Sunday, September 01, 2013
Bored with her life and fresh off a New Year’s Eve epiphany, a
24-year-old Canadian named Amanda Lindhout quits her job as a cocktail
waitress and decides to become a journalist. 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.
AP- WHAT PLAN?Waitress Amanda Lindhout winged it as a freelancer in Somalia until she and a pal were kidnapped by an al Qaeda offshoot.
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“Affirming that I have the world in
the palm of my hand,” she has written in her journal. Amanda has no
training and is using “TV Reporting for Dummies” as her manual. She
gives an interview in which she says every other journalist 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 an ex-boyfriend, 36-year-old Nigel
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 international
bases of operation in Somalia, or that Doctors Without Borders is just
five years away from leaving, or that few journalists 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.
‘ALLAH WANTS A RANSOM’
Robert Draper, a journalist on assignment for National
Geographic, remembers meeting “recklessly
Reuters- PALS NO MORE:Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan manage to smile after their ordeal, but they no longer speak to each other.
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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
learn 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, Aug. 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 turn 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 . . .”