Out Of The Abyss

Imagine yourself in a city where everywhere you look, the scars of war and famine are indelibly imprinted on the landscape.

Buildings are bombed-out, main roads are unsealed and littered with potholes, gangs of gun-toting youths parade in open-air vehicles, and more than half-a-million people without a home live in a makeshift camp under any shelter they can find.

Danger lurks on every street corner, particularly for you, who look so different to everyone else. The only person you know in this foreign land is your travelling partner.

And then, as you are driving along a dusty road, a vehicle pulls out from a side alley. Half-a-dozen young men drag you out of your car. The ambush goes down in broad daylight, but no one comes to help.

You are taken to a dirty, abandoned house. Location: unknown. And as your captors menace their AK47s in your direction, you are gripped by fear and panic…and the realisation that you have just become a hostage.

The next 462 days will be spent sitting on a concrete floor, being physically and psychologically tortured. You have no one to talk to, you are fed just once a day, and you have no idea if the next day will be your last.

And one more thing. You are relying on your family back home to raise more than one million dollars to pay for a crack team of commandos to get you out.

No, it’s not a script idea for Bruce Willis to resurrect his testosterone-fuelled, gun-toting Die Hard franchise, although one day, this story might just end up on the big screen. In fact, there is nothing fictional or ‘Hollywood’ about this scenario, at all.

For 15 months, this was the life of Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan who was kidnapped at gunpoint in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, while on a freelance assignment with Canadian reporter Amanda Lindhout.

At the time, governments around the world warned against travel to Somalia because of a civil war which had torn the country apart for 20 years, and left an estimated one million people dead in the process.

Mogadishu was in anarchy. Gangs and clans ruled the streets. Buildings and homes were reduced to rubble in the mortar attacks. International peacekeeping forces could do little to calm a city which was essentially lawless and ruled by the gun.

As the violence reached its peak in 2008, half-a-million people fled the capital, only to end up at internally displaced refugee camps elsewhere in the country. There were five of these settlements in Somalia with more than 1.5 million people living under tents, tarpaulins and anything they could find for shelter.

The misery inflicted by war was compounded by years of drought. Many parts of Somalia only receive about 100 mm of rain per year and when even those paltry amounts did not eventuate, the country was ravaged. Thousands who had survived the violence died from famine.

All of which begs the question why Nigel Brennan went there in the first place. He was a highly-regarded photographer who had won national acclaim for his portraiture and documentary work. But as a freelance photojournalist, he had a long-held an ambition to make a career in conflict and disaster reporting.

Well before his trip to Somalia, Brennan said his father had asked him to reconsider his attraction to the world’s danger spots.

“Dad said he really didn’t want me to go into a war zone because he was concerned that something was going to happen to me,” Brennan said.

"But he said that at the end of the day, it's my life and I have to do what I want to do. And if that's a dream, then follow that dream."

And so he did. His first foray was a trip to Ethiopia to work on a project about how the country was rebuilding after years of famine and drought. It was this trip which opened his eyes to the humanitarian disaster in neighbouring Somalia.

Brennan said the lack of international media coverage – partly because the country was so dangerous – alarmed him and, at the same time, presented an opportunity.

“I could have gone to other conflicts like Afghanistan or Iraq but there were already big international media organisations which were covering those sorts of stories,” Brennan said.

“So, I went to Somalia because…I wanted people to get an understanding of what had occurred in that country and the horror that people have had to live with.”

But instead of reporting the story, he quickly became the story. Just three days in to the trip, Brennan, Lindhout and their minders were kidnapped while driving through Mogadishu on their way to one of the internally displaced refugee camps.

For the local militia in Somalia, people like Brennan and Lindhout were prize hostage targets. They were westerners, they were from the media and they were going to command a large ransom for their freedom.

Their capture was the start of a 15-month nightmare. The pair was taken to a vacant house on the outskirts of Mogadishu and thrown in a small room. It was the first of 11 different houses they would be held in. All of them were vacant and dirty. Most were inhabited by cockroaches and rats.

For the first three months of captivity, Brennan and Lindhout at least had each other’s company while under guard in a room no bigger than three metres-by-three metres.

At one location, this gave them time to plot an escape when the window of the room they were held in opened out on to a laneway.

They made a chaotic dash around a village they had never seen before. Urged on by adrenalin and the threat of death, they ran…without really knowing where to.

The pair ended up at the local mosque, begging locals to help them. But their captors were not far behind and as gunfire flashed around the mosque, Brennan and Lindhout were cornered and recaptured.

It was a turning point, for the worse, in their hostage ordeal.

The pair was moved again and placed in separate rooms. They did not see or speak to one another except when they were transported to another location.

For the next 11 months, both were shackled and brutalised, and had to survive on a starvation diet and dirty water.

Brennan wrote in his book – The Price Of Life – that the despair of isolation drove his mind to some very dark places. He didn’t know how long he would be in captivity. He didn’t know how the captors were treating Amanda. He didn’t know how he could survive each day, staring at four walls, with no one to talk to. He didn’t know if he was going to be killed.

“At times I’ve been my own worst enemy as I’ve hung onto hope, but that seems to have evaporated and now I’m just living with fear. There are times when I just wish they would finish it.”

All the while, the militias were in contact with the Brennan and Lindhout families, trying to extort money for the release of Nigel and Amanda. The initial demand was for $US3 million.

The Australian and Canadian governments stepped in to assist the families negotiate with the hostage takers. But the position of both countries was steadfast: “we do not pay ransoms”.

Australian Federal Police (AFP) moved in to the home of Brennan’s parents in Bundaberg so they could monitor the kidnappers’ phone calls.

