Beaten, starved, gang-raped and 'forced to give birth': Nigel Brennan and Amanda Lindhout's horrific ordeal as hostages in Somalia

IN the summer of 2008 Nigel Brennan, a 36-year-old Australian photographer, gets a call from his ex- girlfriend to come join her on a mission of a lifetime to report from war-to Somalia.

Instead it tus into the beginning of a nightmare when he and Canadian Amanda Lindhout are captured by Somali kidnappers and subjected to horrific abuse during a year-long ordeal.

The story begins when Lindhout, 24, bored with her life and fresh off a New Year’s Eve epiphany, quits her job as a cocktail waitress and decides to become a joualist. To get famous fast, she’ll start in Afghanistan, landing in Kabul in May 2007. She moves on to Iraq in January 2008, and is held hostage for several hours in Sadr City before paying off her captors.

“Affirming that I have the world in the palm of my hand,” she has written in her joual. Amanda has no training and is using “TV Reporting for Dummies” as her manual. She gives an interview in which she says every other joualist in Baghdad, aside from herself, is too scared to leave the Green Zone. She’s so naive, she doesn’t realize her fellow reporters — “fancypants,” she called them — will see this boast online.

Her disdain and bravado make her persona non grata among the press corps, many of whom are reporting from the Red Zone. She has to find somewhere else. She calls Brennan. He is Australian, a former photographer, and she asks him to come along to Somalia. Although he has a new girlfriend and no experience in war zones, he agrees; Amanda has enough confidence for them both.

No matter that there are no longer any inteational bases of operation in Somalia, or that Doctors Without Borders is just five years away from leaving, or that few joualists will venture in. For Amanda, this is a plus: “The truth was, I was glad for the lack of competition.”

On their third day in Somalia, Amanda and Nigel are kidnapped.

Naive: Aspiring joualist Amanda Lindhout (left) and photographer Nigel Brennan (right) were taken hostage in Somalia in 2007

 

Survival: Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan smile in November 2009 after being freed following 15 months in captivity

Robert Draper, a joualist on assignment for National Geographic, remembers meeting “recklessly perky” Amanda Lindhout at the Shamo Hotel in Mogadishu in August 2008. She looks like Kate Middleton and asks Draper and his photographer, Pascal Maitre, where all the bombings are, because she wants to go there. Draper is horrified and that night sends an e-mail to his girlfriend. “She’s going to get herself or someone else killed,” he writes.

Later, Amanda would lea that her kidnappers had been watching the hotel, and that they’d initially planned to abduct the National Geographic crew. But after Draper and Maitre bulked up their security, the targets changed: Now it would be Amanda and Nigel, who would never know whether their fixer was in on it.

Saturday, August 23, the two set out for “the Wild West of militia-controlled Somalia.” Even the bodyguards they’ve hired won’t go there, and when their fixer tells them they’ll need to drive a few miles alone, they go ahead. Nigel’s gut tells him to tu back, but he says nothing; Amanda admits her grievous naiveté. “It wasn’t like I could say, Well, last time I drove across the line where the Islamic militias battled the uniformed soldiers, here’s how we did it . . .”

Not a minute out from a checkpoint, there’s a blue Suzuki blocking their path, then 12 gunmen, the bulk of whom shove themselves into Amanda’s and Nigel’s SUV and drive them away. “Sister,” one says, “don’t worry. Nothing will happen to you.”

The first house is 45 minutes away. They put Nigel and Amanda in a room empty save for two mattresses. They announce themselves as jihadis, take what little money their captives have, then pull Amanda into another room, where one of them molests her. “This is wrong,” she tells him. “You are not a good Muslim.”

He pushes her down. “You think I need this?” he says. “I have two wives. You are ugly, a bad woman.” He orders her back to the room with Nigel.

The next day, a jihadi named Adan introduces himself as the commander and tells them they’ll be going home soon: “Allah has put it into my heart to ask for a ransom.” The price is $3 million for both.

Now they know - though they can’t yet admit it - that they are very likely going to die there. Nigel’s family is large and middle-class, all “mortgaged to the eyeballs” with about $25,000 in savings among them. Amanda’s parents are divorced, her father seriously ill and living on disability, her mother working for minimum wage. Govements refuse to pay ransom. None of this deters the jihadis: They are sure that the Canadians and Australians will find a way to pay.

During their captivity, Nigel and Amanda are moved among so many houses that they begin to name them: The Electric House, Tacky House, Positive House, Beach House, Dark House.

In those first days, they chainsmoke and plot, agreeing that their best chance of survival is to convert. They tell their captors they want to become Muslim and are given Korans and a maddening, illogical tutelage: Yes, the jihadis agree, the Koran forbids Muslims taking money from other Muslims, but this is a special circumstance.

Yes, they agree, a Muslim may not rape a Muslim woman, but this is a special circumstance. Yes, a Muslim may not kill another Muslim, but here there may be no choice.

Neither Nigel nor Amanda know what conversion means. Life immediately gets worse. Newly Muslim, they are now held in separate rooms. It is against the religion for an unmarried man and woman to share the same space. They are now to eat with their right hand and wipe with their left. They are to pray five times a day, and still they are beaten and starved. They cannot smoke.

They are told constantly that they might be sold to Al-Shabaab, the Somali offshoot of al Qaeda. Nigel curls up in the fetal position as he hears Amanda’s screams through the wall, her jihadi captors soon raping her nightly. During the day, Nigel and Amanda try to bond with their kidnappers, leaing their names and asking their goals. One says he dreams of being a suicide bomber.

Read the full story at the New York Post