn't want to be caught in the middle of a Sunni-Shiite firefight. But it became clear that this conflict, despite its horrible effect on Iraq, might be good for me. Their main mission was now something to which my presence was, politically speaking, only tangential. And they began running out of places to put me, because U.S. and Iraqi troops suddenly were everywhere, trying to keep the peace.

From my first days in captivity I'd seen evidence that they weren't just kidnappers but also insurgents actively conducting attacks. They didn't much bother trying to hide their firearms and explosives. For instance, I once awoke to find fresh dirt in the bathroom, dirt in the shower, and dirt in the washing machine.

I didn't think much of it. Maybe they were washing their shoes. But I quickly learned that the appearance of dirt meant that someone had been planting bombs — IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, the mujahedeen weapon of choice. I knew IEDs now were responsible for about half of all U.S. combat deaths in Iraq.

Not all their explosives were offensive weapons. At least one of my guards — Abu Hassan, a serious man — wore a suicide vest inside the clubhouse. One night, he was leaning over a little gas-powered stove, cooking eggs and potatoes in oil, and then he sat back and pushed the open flame away, saying something like, "Oh, have to be careful!"

The suicide vest was under his shirt, sort of swinging back and forth. He was afraid the fire would ignite the explosives. If it did, we'd be dead.

He used to complain about the vest's weight. He'd wear it at night. He would mime what would happen if soldiers came, showing how he'd put it on, with shoulder straps, and then how two wires would connect.

He would move his hands outward in a big motion indicating an explosion, look upward, and go, "BOOM!"

"Dogs"

There was no mistaking that the mujahedeen who held me hated America.

"One day, hopefully, one day, America, all of America gone," one guard said early in my captivity. He spread his hands out wide as if to wipe America off the map. "I don't quite understand," I said. "All America?"

My female jailer, Um Ali, translated the sentiment into simpler Arabic for me. "No journalists, no people, no nothing," she said.

I also could see that Shiites were high on their list of enemies. Once, when attempting to explain the historical split between Sunnis and Shiites, Abu Nour stopped himself after he referred to "Shiite Muslims."

"No, they are not Muslims," Ink Eyes said. "Anyone who asks for things from people that are dead, and not [from] Allah, he is not a Muslim."

He was referring to Shiites appealing to long-dead Islamic leaders to intercede with God, asking for miracles such as curing the sick. Catholics have a similar practice, praying to saints.

But after the Feb. 22 bombing of the Askariya shrine, and rampant Sunni-Shiite killing, nearly every captor I came into contact with would tell me about their hatred for Shiites first. Abu Nour now simply referred to them as "dogs."

On edge

On the day in late February that an exhausted Abu Rasha had told me that Shiites were now the mujahedeen's top target, he'd told me something else, something chilling.

"We killed an Al Arabiya journalist," he said, his face drawn, his eyes hard. "She said the mujahedeen are bad."

It was unclear if he meant that he had participated in the killing or if it had been done by other men. My captors frequently assured me that I wasn't going to be killed. But their rules certainly allowed them to kill women and to kill women journalists.

As I learned after I was released, the well-known Al Arabiya newswoman Atwar Bahjat and two colleagues were abducted and killed by gunmen while interviewing Iraqis near the bombed Samarra shrine.

I bounced from house to house over the next few weeks — mostly between the clubhouse and a house west of Fallujah, (according to the U.S. military) — and the guards grew incredibly agitated. They would complain bitterly to me about guard duty.

Abu Hassan — the suicide-vest guard — slept and ate little. He was always on edge. He would fiddle with his 9-mm pistol obsessively and peer out a window at the first sound of a helicopter or barking dog. He spent his time on the phone, checking for the latest news on their campaign to kill Shiites. He pumped visitors for stories about their "work," as they all called it.

In his state of agitation and boredom, he began raising suspicions about the Shiite neighbors.

They didn't know I was there. They didn't appear to know that the men at this house were mujahedeen. They'd drop off fresh bread or yogurt, or stop to chat outside, just as Iraqis had done for generations.

They did not recognize that those days of amity had ended.