234 AMERICAN SPY
and collaborate with the Kurds? They also accused “the fat one” (Sadiq) of
being a spy for the Kurds. Ali Baba asked them how we could be certain they
would release Omar, and they hung up on him.
Although the ransom was exorbitant, we were willing to pay it in order
to secure Omar’s release. His wife and daughter were extremely distraught.
After the terrorists threatened to decapitate Omar, his wife shrieked and
wailed so much in front of the young daughter that days later the daughter
actually began to grow hair on her face, apparently from the emotional
trauma of seeing her mother react that way and fearing for her father’s
safety.
Just because we were willing to pay the ransom did not mean we would
ever see Omar alive again. For starters, the captors were furious that Omar
worked with Shi’ites and Kurds. What’s more, AQI and others of their ilk
in Iraq had a nasty habit of forcing victims’ families to sell everything they
owned, borrow more, and pay it all as ransom in exchange for their loved
one, after which the kidnappers would sometimes kill the hostage anyway.
A Shi’ite partner of ours in Baghdad did just that, paying everything he
had for the release of his fourteen-year-old younger brother. The terror-
ists told him he could find his brother in a car parked in a specific location
in Baghdad. When our partner approached the vehicle, he found no one
inside. He then broke into the trunk, which contained his young brother’s
severed head. Not long after, our grieving partner was killed by a car bomb
that went off in front of his house in a Shi’ite neighborhood of Baghdad.
Omar’s captors agreed to our proof of life request, allowing him to
speak briefly with his family. He did not sound good, but he was at least
alive. For the next several days, Ali Baba and his cousin Hatem worked
out the details of the payment. Each phone call was to a different number;
the terrorists never used the same number twice. They would use “burner
phones” that they had taken from their victims. I instructed Ali Baba and
his cousin to do their best to reach an agreement without angering the ter-
rorists further, since our objective was to get Omar back to his family.
We ended up “wiring” the cash from Baghdad to AQI in Mosul,
using an informal hawala money transfer network as instructed by Omar’s
captors. Hawala is a common Islamic nonbanking method for transferring
funds without actually moving money.^3 We delivered the cash to the AQI-
designated hawala rep in Baghdad, and the Mosul hawala rep gave the same