Stephen Farrell, a reporter for The New York Times, and Sultan M. Munadi, an Afghan journalist working with him, were kidnapped by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan on Saturday. In a British raid to free them early Wednesday, Mr. Munadi was killed, as was a British soldier who has not been identified. This is Mr. Farrell’s account of the four-day ordeal.

Mid-to-late morning on Friday, Sept. 4, we in the Kabul bureau began hearing reports of an explosion in a Taliban-controlled area near the northern city of Kunduz.

It was clear that this was going to be a major controversy, involving allegations of civilian deaths against NATO claims that the dead were Taliban. Furthermore, it was in an area that was becoming increasingly newsworthy because it was becoming more troubled by insurgents.

My colleague Rich Oppel and I began discussing the story, and I forewarned the Afghan staff that they should at least begin thinking about logistics for a possible drive north, for a decision to be taken later.

The drivers made a few phone calls and said the road north appeared to be safe until mid- to late afternoon. It was close to the cut-off point, but if we left immediately we could do it. We left within minutes.

En route, I called in to the bureau to check with Rich on how the story was developing. He said the Kunduz police were saying that there were only adult male patients at the main hospital in Kunduz, leaving it unclear whether they were civilians or Taliban.

We saw that the highway we were on was going to pass through Ali Abad, a village near the location of the blast.

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We decided not to stop and made straight for the hospital. But after we passed through Ali Abad, Sultan saw a man walking along the road, and suggested we offer him a lift and talk to him as we drove. We did but he was unhelpful beyond generally proffering local rumors. A few miles farther on, we ran into a fortified police checkpoint. Sultan began talking to the police and gleaned the exact location of the tanker blast, the substance of the story and that it was not safe to go off the main highway to the site, which we had no intention of doing that late anyway.

We went directly to the hospital, which was crowded with patients, doctors, journalists — including one Western woman from Reuters news agency — and International Committee of the Red Cross officials. The reactions to us were very benign. We took extensive notes and interviews with two patients including a young boy of 10 who said he was injured in the blast, and went straight to the hotel in Kunduz to spend the night. The hotel had armed guards. While there I spoke to a Western journalist from Al Jazeera English, who said he had been to, or near, the scene in the afternoon, but that he had not felt safe to go into the villages.



On Saturday, Sept. 5, I woke up in Kunduz to begin the second day of reporting.

We did what we had not dared do at such a late hour on Friday. We drove south of Kunduz along the main Kabul highway until we reached the turnoff.

I checked with Sultan and the driver to see if they felt safe going there, and they said it seemed all right. We edged along a narrow country lane and came out on the riverbank with the tankers a few hundred yards ahead.

We did not go up to the tankers themselves, which were stranded in the middle of the river, but stayed on the towpath. I briefly filmed the vehicles while Sultan and the driver spoke to Afghans beneath a tree, dividing the duties to save time.

I then rejoined Sultan and the driver and we began interviewing an Afghan beneath the tree, getting his account of what happened. He said that the Taliban — he later amended it to ”armed men” — had stolen the tanker, failed to drive it across the river and then commanded residents of nearby villages to bring tractors to help ferry away the load.

Word quickly spread, according to the witness — supporting the evidence from the hospital the night before — and many ran to the site with jerrycans, eager for free fuel in an impoverished area.

As the interviewee spoke I was checking with Sultan and he seemed relaxed: there was no sign of hostility from the crowd, only faces eager to tell a story.

A crowd began to gather, time passed and we grew nervous. I do not know how long we were there, but it was uncomfortably long. I am comfortable with the decision to go to the riverbank, but fear we spent too long there.

I said, “We should go,” almost exactly as Sultan said the same thing.

An old man said we should not tarry. The driver went to the car. Even as we were carrying our gear bags to the car, villagers shouted, “Taliban,” and scattered away from the river. Our driver fled, with the keys. His instincts were immaculate — he survived.

Sultan and I fled a shorter distance, stopped and tried to gauge where we were running, and from whom. Should we stay and hope they did not cross the river toward us, or flee straight across unknown fields and run the risk of being cut down by Taliban in the field ahead of us, shooting at anything that moved?

We hovered, and got caught. The first one to wade across the river hit Sultan with his Kalashnikov and began shouting at him. Then he appeared to calm down, pointed at the car and toward the main road, seemingly ordering us to leave.

We could not, because we did not have the keys. He could not understand why we refused to comply, and became enraged again.

