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Carroll: Insurgents made Shiites top targetHostage: The Jill Carroll story, Part 8
Editor's note: The following is a content summary of Part 8 of the Jill Carroll series on The Christian Science Monitor.  Jill Carroll learned to recognize the signs of when her captors had been out planting bombs. SPECIAL REPORT
• Interactive: Who's who in Iraq
• Interactive: Sectarian divide
• Timeline: Bloodiest days for civilians
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(The Christian Science Monitor Abu Rasha was a large man, one of the organizers of my guards. His house in Baghdad -- or what I took to be his house -- was one of the first places I'd been taken after being kidnapped. I'd spent a lot of time in his presence. But I'd never encountered him in a state like this. "Today was very, very bad," he said. "All day, driving here, and driving there, with the PKC and the RPG," he said, referring to Russian-made machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, which were among the insurgents' most common weapons. It had been a day of hard fighting. But they hadn't been confronting U.S. or Iraqi soldiers. Today, they had had a different target: Shiites. Two days earlier, on February 22, an important Shiite mosque in Samarra, Iraq, had blown up. Shiites had attacked Sunni mosques in retaliation -- the result being a vicious cycle of attack-and-response that had altered the world of my Sunni Islamist kidnappers. We arrived back at the place I called the "clubhouse," near Salman Pak, later that night. Slumped in a plastic chair in a room lit by the stark half-light of a fluorescent camping lantern, another mujahid told me their new bottom line. "Aisha," he said, calling me by the Sunni nickname they'd given me, "now our No. 1 enemy are the Shias. Americans are No. 2." One morning at the location I knew as the mujahideen clubhouse I awoke to find fresh dirt in the bathroom, dirt in the shower, and dirt in the washing machine. I didn't think much of it. Maybe they were washing their shoes. But I quickly learned that the appearance of dirt meant that someone in the house had been out planting bombs -- IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, the mujahideen weapon of choice. I knew from my reporting, and the time I spent embedded with U.S. Marines, that IEDs were now responsible for about half of all U.S. combat deaths in Iraq. Not all their explosives were offensive weapons. At least one of my guards -- Abu Hassan, a serious man -- wore a suicide vest inside the clubhouse. One night, he was leaning over a little gas-powered stove, cooking eggs and potatoes in oil, and then he sat back and pushed the open flame away, saying something like, "Oh, have to be careful!" The suicide vest was under his shirt, sort of swinging back and forth. He was afraid the fire would ignite the explosives. And if it did, we'd all be dead. He used to complain about how heavy it was. He'd wear it at night. He would mime for me what would happen if soldiers came, showing how he'd put it on, with shoulder straps, and then how two wires would connect. Then he would move his hands outward in a big motion indicating an explosion, look upward, and go, "BOOM!" Click here Coming tomorrow: Part 9: The Muj brothers Copyright 2006 The Christian Science Monitor 
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) -- "Abu Rasha is very tired. It was a very busy day," said Abu Nour's No. 2, speaking in the third person, as night fell like its own black scarf on the world outside. 
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