Ransomed Al-Qaeda Hostage Speaks Out: Part 2/2
A guest post from Jeff Woodke.
Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.
Rain soothed my morning as I woke and made my coffee. I sipped it slowly to the chatter of water in the downspouts and the soft light of a candle that smelled of quiet and pie. The shock of the election a week or so earlier was fading to a dull numbness. It was Nov. 13, 2024. I was 64 years old. Falling water was as a birthday song to me. Most of my birthdays over the past eight years had not been so peaceful. On Oct. 14, 2016, I was kidnapped by Al-Qaeda terrorists while at work in the town of Abalak, Niger. They took me hundreds of miles west to northern Mali, where they kept me as a hostage for six years, five months and five days. Birthdays came and went there, along with all hope I had of ever leaving that place alive.
I’d worked in Niger for over 27 years when I was taken. I ran a Christian humanitarian organization there, serving the nomadic pastoralists in the Abalak region. We did about everything imaginable, from digging wells to helping communities adapt to climate change and reduce drought disasters. We kept people alive in famines and made sure young nomadic girls had schools to go to and medical care. My wife and family worked with me although we had shifted our permanent residence in 2006, when my youngest kids hit high school. We moved to McKinleyville, a small town in Humboldt County, up in the northern woods of California. I went back and forth, alone, from home to Niger — until an orange muzzle flash from an AK-47 ripped the dark night and I was captured. Men became ghosts that night; my friends died. They were torn from life. I was torn from reality.
I’ve written a memoir about my time in captivity, called From Nowhere to Forever. It’s my story not only of how I got through the ordeal, but also of how I confronted my own inner demons of depression and insanity. How I survived and forgave. Below is an excerpt. Here is Part 1.
Human trafficking is wrong. Treating humans as commodities for exchange is evil, no matter what the group is that does it, their reasons or rhetoric. If I manage to stay alive until my next birthday, I hope I’ll wake that morning, in a world with no more hostages, and where all of us are treated with humanity and respect.
— Jeff Woodke
Murderers’ Academy, Part 2
Loneliness plagued me in those days, along with isolation and solitude. With Hamza’s transformation I’d realized that, to them, I was an alien. I was as different from them as a creature from another planet. They didn’t care how long I suffered in their hands. I knew that I was a being they couldn’t recognize, and that made me feel even more lonely. In hostage mathematics, hope is inversely proportionate to loneliness; as it grew, my hope diminished.
Another anniversary, that of my second year in captivity, came and went. October 2018. Shit. It had been a year since the old Algerian cameraman had taken the proof-of-life video, that was supposedly “the first step in my liberation,” as he had put it. I had no clue if the publicity video I’d done in August had been posted on the internet or sent to my family. It had been a year since my last proof-of-life. A year since I had any hope of ongoing negotiations. I had no news. I felt abandoned. I only knew the wind, sky and the black stone hills that surrounded me.
A few days after the anniversary, search drones arrived, bringing a load of trouble with them. The terrorists hated the drones, becoming anxious, agitated and downright murderous when they were close or overhead. All they could do was hide or run. I didn’t think too highly of the drones, as you could hear them from miles away and they didn’t seem to see much. I lost count of how many times they flew over me and, apparently, saw nothing. The only thing they were good for in my opinion was pissing off the mujahedeen. And this group of drones got them upset indeed. Not one or two, but four at a time. Four drones ran a square search pattern above our camp. Above my boogie, a small shade hut. And they didn’t leave.
The result was a panicked meltdown by the two gun-toting teenagers guarding me. Rifle butts, punches, slaps, choke holds and a constant stream of the worst insults they could come up with were all sent my way as we evaded the planes. Those two made my life a living hell for a couple weeks as we outran the drones. After a 100-kilometer motorbike ride at night, we climbed up a rocky mountain slope, the bikes slipping and falling over, with me on the back of one. Our destination was a narrow valley surrounded by black peaks. Once we got there, I was made to build a hut not much bigger than the box I’d been shoved into back in the sand dunes months earlier. I’d not been allowed to bring any of my things besides a blanket, water bottle and spare shirt. It was miserably hot and I was physically and emotionally exhausted from the trip and the abuse.