Nigel’s sister, Nicky, became the crack hostage negotiator with the responsibility of trying to placate the ransom demands of a Somali criminal gang while also pleading for her brother’s life.

The rescue mission had other leads. Staff from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and other Australian security agencies were using their contacts in Somalia to try to find out where Brennan and Lindhout were being held, and how they might be rescued.

But they were dealing with criminals – some were just teenage boys – who had known war for all of their lives. Violence was a means of survival. Life was fickle. Death held no fear.

With Nigel and Amanda as hostages, this was their chance for a huge pay day, but only if they could avoid detection while continuing to make threatening demands for a ransom.

Weeks turned in to months as the Brennan family became increasingly frustrated with the government’s rescue strategy, which rarely showed signs of breaking through the murky and erratic world of Somali militia and clan politics.

Eventually, against all the advice of the AFP and DFAT, the families decided that the only way to get Nigel and Amanda home was to pay the ransom.

Going out on their own had risks. The Australian and Canadian governments could no longer provide support once the families had agreed to meet the extortion demands of the hostage takers.

The task was made even more difficult because neither of the journalists had taken out kidnap and ransom insurance before heading in to Somalia. The ransom money would have to be raised by the families from scratch.

For the Brennan family – parents Geoff and Heather; siblings Nicky, Hamilton and Matt, and their partners – the emotional and physical stress consumed them, day-in and day-out, as the stand-off dragged on.

They worked jobs, owned businesses, ran farms, and had their own children to care for. And at the same time, they were trying to conduct international hostage negotiations with criminals who viewed Nigel and Amanda as a financial transaction rather than human beings.

Brennan is chastened by the consequences of his naiveté and inadequate preparation for Somalia. Mistakes: he made a few.

“I realise my ambition and drive to make a name for myself came at an enormous expense – and not just monetary – with the trauma that I put my family through by placing myself in an incredibly dangerous position,” he said.

“During captivity…the one thing that ate away at me the whole time was the guilt and the shame that I had for doing that to my family.”

The Brennans sold houses and cars, cashed-in superannuation savings and held fundraising events as they tried to scratch together a sum of money which would at least give them something to negotiate with the hostage takers.

Added to their costs was the hiring of a kidnap and ransom (K&R) company in England, which had been contracted to go in to Somalia to rescue Nigel and Amanda.

The K&R personnel – some of whom were SAS soldiers – helped the two families negotiate a ransom. They knew the kidnappers would be under considerable stress keeping Nigel and Amanda alive by constantly moving location to avoid being caught.

The negotiations were highly-charged and on a knife’s edge. Experience told the K&R team that if anything went wrong, the easiest thing for the kidnappers would be to kill the hostages and run.

Throughout these negotiations, the gang made numerous threats, including a particularly chilling one which caused Brennan and Lindhout to think that they might never get out of Somalia alive.

“There was a threat of us being on-sold to Al-Shabaab (the Somali-based cell of al-Qaeda) and our kidnappers told us they had offered the (Al-Shabaab) gang half-a-million dollars for us,” Brennan said.

“The danger was that Al-Shabaab was a much bigger organisation and had the potential to hold us for a much longer period of time.”

Fortunately, it turned out to be an idle threat and negotiations with the families finally got to a point where the ransom figure was knocked down to $US750,000.

The parties had settled on a deal but just as Kellie Brennan (Nigel’s sister-in-law) prepared to transfer the money to Somalia for the K&R team to collect, Australian authorities made contact to point out the risk she was taking with her own life.

“She was informed that what she was about to do was going to break 13 international and Commonwealth laws,” Nigel said.

“And one of those laws had the capacity to put her in jail for 25 years-to-life if that money was seen to go to a terrorist organisation.”

To this day, Brennan does not know if it was a friendly warning or a veiled threat by Australian government officials. But the family remains upset about the message being conveyed – particularly from their own government – at a time when they were on the verge of securing Nigel’s release.

For Kellie, even the dark spectre of being accused of international money laundering was no deterrent.

“As I sign the paperwork (to transfer the money), I start crying,” she writes in The Price Of Life.

“These are tears of happiness. I’m happy that this nightmare is nearly over, happy that this pile of money the family has been working so hard for is finally going towards getting Nige back.”

The extraction team flew in to Somalia and set-up in Mogadishu: a city rated among the most dangerous in the world.

They waited, paced around hotel rooms and nervously ventured on to dangerous streets with three-quarters-of-a-million dollars strapped to their shoulders in two backpacks.

But the hostage takers continued to play games about where and how the exchange would take place.

The K&R extraction team spent four days in Mogadishu, waiting for the phone call to close the deal. As the tension escalated, underground intelligence came through that the team was in danger because local gangs had become aware of the booty they were carrying.

The deal was off and the extraction team jumped straight on a plane out of Somalia to neighbouring Kenya.

At the same time, they told the hostage takers that $US80,000 had been taken off the ransom because they had failed to make the deal.

Brennan was still in isolation and oblivious to the high stakes game of brinkmanship between his captors and his rescuers.

He later described the dropping of the ransom amount as “incredibly ‘ballsy’, seeing you were playing with two people’s lives”. But he also understood how the K&R team wanted to send a message to the hostage takers that there was a price to pay for being deceptive.

The extraction team returned to Mogadishu weeks later and this time the hostage takers were quick to make the deal. The exchange was chaotic, dramatic and charged with tension as the SAS soldiers tried to assess if the Somali criminals could be trusted.

But eventually the reduced ransom of $658,000 was handed over and, in return, Nigel and Amanda were given their freedom.

Continued - go to part #2