Other Taliban arrived and forced us to wade across the river to the far bank at gunpoint. There was no point trying to resist, Sultan advised, just go with them. I was still carrying my camera equipment and was thinking that at least we had interviews with civilians talking about civilian casualties, which should establish our credentials as journalists who were drawing attention to a controversial NATO strike. This later proved very useful to demonstrate who we were and what we were doing.

I reached the other side of the river and was immediately bound, my hands behind my back, and blindfolded, very badly. One Talib drove off with me on a motorcycle at high speed, crashing at one point as we overbalanced.

Sultan followed behind.

Once away from immediate pursuit, they transferred me to a waiting car and drove into the dusty back roads of Char Dara District at high speed. “Russian?” one asked me, a question that seemed so out of recent historical context that it made my heart sink.

They unloaded me at a tree and began questioning me, but not in a hostile manner. After half an hour of questions, they summoned more Taliban and drove me back to where Sultan was being held. From that moment on we were not separated.

Apart from the initial swing of the rifle at Sultan right at the outset, neither of us was subjected to any beatings, torture or ill-treatment over the next four days. Quite the reverse — they offered food and water to me even though it was during the Ramadan fast (apart from the first drink at a time when I had been running and fallen off the motorcycle, I declined during the fasting period). Sultan repeatedly prayed alongside them.

For four days they drove us around Char Dara, almost always in the same old Toyota Corolla, sometimes with masked and turbaned motorcycle outriders, rocket-propelled grenades sticking out of backpacks in full daylight, just a few miles from the main Kabul-to-Kunduz road.

They delighted in showing off, at one point driving within 500 meters of what they said were government and NATO watchtowers — gleeful at their daring, at others they drove with headlights full on at night as they moved us from house to house, at least three different buildings a day.

It became a tour of a Taliban-controlled district of Afghanistan, and that control appeared total. At no point did we see a single NATO soldier, Afghan policeman, soldier or any check to the Taliban’s ability to move at will.

We did see two green Afghan police pickup trucks, both full of Taliban fighters and weapons. “This is our jail,” went the running commentary. “This is the checkpoint where we expelled the government forces.”

It felt like a military embed with the American military, except at gunpoint. “You spend enough time with the Americans, you should spend some time with us,” one of the Taliban said, making the comparison explicit. In fact I had not spent any time with the American military in Afghanistan, but it seemed unwise to correct him.

There was no doubting the absolute force of their writ in the area southwest of Kunduz, which we traversed time and again, in an area of cornfields, rice plantations, mud brick villages, waterways and other farmlands, measuring perhaps eight miles long by three or four miles wide. They drove down lanes, through villages, stopping at will and talking to residents, boasting about how the people provided a willing intelligence service to them. The extent of volition was impossible to determine, but the Taliban were the only armed presence I saw there for four days.

Interestingly, they paid when they needed gas for the car, instead of just commandeering it, which they could have easily done. Some villagers appeared very friendly, others more wary and formally polite.

Motorists unfailingly gave way as soon as they saw a Taliban car coming in the other direction, and snapped to a smile and an Islamic greeting. Whether through consent or fear was impossible to read on the faces of villages who were rarely allowed glimpses of us, except at favored stops and safe houses. Then we were paraded to the children in the street: the infidel and his translator, to be laughed at and mocked.

At first they seemed seamlessly efficient — teams of motorcycle riders would come from nowhere, ushering us to our next destination, where we would quickly be guided — not pushed — into a room out of the sight of prying electronic eyes above.

The teams changed — the captor team gave way to the guard team. “We are just looking after you,” one Talib said, bored by yet another attempt to convince him of our credentials as journalists. “The people who captured you, they are checking out whether you are journalists, and independent journalists.”

That was a crucial distinction, Sultan impressed upon me. They seemed to believe we were genuine, not least from their repeated satisfied “aahs” when we played and replayed the video of the tankers, and of a NATO armored car they claimed to have destroyed some days earlier. But their elders remained to be convinced.

There were good hours, and bad ones. Progress and setbacks. They reported to Sultan that their elders — the word “commandant” was used frequently — thought that we were “not security people so are to be treated well.”

But then our status as journalists was called into question again, and it became an endless series of assurances and reassurances. They allowed Sultan to talk to his mother and father, which was encouraging, but on the second day Sultan picked up that they might be seeking money, and on Day 3 an exchange of prisoners. He became glum at this, especially so when two Taliban told him that while they were confident that an exchange could be arranged for me, not so for him.

