This was a journey I undertook without the pretensions of a scribe. On one side are your ethics, and your hunger to milk the source to the last tiny drop of information. When international journalists and TV networks were groping in the dark, I managed to break through terror barricades and lay a “hotline” to a key source among the 46 Indian nurses held captive in 2014 by Daesh, the world’s most brutal terrorists at the Tikrit Teaching Hospital in Iraq. It was a painful dilemma for a reporter who calls people trapped in a war zone. When the Indian ministry of external affairs parroted to the Press in New Delhi that the nurses were safe, I brought out the plight of the shell-shocked victims day-by-day. My reports were the barometer of the captives’ emotions and requirements.
I had sleepless nights. Their faith in me was so immense that they started to generate calls whenever they were in distress. I could hear bombs slamming into their compound. I could hear their screams of despair and prayers. I knew more than anyone else what was on their dinner plate. How many days they subsisted on cookies. How many kilos of rice were left in the store. They were on a razor’s edge as gun-toting terrorists forced them to attend to their comrades. They cried on my shoulders. I consoled them. I texted them prayers. They thanked me even when they were running out of phone credit. I then became one among them, living with them in the confines of war stories. I was overwhelmed.
Armed with an order to board a bus to “nowhere”, my source Marina Joseph gave a call which she said could be the last. “I am going. I have kept an SMS ready for you. If they take us, we will press the send before they snatch the phones.” The war had already made Marina a woman of steel. Midway to Mosul, sitting in the bus piloted by terrorists, she texted “all is fine”. She warned me not to generate calls. A night passed — probably the worst in the whole episode — as there was absolutely no contact.
Pestered to death the next day by TV channels, I gathered up the courage to call Marina. We talked for a few minutes, about the geography, the architecture of the room, the Ramadan food etc. Then there was this call that everyone wanted to hear. “We probably are on our way to freedom.”
“Please, keep me in your prayers,” she said before hanging up. It opened the floodgate of emotions as they finally crossed the Irbil checkpoint.. “This is a second birth,” she said emotionally. Upon receiving the released nurses back home, Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy called to say: “This would not have been possible without you. Thank you so much.”
