I Was Kidnapped by Idiots

Four men searched my mouth for implanted tracking devices. I had told them I didn’t have any—that, as far as I knew, such things existed only in movies. They asked if I had fillings, and I confessed that I did. They looked again. “No, you don’t,” one of them corrected me, having failed to find any glint of silver. My fillings are white. The men, wearing dark civilian clothes and balaclavas, seemed convinced that these unfamiliar fillings posed a threat to their operational security. That’s when I knew that my kidnapping was going to be a little bit different.

I was violently snatched on March 21, 2023, from the outskirts of Baghdad, where I had been conducting fieldwork for my Ph.D. at Princeton University. When my kidnappers delivered me to my cell, they cut the restraints they’d placed around my arms and legs, and lifted the cloth bag off my head. The secret prison where I was brought was run by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi militia backed by Iran.

That was my first day of captivity. Nine hundred and two more followed. I spent the first four and a half months in a prison usually used for holding the militia’s Iraqi victims. The militiamen, I later learned, worked for one of Iraq’s security agencies, many of which have been extensively penetrated by pro-Iranian paramilitary groups. Even so, my kidnapping was purely opportunistic—I was taken for ransom, not for any political reason.