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Watching mujahadeen moviesHostage: The Jill Carroll story, Part 5
Editor's note: The following is a content summary of Part 5 of the Jill Carroll series on The Christian Science Monitor. (The Christian Science Monitor It was beautiful, really. I could stare in it and get lost. I thought, I wish I was there, I wish I was there. But my captors wanted me to look at something very different: DVDs of them waging war. By their count they were killing dozens or even hundreds of soldiers a day. They could prove it, they said, with videos of their operations showing Humvees and tanks blowing up and snipers shooting soldiers. So Abu Ali sat me down to show me the videos. They were all in Arabic, and were stamped with the of symbols of various insurgent groups, and included audio overlays of mujahadeen singing in low, somber tones. Others had pictures of an American Humvee driving along, and then it would blow up, and they'd cut to a graphic of a lightning flash, and thunder clapping. Abu Ali would glance over at me as I watched the videos, asking me what I thought of them. I couldn't say anything good, but I tried to say things that were true, like "Oh, this is the first time I've ever seen this, I didn't know this was out there". To Abu Ali, though, this was their mission, a righteous path; this was their work for God. While I sat there watching them I felt like the insurgents were sending me a message: they hate Americans so much, they're proud of these attacks. It's normal to them. At the beginning of my ordeal I had hoped my kidnappers were amateurs who wouldn't really know what to do with me and would start to get very nervous after a few days. So then they'd let me go. But -- beginning about the time of the showing of the videos -- it became increasingly clear to me that they were the real deal. During the precious few hours when the electricity worked, they would sometimes plug in a cassette player, and an angry voice would blare in classical Arabic from the room across the hall, where the guards slept. I usually only understood a few words, like "America," "Israel," and "occupation," but the point was clear. "Do you know who that is?" one of the guards asked me at one point. "That is Sheikh Abu Musab. Is he a good man? What is your opinion of Zarqawi?" Click here Coming Monday: Part 6: Reciting Quranic verses Copyright 2006 The Christian Science Monitor 
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) -- One afternoon in the first week after I'd been taken -- and I'd been moved to yet another house -- Abu Ali called me into a big sitting room with green velveteen couches. On the far wall, above the TV, was a gigantic poster of waterfalls and rocks and trees.
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