They offered no evidence of this, or any of the welter of conflicting claims we heard. Indeed, they appeared sometimes to be playing with our heads. “You, three days, Kabul,” one said to me, smiling. And he was the least likely smiler and encourager I had met of the entire crews. Another said 10 to 15 days. It was impossible to read motives behind words.

“Do you know anyone in the government, you should get them to work on this,” one relatively friendly Talib told Sultan early on the final day.

Another reminded him that an Italian journalist had once been exchanged, but his translator was not so fortunate. “He was beheaded,” the unsmiling youngster said, to Sultan’s face. He translated it, faithfully but with a gray face.

Our guards, usually six or eight in number, were hugely unpredictable.

One became enraged when I urinated standing up, deeming it an offense to local families. He then calmed down and asked me to teach him how to count to 10 in English. Another kept trying to convert me to Islam, amid endless conversations with Sultan about Islam, working with Americans and his job.

When they bundled us into cars, they would sit with half a dozen rocket-propelled grenades bouncing around inside the car down rutted country lanes, or Kalashnikovs pointing at our, or their own, heads.

As the days wore on they seemed to be more relaxed with me, more verbally sharp to Sultan. (One Talib apologized for that blow to Sultan in the first minute, saying they could not always get good quality people.)

As Day 2 passed into 3, amid a blur of different houses and days spent sleeping, hoping and worrying, the mood changed. It became harder for them to find safe houses. They would get lost down ever narrower and ever more obscure country lanes. We would arrive at a building late at night, bang on the gate and eventually be admitted — never knowing if the Taliban had just picked on a house at random and demanded entrance or arranged it in advance.

Although their discipline was good in their conduct toward us, their operational security was hopelessly inept. So much so that the supposed team leader would be bellowing my name and the word “journalist” repeatedly into his Nokia cellphone — they all had Nokias operating on almost no battery life and no reception — heedless of who was, almost certainly, monitoring the calls. From the car’s cassette recorder blared the words “Taliban, Taliban” in song.

They were not making it hard.

By Day 2 or 3, new characters emerged. One very scary, powerfully built Talib, who seemed to inspire awe among his underlings, sat staring at us, saying almost nothing. When they finally found a house with electricity, two youngsters produced a tape recorder and began blaring hours of religious sermons, praising Osama bin Laden, the mujahedeen of Chechnya, Somalia, Helmand, Kandahar and anyone fighting the Americans. The repeated mention of prominent extremist groups and individuals, such as Hizb-i-Islami and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf did nothing to ease our fears about being handed over to other Taliban or Qaeda groups.

We also began hearing the word “Baghlan” shouted into cellphones, a town and province south of Kunduz. This made me nervous as I felt that these Talibs were strictly local, and operated only within their own comfort zone of these few square miles. Transferring us to another area could not be good.

The hectoring and attempts at converting me accelerated, and the demands to know why I would not convert, what I thought of the Prophet Muhammad, and so on. One, named Amman, said he wanted me to invite him to my home country of Ireland — I have dual Irish/British nationality — to start jihad. He at least appeared to be doing so out of a genuine conviction that it was his duty to bring me to Islam, occasionally tossing me cinnamon candies during the fasting period, which I declined to eat during the day. Others were harsher in tone.

On the third night, just before the 3 a.m. meal — Muslims breakfast very early to comply with the Ramadan daytime fast — there was a scare. Aerial activity intensified, and there were loud explosions in nearby fields. We, and the Taliban, took this as an attempt to free us. They fled with us in minutes, racing across open fields in the dark until they found another refuge.

From that point I noticed that the “A team” of hardened Taliban fighters disappeared, leaving only youths. On the fourth day, there was more indoctrination and more racing around homes. But the level of planning had fallen away dramatically, which was alarming. They appeared to be going farther and farther afield to find safe houses; the meals dwindled to just bread and butter instead of the feasts of grapes, fish, meat and sweets on earlier days, and the dirt tracks they were using were almost impassable.

When we finally arrived at the house where we were to spend the fourth, and last, night, Sultan and I were left alone in the car for a rare two minutes. I warned him that if there was to be a rescue, it might well be tonight, because the moon was much fainter than the two previous nights, and clearly something had been happening in the air the night before. He was trying to be upbeat, but was increasingly despondent about his own chances.

We waited, and half-slept. The noise of the spotter drones overhead intensified, turned into a louder buzz, then multiple engine noises, rotors, and then gunshots and explosions. The half-dozen or so Taliban in the room rolled from their mattresses, snatched up their rocket-propelled grenades and ran from the room.