Any emotional or psychological reserve I’d built up was depleted in that two-week period. Those kids had no reason to treat me this way. No reason outside of what they’d been taught in training. They reasoned that all kouffarwere worthy of mistreatment and death. Once we reached our drone-free destination, I wasn’t allowed to walk or exercise, and was kept in my suffocating hot little shade stall almost 24/7. I was now in my third year if captivity and I was back in a box. There was no reason to believe that this brutality would ever stop. I felt hopeless, depressed and once again, suicidal. Living a life like that was just not worth the pain.
Eventually, the zone commander showed up, and reprimanded the kids for being overzealous. He tried to cheer me up with a meal of rice and fresh organ meat, including two big ram’s testicles. But it would take more than ram balls to pry me from my funk. Depression once again overtook me, nuts or no nuts.
We moved again and again through a bizarre landscape of rocky peaks and forests of a strange plant called tirza,a euphorbia with poisonous white sap. Alien, that’s what I was. If I’d come to a place like this in my pre-hostage life, I would have considered it a bizarre landscape. Now, it was I who was odd, different, out of place and time. I didn’t fit here, and I didn’t think I could ever fit back into the world I’d left. Who and what I had been was slowly being dissolved, lost between the stalks of that bitter and poisonous forest. The sand dunes had broken me, and now these stone hills were erasing me. I felt I would disappear.
A white gash. A long slash of gully in the black rocks near the poison forest. The pale watercourse looked like a scraped knee would feel; torn, with black rocks like picked scabs on its margins. Home for now. Home for Christmas of 2018. What joy would the new year bring? I had a tree, but it was I who sat under it, and not presents. I had ornaments, but they were bizarre … and only seen at the close of the day. In dusky light, spiders as big as a hand would descend from hidden lairs on strands of silken tinsel. They did not glitter. They scurried, leaving the tinsel to tangle in my own silver hair.
I sang my Christmas songs on the eve, what else was there to do? I loved Christmas. It was my favorite holiday. I loved the joy of it; the lights, smells, frosty weather and Christmas Eve service. It was the best service of the year, hushed in candlelight and mystery. New Year’s Eve was never a marker for me; I considered Christmas Eve the line between old and new. We celebrated hope on Christmas; the birth of Jesus, the bright promise of love renewed. That year, stuck under a spider-infested tree growing in a slash of white sand on a black slope, I struggled to dig hope from some recess of my soul. I tried to believe that as another year began, I’d find a way out and back from the beyond. Hope must exist somewhere. So, I sang carols to the spiders, hoping to birth hope. And, truth be told, I’d had a worse Christmas in my life, long ago.
Lights twinkled on eves and in yards, there were nativities and lit-up Santas with reindeer. I loved driving through the snowless California streets on Christmas eve, wide-eyed, seeing the lights. It was always as much a feeling for me as an experience. We drove on wet streets to my maternal grandparent’s house, on what for me, was the most magical night of the year. I was startled that year, Christmas of 1973, when suitcases came out of the trunk, and we carried them up the steps to the bright-red front door. What did we need suitcases for? The red door opened, and we went in, along with the suitcases. My mother did not follow us, and I looked back confused. I didn’t want to exchange my mother for a suitcase.
We always had Christmas Eve dinner at my grandparents’ house, and then my father would come get me and I’d spend the next morning with him. Then he would bring me back on Christmas afternoon. I was confused. My mother didn’t seem to be following the plan. In fact, she left without telling me goodbye. It was my grandmother who told me that I was now to live with my father. Along with my suitcase, which now contained a bitter memory folded up beside my clothes.
Chills is self-funded, without ads. If you want to be a part of this effort, of revealing how difficult reporting is made — of sending me to places like Ukraine to report for you — I hope you will consider subscribing for $50/year or $7/month.
How is it possible that I'd never heard of this Jeff as a hostage in all the years he was in captivity? How many more are out there, forgotten?