With A Plan And A Rope, Captives Escaped Taliban

With a Plan and a Rope, Captives Escaped Taliban By ADAM B. ELLICK Published: June 21, 2009 KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan journalist who was held captive by the Taliban for more than seven months along with a New York Times reporter revealed details on Sunday of a nighttime escape that included weeks of careful plotting, taking advantage of weary guards and dropping down a 20-foot wall with a rope. The Afghan journalist, Tahir Ludin, 35, said in an interview that the escape early Saturday from the second floor of a Taliban compound in North Waziristan, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, was a desperate attempt by two severely demoralized reporters who believed that the Taliban were not seriously negotiating and would hold them indefinitely. Mr. Ludin and David Rohde, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Times, along with their driver, Asadullah Mangal, were abducted outside Kabul on Nov. 10 as Mr. Rohde traveled to interview a Taliban commander for a book he was writing about Afghanistan. Mr. Ludin said that he and Mr. Rohde had been threatened with death by their captors. The past two to three months were so “hopeless,” Mr. Ludin said, that he considered committing suicide with a large knife. Mr. Rohde, who was reuniting with his family on Sunday, confirmed the accuracy of Mr. Ludin’s account but declined to comment further. The three men were abducted on a road just a few minutes from where they planned to meet the Taliban commander, known as Abu Tayeb, in Logar Province, southeast of Kabul. Mr. Ludin had previously escorted two other foreign journalists to safe interviews with the commander, and during those meetings the two established a degree of trust. Mr. Ludin said Mr. Tayeb had betrayed that trust by directly orchestrating the kidnapping. The reporters and the driver were shuttled to various houses in Pakistan’s tribal areas while they were imprisoned, Mr. Ludin said. As their captivity dragged on, he said, he and Mr. Rohde began plotting their escape by surveying the compound and its surroundings. Once, Mr. Ludin said, he faked illness to visit a doctor outside the complex. Other times he asked his captors if he could watch local cricket matches — a sport he pretended to adore — so that he could study potential escape routes. Still, it seemed impossible to escape from a town controlled by Taliban and foreign militants. On Friday evening, in a planned bid to keep their captors awake as late as possible to ensure that the men would eventually sleep soundly, Mr. Ludin challenged the militants who slept beside them in the same room to a local board game. When at last the games ended at midnight, the journalists waited for the militants to fall asleep. At 1 a.m., Mr. Rohde woke Mr. Ludin and sneaked out of the room. Mr. Ludin recited

several verses of the Koran and followed him. They made their way to the second floor, and Mr. Ludin got to the top of a five-foot-high wall. When Mr. Ludin looked down, he said, he was greeted by an unnerving view: a 20foot drop. Mr. Rohde handed Mr. Ludin a rope that he had found two weeks earlier and had hidden from the guards. They fastened the rope to the wall, and Mr. Ludin lowered himself along the rope before unclenching his fists for good. He crashed to the ground, leaving him with a sprained right foot and other injuries. He cut his foot, he said, pointing to his swollen and heavily bruised ankle and his bandaged big toe. Mr. Rohde then lowered himself along the wall and jumped down without injury, Mr. Ludin said. When asked why their captives did not hear the thump of their impact with the ground, Mr. Ludin said they waited to make the escape attempt on a night when the city had electrical power. At night, an old, noisy air-conditioner that ran masked the sound. As the two men walked away, dogs barked at them from nearby compounds. At one point, barking stray dogs rushed at them in the darkness. To their surprise, no Taliban members emerged from nearby houses. After 15 minutes, Mr. Ludin said, they arrived at a Pakistani militia post that he had spotted during one of his daytime trips outside the house. In the darkness, a half-dozen guards who suspected they were suicide bombers aimed rifles at them and shouted for them to raise their hands and not move. “They said, ‘If you move, we are going to shoot you,’ ” he said. Mr. Ludin said he was shivering in the darkness, and it took 15 minutes of anxious conversation to convince the guards that he had been kidnapped along with an American journalist — who hardly looked the part, with his long beard and Islamic attire. The men were eventually allowed in the compound, ordered to take off their shirts, searched, blindfolded and taken to the base’s headquarters. After Pakistani officials confirmed their identities, they were treated well. Later that day, they were transferred to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, and to an American military base outside Kabul. While telling his story, Mr. Ludin showed flashes of his exuberant personality, as when he waved his arms and proclaimed “the food was excellent,” or when he joked about the gray hairs he had grown since his abduction. He spoke with his seven children gathered around him. But more often than not, Mr. Ludin spoke in a burst of sentences and alluded several times to being in a confused mental state. On three occasions, he mistakenly referred to a visiting journalist as “David.” Mr. Ludin said the driver, Mr. Mangal, appeared to be overwhelmed by fear of his captors and had not participated in the planning or the escape.