We absolutely expected them to cut us down as they ran. We were crouching targets in a long, narrow room devoid of anything but walls and matting. We were no longer of any use to them, and belonged to their hated enemy who had manifestly just arrived and presented a far harder target than we did.

The last Talib out of the room turned round, his Kalashnikov rising and falling with hesitation. It was the half-smiling, half-scowling Talib with whom we had bonded the most — the one I had taught to count to 10 in English. He had looked bewildered on Day 2 as I couldn’t suppress laughter when he played me the English language option on his cellphone menu: “Press 6 for Help. Press 7 for Exit.”

He had second thoughts and, in the final analysis, lack of conviction. It would have delayed him half a second to cut us in two.

Even if he hadn’t thought about it, our behavior was making it clear we had. I grabbed the thickest cushion I could find and, more substantively, the torso-sized sized camera bag onto which I had been holding for four days for — in part — precisely this outcome. It was filled with metal, hard plastic, mini-tripods and a metal camera light. I hid behind the cushion and bag, and Sultan hid behind me.

The Talib jerked his head for us to follow, and left. We had no intention of running out of a room and then a courtyard with a group of rocket-carrying Taliban into an oncoming American — we wrongly assumed — raid. Once the Taliban had gone, we ran to the door, Sultan ahead of me because I had to pick up the camera bag and put on Western sneakers, which takes more time than sliding into Afghan flip-flops.

I lost him. Inside the courtyard I was merely a lone sitting target in a slightly larger enclosed space, so I ducked and ran out the gate.

Someone loomed out of the dark. I lost my balance and fell back, my leg still somewhat impaired from the motorcycle accident.

It was Sultan, in the last minute of his life. He held out a hand, steadied me and asked if I had my contact lenses in, which I had. With him already in front we crouch-ran along a very narrow ledge of earth — less than a foot wide — along the outer wall of the compound.

It was dark. There were trees to our left and a high mud-brick wall to our right. We could see nothing more than a few feet in front of us.

We had no idea who was where, and there were bullets flying through the air.

I could hear Taliban voices shouting and shooting from trees to our left, I thought. I could also hear indistinct voices ahead. We continued 20 yards along the wall until it suddenly reached the corner.

With the still indistinct voices ahead — but I do not know what Sultan could see or hear — he carried straight on beyond the corner of the wall, bringing him out into the open. Wearing the same pale salwar kameez he had worn for four days he raised his hands and shouted, “Journaliste, journaliste,” even as he stepped out. It was accented, in exactly the same way he had used 1,000 times in four days talking to the Taliban.

In the dark I could not see around him to discover who he was trying to reassure: the troops that he wasn’t Taliban, or the Taliban that he wasn’t a soldier.

There was a burst of gunfire and he went down immediately. In the dark, with firing all around, trees everywhere and my view obscured by him and the wall, I did not know whether the bullets came from in front, to his right or to his left.

I had already reared back at the sound of gunfire and dived into a two-foot deep ditch with water at the bottom. I dragged out the camera light to flash it if necessary. I could hear a blur of voices, but could still not make out the direction from which they came. I waited a minute or two, raising my head, turning it left and right to get a better sense of what they were, and where they were coming from.

Vague sounds coalesced into northern British vowels. One voice was urging someone to get a ladder up over the wall and into the compound we had just left. Pressing my face down as low as I could I screamed, “British hostage, British hostage,” and flashed the light once, very briefly to tell them the direction. I heard a voice saying something like: “British hostage approach me with your hands in the air and lie down on the ground.”

I complied, dropping the camera bag and all its contents. While I wanted to keep my equipment, emerging suddenly from the dark carrying a bag seemed an insane risk.

I lay on the ground, gave my name and newspaper and pointed to where Sultan was lying behind me, telling them I thought he had been shot.

The body was lying motionless in the ditch where I had seen him go down. I hoped he had dropped and was lying still. I knew it wasn’t the case. They told me they had his picture and would look for him, then dragged me away past the house across a rutted field and toward the helicopter landing zone.

It was over. Sultan was dead. He had died trying to help me, right up to the very last seconds of his life.

There were some celebrations among the mainly British soldiers on the aircraft home, which soon fell silent. It later emerged that one of the rescue party was also dead, mortally wounded during the raid. His blood-soaked helmet was in front of me throughout the flight. I thanked everyone who was still alive to thank. It wasn’t, and never will be, enough.