Being guarded by a petulant pair

Abu Qarrar was young and rotund. He seemed new to the mujahedeen lifestyle. He hadn't memorized much of the Quran, unlike senior counterparts. He sometimes sneaked glances at the women on the music-video channels when he thought no one was looking.

To show off, he would run in place, then kick his right leg in the air and fling his arms forward in an awkward demonstration of kung fu. Abu Hassan was older, athletic and seething with devotion to jihad. He seemed a veteran fighter — although, like Abu Qarrar, he loved "Cat and Mouse" cartoons. Yes, they watched "Tom and Jerry."

When bored — which was often — he'd use his cellphone to record himself giving fake, fiery sermons at the top of the stairs as if on a mosque pulpit. He would play them back to hear how he'd sound as a famous imam.

These two men were my most constant guards. They reported to Abu Ahmed, one of Abu Nour's lieutenants.

The two guards weren't at every house where I was held, and others came and went even when they were present. But I spent more time with them than anyone else. They were my up-close-and-personal examples of the rank and file of the Iraqi mujahedeen.

Abu Qarrar and Abu Hassan also were starkly different people, despite the fact that they called each other "brother." They were symbolic of contrasts I saw in the mujahedeen.

Some members were clever; some seemed dangerous; most were devout. A few were sympathetic. A few were educated. At least one woman appeared bitter about her lot in life. As far as I knew, all were native Iraqis.

As the weeks of my captivity turned into months, Abu Qarrar and Abu Hassan became tense and unhappy. They were bored with guard duty and tired of inaction. They became more petty and controlling toward me.

Meanwhile, I was increasingly desperate, fearful and angry. I felt I was beginning to lose self-control. The result was conflict between me and the Muj Brothers that, if not for the context, might have seemed adolescent. We couldn't let little slights go. We were like animals in a cage.

Inappropriate advance

Abu Qarrar claimed to have been part of the team that abducted me, but I didn't see him. He was the guard who sat outside the door of my bedroom on the first night I was held.

He was hard to miss, with a girth that advertised his eating habits and a tattoo of Arabic writing on his inner left arm. He told me he was 26. He was unmarried at the beginning of my ordeal. He later left for a period of time for an arranged wedding to a 13-year-old bride. He didn't know what e-mail was. He'd never seen a computer. He marveled at how a can opener worked.

We got along well at times. Overall, though, I thought he acted like a spoiled little boy who enjoyed authority over another human — namely, me.

During the first full day of captivity, he kept peeking in the door, presumably to make sure I wasn't trying to escape. I'd heard that it was best for hostages to try to make captors see them as humans, to elicit sympathy, so I tried talking to him. I asked him to help me with my Arabic.

I would point to things, and he would tell me their Arabic names. I was open, even friendly. That was a big mistake.

You can't be that way with men in such a conservative culture. He began to be demanding, even assertive. At one point, the pin on my hijab came loose, and I started to pin it back.

Abu Qarrar said, "No, open."

I said, "No!"

He went, "Open!" He looked at me with wide eyes.

In the context of the conservative Middle East, this was a totally inappropriate advance. I needed to shut him down completely. I put my head down, held my hands in my lap, and didn't move a muscle. He finally left and locked the door. He returned every hour or so, and I wouldn't even look at him.

I met Abu Hassan later. He was older, about 32, and married with children. Where Abu Qarrar was unathletic, Abu Hassan was trim and fit. He told me he'd been a gym teacher. I got the impression he'd been in Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard.

At first I found him the more sympathetic of the Muj Brothers. His age made him seem more mature, or at least more responsible.

I later saw that, by guarding me, he was being confined as well. He'd pace, singing the fatiha, the opening chapter of the Quran.

The relationship of the Muj Brothers to each other was not one of equals. At times, Abu Hassan treated Abu Qarrar as if he were an insurgent's apprentice. For instance, the older man taught the younger how to clear the chamber of his handgun and remove its clip. This was good for my safety, as Abu Qarrar often would point his handgun at me and pretend to shoot, for fun.

Abu Hassan used to go out at night to plant IEDs. He'd go out again in daylight to detonate them. One day, when we were at the insurgents' "clubhouse," as I called it, he decided he would have to wait before leaving to set off his explosives. There were too many American soldiers in the vicinity, he said.

So Abu Qarrar decided he would act the part of the mujahedeen hero. He grabbed a black-and-white checked kaffiyeh, the common Arabic head covering favored by insurgents, threw it over his shoulders, and declared that he would set off to fight the Americans, no matter what.

