Part 8: No. 1 target shifts to Shiites

One of the captors wore his suicide vest day and night.
By JILL CARROLL
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Blind again under the black scarves -- a now familiar routine after one and a half months in captivity -- I was herded into a car, headed for yet another change of houses. I didn't know who the two men in the front seat were until I heard a voice I barely recognized, due to the speaker's exhaustion.
"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 on the world outside.
Abu Rasha was a large man, one of the organizers of my guards. His house in Baghdad -- or what I took to be his house -- was one of the first places I'd been taken after being kidnapped. I'd spent a lot of time in his presence. But I'd never encountered him in a state like this.
"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, which were among the insurgents' most common weapons. 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.
New No. 1 enemy
We arrived back at the place I called the clubhouse, near Abu Ghraib, later that night. Slumped in a plastic chair in a room lighted by the stark half-light of a fluorescent camping lantern, another mujahed told me the new bottom line.
"Aisha," he said, calling me by the Sunni nickname they'd given me, "now our No. 1 enemy are the Shias. Americans are No. 2."
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 of its members were out fighting their new war almost every day.
At first, I thought this was a bad thing for me. It was destabilizing the status quo -- and under the status quo, at least I was still alive.
I didn't want to be killed just because I was now a burden. And I certainly didn't want to be caught in the middle of a Sunni-Shiite firefight.
But after a while it became clear that this conflict, despite its horrible effect on Iraq itself, might be a good thing 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 suddenly, American and Iraqi troops 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 to try to hide their firearms and explosives.
For instance, one morning at the location I knew as the mujahedeen clubhouse, I 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.
Weapon of choice
But I quickly learned that the appearance of dirt meant that someone in the house had been out planting bombs -- IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, the mujahedeen weapon of choice. I knew from my reporting, and the time I spent embedded with U.S. Marines, that IEDs were now responsible for about half of all U.S. combat deaths in Iraq.
Not all of 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. And if it did, we'd all be dead.
He used to complain about how heavy it was. He'd wear it at night. He would mime for me what would happen if soldiers came, showing how he'd put it on, with shoulder straps, and then how two wires would connect. Then he would move his hands outward in a big motion indicating an explosion, look upward and go, "Boom!"
There was no mistaking that the mujahedeen who held me hated America. "One day, hopefully, one day, America, all of America gone," said one of my guards 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, listening in on the conversation, translated the sentiment into simpler Arabic for me. "No journalists, no people, no nothing," she said.
I could also see that Shiites were high on their list of enemies. Once, when attempting to explain the historical split between Sunnis and Shiites, Abu Nour, the leader of my captors, 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. It's a practice similar to that of Catholics' 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 hate for Shiites first. Abu Nour now simply referred to them as dogs.
Frightening news
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 himself had participated in the killing or if it had been done by men from the larger group of mujahedeen.
They'd frequently assured me that I wasn't going to be killed. But clearly there were times when their rules for jihad allowed them to kill women and to kill female 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 they were interviewing Iraqis near the bombed Samarra shrine.
I bounced from house to house over the next few weeks -- mostly between the clubhouse and a new house west of Fallujah -- and the guards grew incredibly agitated. They would bitterly complain to me about being stuck with guard duty. Abu Hassan -- the guard with the suicide vest -- would sleep and eat little. He was always on edge. He would fiddle with his 9mm pistol obsessively and leap to his feet to peer out a window at the first sound of a helicopter or barking dog.
He spent his time on the phone, checking in with others for the latest news on their campaign to kill Shiites. When anyone came to the house, he pumped them 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 yet recognize that those days of amity were over.