Time Magazine: The Disappeared

Waddah al-Anbari's ordeal began on an afternoon in Baghdad early this year while he was out buying a new cell phone. The neighborhood seemed safe; Waddah didn't bother to lock his car door. He was about to cross a narrow alley when a car screeched up, blocking his way. Two men got out, thrust AK-47s into his ribs and pushed him into the floor behind the front seat. Climbing in the backseat, the men pinned him down with their feet and beat him in the torso with the butts of their guns. When he tried to speak, he got a sharp jab in the ribs. His captors emptied his pockets and took his cheap wristwatch and his belt and shoes. As the car sped away, one man put a hood over Waddah's head and, using a plastic tie, bound his wrists behind his back. All that happened in a few moments, and Waddah says he could only think, "This is a mistake--they think I'm somebody else." But it wasn't a mistake. He was being kidnapped.

As if the atrocities committed by terrorists and sectarian death squads in Iraq weren't bad enough, kidnapping has become one of the country's most common forms of crime since the fall of Saddam Hussein. U.S. officials say that up to 40 people are kidnapped every day, a phenomenon highlighted last week when a U.S. soldier in Baghdad went missing, an apparent abduction victim. With ransoms ranging from a few thousand dollars to more than a million and with the police often unwilling or unable to even register such cases, officials say kidnapping has become an increasingly lucrative business. It helps the kidnappers that their criminal activity is often confused with the routine hostage taking by both sides in the Shi'ite-Sunni civil war. "Kidnapping for ransom is an industry," says Dan O'Shea, former coordinator of the U.S. embassy's Hostage Working Group. "It is governed by the profit motive, not religion or race or politics."

Waddah's story provides a rare insight into the inner workings of a kidnapping ring. He spoke with TIME on the condition that his identity be concealed; we have used a pseudonym and changed other details that might give him away. He refused to be photographed for this story for fear of being recognized. One of his concerns is that being known as somebody who was ransomed once might mark him as a target for other kidnappers. O'Shea and another U.S. official who works with Iraqi authorities on kidnapping-related issues say many details of Waddah's account are consistent with what they have gleaned from their investigations.

The story Waddah tells is a window into the worst nightmare of many Iraqis, who in the absence of law and order must live with the fear that they could be taken and held captive at any time or in any place. Waddah's grin reveals two missing front teeth, the result of severe beating with the butt of an AK-47, and his face is drawn and gaunt from long captivity. If his physique--once strong and upright, now stooped and limp--recovers from the ordeal, Waddah's psyche will carry some scars forever: the terror of imprisonment, the dread of not knowing whether he would live another day, the degradation of torture and the mortification of having to grovel and plead for his life. "For five weeks, I was less than a human being," he says. "Nobody should have to go through that." The disturbing truth, however, is that many of his countrymen do.

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Midnight, our sons and daughters
Were cut down and taken from us
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat

In the wind we hear their laughter
In the rain we see their tears
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat

Night hangs like a prisoner
Stretched over black and blue
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat

In the trees our sons stand naked
Through the walls our daughters cry
See their tears in the rainfall