Foreword

The phone rang one afternoon at the end of May 2013. I had just returned home to Beirut after a two-week reporting trip to the Syrian city of Yabrud, which lies slightly north of Damascus. The trip had ended dramatically when the Syrian regime started sending fighter planes over the city. The bombs hit our neighbourhood and shattered the windows in the building where we lived. My photographer and I decided to leave Syria by crossing the border into Lebanon.

We were totally exhausted after working for days on end under the constant threat of danger. It wasn’t just the bombings that made us feel nervous, but also the Syrian rebels who came from the many different groups in the area. We just didn’t trust them. We knew that a French photographer was already being held captive a little further south. The mood in Yabrud had also changed considerably since I had been there a few months earlier and I was on my guard with everyone we met.

I was lying sprawled on the sofa, trying to recharge my batteries, when the call came. It was the accomplished war photographer Jan Grarup on the other end. He asked me to keep our conversation strictly confidential. I sat up as he told me that the Danish freelance photographer Daniel Rye, who had been his assistant, had been kidnapped in northern Syria.

‘Do you know anyone with contacts in the sharia courts?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t think so – no one springs to mind,’ I replied.

According to the limited information available, a group of Islamic extremists were behind Daniel Rye’s abduction and he would apparently have to stand trial before a sharia court. However, Jan had only a few details. I felt powerless because there was nothing I could do to help. My first thoughts went to Daniel Rye’s parents. I had always worried that if anything like this should ever happen to me, my parents would be the ones to suffer the most, just sitting there waiting, with no idea where I was. It was too unbearable to contemplate.

The news of Daniel Rye’s capture was just one of several events that emphasized the fact that my profession was under serious attack. Several of my foreign colleagues had been kidnapped in Syria. It was a much-discussed subject, because the prospect terrified us. In principle, we were all potential hostage victims and this meant it was becoming increasingly difficult for us to tell the important stories of the war and to report on the tragedy unfolding in Syria.

Over the following year an increasing number of foreigners were captured. A feeling of panic was spreading through the journalist corps in the Middle East and in the closed circles where we discussed the kidnappings. People we knew were being held hostage for indefinite periods of time. When I returned to Syria in September and November 2013 and in June 2014 it was with a great deal of trepidation.

The Islamist terror organization known as ISIS set the agenda for where we could go. Even if ISIS disappeared from an area that had been under their control, their tentacles reached deep into Syrian society and souls. The armed men I met in northern Syria in June 2014 had a wild and unpredictable look in their eyes. As it turned out, my friendly driver was a former ISIS fighter. ‘But no more, Madame,’ he reassured me.

I couldn’t avoid the presence of ISIS in Baghdad, either. In spring 2014, ISIS attacked a stadium filled with several thousand people – men, women and children – who had come to a Shiite party election meeting that I was covering. When the first bomb exploded I completely lost my hearing and I hid behind a freezer in a makeshift street stall. When I saw bullets being fired wildly all around me I ran across the road, down which a suicide bomber drove his car shortly afterwards. It was a narrow escape and I felt the blast of the explosion against my back. More than forty people were killed that day. That spring the only positive news from the region was that several European hostages had been released after their ransoms had been paid, including Daniel Rye.

One evening in August 2014, while I was in a hotel room in Iraq, a video was uploaded on YouTube. It showed the murder of the American freelance journalist James Foley. He could be seen kneeling in an orange prison uniform in the Syrian Desert, at the hands of an ISIS executioner. An American colleague, whom I was supposed to meet for a beer later that evening, wrote to me that she was in total shock and we cancelled our plans. I couldn’t sleep that night. It was so utterly tragic for James Foley and his family, and it was also a brutal attack on journalism. With these new developments, it was no longer enough to prepare yourself and your loved ones for the unavoidable fact that bullets and bombs could strike when you’re covering a war.

I was now first and foremost a target; a potential and valuable political tool that could be used at will. The world was certainly no stranger to such tactics, but this was the first time, as a journalist, that the threat felt so intensely close, almost personal. Nevertheless, my greatest wish was to be able to travel to the ISIS stronghold in Raqqa and report on the Islamists and the life they had created for the civilians; I was keen to investigate them further and discover who they really were. Out of pure frustration at being so far away from the story, I seriously considered dressing in black from head to toe and travelling there with a trusted local.

Instead, I chose the next best thing. I decided to use my journalistic skills to write about what had happened to my colleagues and, through their stories, come a little closer to the core of ISIS. Daniel Rye had been a hostage along with James Foley, so I sent him a message via a mutual acquaintance, asking him if he would talk to me about his thirteen months of captivity at the hands of ISIS. He answered me on Facebook: ‘Hi Puk. My name is Daniel Rye. You’ve probably heard of me. I suffered a slight occupational hazard last year. Luckily for me, it had a happy ending.’ We met for the first time one Friday in early October 2014 at a basement restaurant in central Copenhagen. We agreed that Daniel’s story needed to be told.

The ISIS Hostage is about surviving one of the most notorious kidnappings in recent times – a hostage drama carried out by Islamic extremists, against whom much of the West is at war, including Denmark, since October 2014.

Twenty-four hostages – five women and nineteen men – from thirteen different nations ended up in the same prison in Raqqa in northern Syria. It was controlled by the terror group known as ISIS – it later changed its name to Islamic State (IS) – which has conquered and administrates large areas of Iraq and Syria. Daniel Rye was one of those hostages and, at the time of writing, he was the last prisoner to leave captivity alive. Six of his fellow prisoners were murdered while in captivity.

This book is a journalistic narrative based on countless interviews and conversations with Daniel Rye and his family, and it follows the struggle to get Daniel released from the clutches of the world’s most brutal terrorist organization. I also talked to a large number of other relevant sources: former fellow prisoners, jihadists and background contacts from around the world with extensive knowledge of the case and of the people who held Daniel Rye captive.

This story is also based on interviews with kidnapping expert and security consultant, Arthur. He led the search for both Daniel Rye and his American fellow prisoner James Foley, who ended his days in Syria. Arthur isn’t his real name; in fact, he lives a very discreet existence, which is crucial for his work in negotiating hostage releases all over the world. It isn’t in his nature to discuss his work, but he has nevertheless chosen to participate, because he believes that there is much to learn from this story. And, as he says, Daniel’s experience also shows that ‘where there’s life, there’s hope’.