236 AMERICAN SPY
able to speak at length with one hostage, a successful Christian car dealer
from Mosul who had been held over forty days.
Immediately after Omar arrived at the first house, the jihadi whom
tough guy Hassan had humiliated in the car burst into the house, extremely
angry. He wanted to kill Omar, but the other captors prevented him from
doing so, since they said Omar was worth more alive than dead. The
furious jihadi fired several rounds near Omar’s head and stormed out of
the house. Note that had Hassan killed the jihadi when they were in the car,
AQI would have killed Omar in retaliation.
Omar said his captors moved him from house to house in Mosul.
Dying of thirst, he asked a child who lived in one house to bring him water.
The child refused.
Barefoot, Omar discovered that the floor was sticky, with the still-moist
bloodstains left by previous hostages. The entire time he was in captivity, his
thoughts were only of his children, since he assumed that AQI would kill
him. He knew nothing about the ongoing negotiations between AQI and
Babylon Inc. One day, the terrorists put Omar into a vehicle and took him
to a remote spot along the banks of the Tigris River. They made him kneel
down and put a gun to his head. Omar began to pray. The terrorist pulled
the trigger, but it just clicked. There were no rounds in the chamber. They
were just “toying” with him, inflicting emotional abuse because they could.
Another day, a filthy, smelly, scraggly-bearded terrorist came into the
house where fellow Sunni Omar was being held and sat down to talk with
him, apparently eager for conversation. The jihadi told Omar that he was
an AQI sniper and that he was filthy because he posed as a beggar on the
streets (beggars are a sad and common sight to this day in Iraq, and they
are typically women and children). He told Omar that because people tend
to avoid looking at beggars, this made it easy for him to hide in plain view
anywhere he wanted in the city. He told Omar that he had just recently
begun to work as a sniper for AQI. Omar asked him how many people he
had killed, and he replied that so far he had killed six military and police
targets. The sniper said AQI paid him twenty-five thousand Iraqi dinars—
just under twenty-five dollars—per kill. Omar later heard that the man
went on to become known as “the Sniper of Mosul.”
Omar never told his captors that he worked for an American company.
He told them Babylon Inc. was owned by a Sunni who lived outside Iraq,