An American journalist held captive for nearly two years by Al Qaeda’s official branch in Syria has been freed, according to a representative of the journalist’s family and a report on Sunday by the Al Jazeera network.
The journalist, Peter Theo Curtis, was abducted near the Syria-Turkey border in October 2012. He was held by the Nusra Front, the Qaeda affiliate in Syria, which has broken with the more radical Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. Another American journalist, James W. Foley, who was kidnapped in Syria the following month, was beheaded last week by ISIS, which posted images of his execution on YouTube.
A family friend confirmed on Sunday that Mr. Curtis, originally from Boston, had been handed over to a United Nations representative. The family friend spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In a video made in June and obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Curtis is seen looking disheveled, with long, unkempt hair. Speaking from a script, he says his captors had treated him well and that he “had everything” he needed. “Everything has been perfect: food, clothing, even friends,” he says in the video.
That description of his captivity is at odds with the accounts given by the American photojournalist Matthew Schrier, who escaped in July 2013 after being held for seven months, much of the time alongside Mr. Curtis in the same prison.
Mr. Schrier described being tortured and starved by his masked jailers. In an interview soon after he regained his freedom, Mr. Schrier said his captors had forced a car tire over his knees, immobilized him with a wooden rod slid behind his legs, rolled him face down on a cement floor and beat the soles of his feet until he could not walk.
Desperate to escape, Mr. Schrier said in the interview, he managed, while standing on his cellmate’s back, to unravel some wires in an opening in the wall of their cell. That allowed him to wiggle through the opening, he said, but his cellmate, who was slightly heavier-set, became stuck and decided to stay in the cell, urging Mr. Schrier to go on without him.
The cellmate was Mr. Curtis, who endured 13 more months in captivity before the announcement of his freedom on Sunday. At the request of his family, news organizations, including The Times, agreed not to identify him in their reports of Mr. Schrier’s experiences, until now.
The Nusra Front and ISIS were once a single organization, but the two groups split over ideological and tactical differences, with ISIS going its own way and Nusra remaining loyal to Al Qaeda’s central command. One of the issues that divided them was the acceptable level of brutality; since the split, Al Qaeda has criticized the unrestrained attacks by the fundamentalist Sunni militants of ISIS against Shiite Muslims.
Three Americans are now believed to be captives of ISIS — two men and one woman. The group has threatened to behead one of them, the journalist Steven J. Sotloff, if the United States does not meet its demands, including stopping airstrikes.
Both ISIS and the Nusra Front use kidnappings to finance their operations, as other Qaeda affiliates do. While the United States has refused to pay ransom, European nations have secretly funneled large sums to terror cells to obtain the release of hostages, including four French citizens freed this year. Al Qaeda’s direct affiliates are estimated to have reaped at least $125 million in ransom payments since 2008, most of it paid by European governments through intermediaries.
NYTimes.