Like a teacher facing a rebellious student, Abu Hassan grabbed Abu Qarrar by the shoulders and snatched away the kaffiyeh, over Abu Qarrar's loud objections. The younger man wasn't going to be allowed to pick his battles.

Abu Hassan recognized the kaffiyeh for what it was, a giant flashing sign to any U.S. soldier.

Dreading videos

As my time in captivity passed the two-month mark, my morale, already low, began to deteriorate sharply.

One of my biggest problems was that I had let myself have hope. Numerous times, the insurgent leader, the black-eyed Abu Nour, had said my release was only a matter of settling details. My mood would soar, but the release wouldn't happen due to an unspecified "problem." Then there were the videos. They had been astounded when my first hostage video, in which I had been forced to plead for the release of women at Abu Ghraib, had coincided with the freeing of five female prisoners. After that, they seemed to be almost in a frenzy to see what else they could get in exchange for me.

They kept wanting to film videos with different demands aimed at different audiences.

While only four videos reached the outside world, I made nearly a dozen, including retakes done when I didn't cry enough.

And I dreaded making them, not so much because it's scary to plead for your life in front of a camera, but because I recognized that each was a guarantee I would remain in captivity longer.

Of course, there was an even worse alternative — that the death threats and deadlines they mentioned would be real.

A good day

Meanwhile, the relationship with Abu Qarrar and Abu Hassan worsened. Frustration and boredom had slowly eroded their once permissive and friendly attitudes. Now they made mean jokes and comments about me in Arabic, thinking I didn't understand.

They capriciously restricted my tiny freedoms, such as access to sun, fresh air and even interior space for pacing. They picked at me in petty ways. We were having tea one day, and I took my glass and stirred it counterclockwise, as I always do. "No, that's wrong!" said Abu Qarrar, only half-joking. "Stir your tea clockwise!"

I was tired of that kind of behavior. When we later moved to Abu Ahmed's house west of Fallujah, I went over their head, in essence, to gain more freedoms. I was able to hang out with the woman of the house.

They couldn't follow me. The woman's husband was gone during the day, and it would have been unthinkably improper for unrelated men to be around her in any way.

So I had one of the best days I had in captivity. The woman and I chopped vegetables, cooked, washed dishes, swept the floor, made tea and played games with her little girl. I sensed a flicker of sympathy when the woman complimented my potato-peeling ability, and when she asked what people in America ate for breakfast.

I could almost fool myself into thinking I really was a guest, living with an average Iraqi family for a story about daily life. But I was a prisoner. And my guards were determined to win our battle of wills.

A few days later we were back at the clubhouse, where there were no women, and they were little kings. After we arrived, they locked me in my room. They wouldn't eat with me. They wouldn't speak, except for blunt orders. After dinner, I knocked on my door. They opened it, perhaps expecting I would beg forgiveness. I didn't.

"This is injustice!" I yelled. "This is thuloum!"

My strategy from the start had been to humanize myself. The only way to survive, I thought, was to have them see me as a person, not a symbol or an object of hate.

But by this point, I had put up with so much from so many people, I didn't care.

All the questions. Plus the fact I'd been kidnapped. It was all ridiculous. They just locked me back in my room. And as I lay there that night, I thought, "I can't do this. I'm not going to win this. It's stupid to try."

I didn't knock on the door the next morning. I waited for them to fetch me. When they did, I kept my head down and walked to the bathroom. I was quiet and deferential — as I had been in my ordeal's early days. I had to keep my eye on the larger goal, which was survival. I had to give in. The Muj Brothers had won the battle. That didn't mean they had won a war.

Abu Hassan slept less and less in the following days. He'd pull out his handgun and play with it.

"The American soldiers, they will never leave Iraq," he said one day. "It will be 300 years before they go away."

It was the first time I had every heard any mujahedeen express anything less than complete optimism.

Would prayer help?

I got worse. I was losing it.

I would curl up in the bed and cry so hard. But I couldn't be loud, so I would cry into the bed, into the plush blanket. Through all the weeks and months, I hadn't prayed. I thought it would be hypocritical. All of my extended family is Catholic, but I hadn't been to church in a long time.

I hadn't grown up with much religion, in fact. But I needed to calm myself. I knew my family and friends were doing all they could, but it just wasn't enough. They were out there, and I was here alone.

I asked God for strength and patience.