8 Insane Things I Did After Being Kidnapped By Terrorists

By Robert Evans,  Singer Smith 

In August of 2000, Jason "Singer" Smith and some friends earned a sweet corporate sponsorship that sent them to Kyrgyzstan to climb mountains. It should've been the adventure of a lifetime -- cultural misunderstandings, zany foreign sidekicks, a yeti! -- but instead, Jason and his friends wound up kidnapped by heavily-armed terrorists for more than a week.

#8. This All Happened Before 9/11, When "Terrorist Kidnapping" Didn't Seem Likely

Dan Patitucci

Several days into their trip, while they were preparing for a "warm-up" climb, something odd happened:
"Beth came over and said 'Singer, don't look right now' -- and the first thing I did was look -- 'there's these guys sitting across the meadow'"

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We would have assumed they were just voyeuristic goatherds.

"So there's two guys wearing camouflage. All the Kyrgyz soldiers we'd met were wearing plain tan khakis. And these guys had beards ... the Kyrgyz soldiers hadn't had beards. I waved at them, they waved back, then stood and walked away, and we forgot about it."
Aw, they made friends! Maybe they were leaving to prepare a picnic for Singer and his hiking buddies?

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"The guns are in case bears try to steal the picnic basket."

That day, at 6:15 a.m., Singer and his friends heard "a single high-pitched crack." Singer, who'd been hunting since the age of five or six, "immediately registered it was a gunshot," but feigned ignorance.
It was Beth who finally said the obvious.
"That was a gunshot, Singer."
The group could see three people at the base of the rock wall. They ran through the possibilities besides "kidnapping", because the human brain can rationalize just about anything:
"Maybe there's some kind of family emergency back in the U.S. and they need to contact us."

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You know it's a shit situation when "Nana threw out her hip" would have been a better outcome.

Or maybe they have a crush on Beth and don't know how to approach. Or maybe they think Tommy's shoes are awesome and want to know where he got them. Or maybe they're going to fucking kidnap everybody. Obviously, in 2015, if you were woken up at your campsite in any-stan by a bunch of armed, bearded men, you'd immediately know you were about to be kidnapped by terrorists. But all this happened in August of 2000, before the word "terrorism" made up 60 percent of an average hour of Fox News.

#7. The Kidnappers Were Strangely Polite

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Singer was adamant that his kidnappers were fairly congenial, considering the circumstances.
"They weren't unfriendly, but not friendly either. It wasn't smiles and handshakes, but it was handshakes and what I'd call 'firm suggestions.'"
They told Jason and John to convince their friends to come down so the whole group could go back to base camp and have "some food and a conversation."

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As the old Kyrgyz saying goes, "Speak softly and carry an AK-47."

Singer and his friends descended and met their kidnappers.
"This guy Obert was super-cool, actually. He looked exactly like Snoop Dogg. He was the kind of guy you see and just instantly want to hang out with. He had this really nice Patagonia jacket, and over that, he had this camouflage ammo vest, and in the pocket of that, proudly displayed, a tube of Colgate and a toothbrush.
"The other two guys were Abdul and Su. Abdul was clearly the commander-guy. He had this big bushy beard and an air of being a guy in charge. Su was just clearly a simple 19-year-old goat-herding kid. He wouldn't even shake our hands if Abdul didn't authorize it."
The kidnappers were not at all comfortable with Beth's presence. According to Singer, from their perspective, "she might as well have stepped off of Mars." They weren't sure what to make of three men and one woman sleeping alone on a cliff. This was an issue. A woman hadn't been a part of their plan.

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It wasn't until 2007 that the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan even started hosting a Lady's Night.

"You could see they wished she wasn't there. It was a big problem for them."
Beth sat next to her boyfriend to give the impression that they were married. Singer says they were "clearly relieved" to see Tommy "take responsibility" for her. Back at base camp, they met two more people: Abdullah and Turat, whose pants were covered in blood.
"Beth and Tommy had apparently met Turat before, and they told us he was a Kyrgyz soldier. And Turat explained that his three friends were dead. When these guys invaded the country, they captured Turat and killed three of his friends, and they used him to guide them to us."
It was around this point, three or four hours after that gunshot, that the first of the climbers -- John -- realized they were being taken hostage. No, it's not because they were dumb: we were all super naive before 9/11.

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Don't worry. We'll overcompensate 'til we get it right.

#6. Staying Alive Sometimes Means Letting Another Person Die

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It became "quickly obvious" that the kidnappers didn't need Turat now that they'd captured the Americans. This fact was not lost on Turat:
"Abdul gave Abdullah a radio and sent him off, so there were three of them left ... Turat had his back to these guys, I was facing all of them. He bent down and pulled a tent stake out of the ground, probably 10-12 inches long. He clutched it tightly and held it close to his chest like it was a prison shank. He stared into my eyes with this ferocious, murderous, crazy intensity. The message was pretty clear: 'You and me, these tent stakes, right NOW!'
"This was within two minutes of realizing I was a hostage -- an entirely new reality I was still processing. That's when I realized how bad the situation actually was. Because Turat, based on everything he'd seen in the last 24 hours, was looking at this as the best opportunity he'd get."

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Unless they were vampires, this was a shaky plan at best.

Attacking at that moment (and with tent stakes) seemed suicidal to Jason:
"... Obert and Su were 45 feet away, cradling their rifles and guarding us ... I faintly shook my head 'no.' I wasn't ready yet. I couldn't risk the lives of my friends, particularly Beth, without an extremely high probability of success."
Singer described the look in Turat's eyes in that moment as devastating.
"... Mentally, that's the moment Turat died. He gave up and knew his life was over ... The way his face changed in that moment is probably the worst thing I've ever had to witness, and is unforgettable."
The group headed down valley and across a plateau, dodging helicopter and foot patrols along the way. Jason and his friends didn't know it, but their kidnapping occurred in the middle of a border incursion by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The IMU is a terrorist organization, trained in Afghanistan, which split its time between smuggling narcotics and resisting Uzbekistan's repressive dictator, Islam Karimov. Abdul and his crew of abductors were part of a large guerrilla force that attacked several villages and killed more than two-dozen Kyrgyz soldiers over the course of a week.

via Wikimedia
Today, you might better know them as part of ISIS.

The terrorists / freedom fighters of the IMU were men from Chechnya, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan, attacking soldiers from Kyrgyzstan. Jason Singer and his friends had stumbled into a small-scale war between people from several different nations whose names the average American couldn't spell, let alone find on a map.
They watched as Abdul and his men fanned out and set up an ambush for the Kyrgyz soldiers pursuing them. At some point, Abdul took Turat away from the group. The climbers took the opportunity to grab some shut-eye.
"While I was asleep, these soldiers filled up the opposite hillside, and suddenly a bunch of shooting started. Abdul came down, grabbed me and John, and told us to run across this exposed hillside to seek cover behind a large boulder. John went first and attracted gunfire the whole way, bullets impacting all around him. Abdul told me to go next. As I came up to the boulder, Turat was there. He'd been shot in the head a couple of times. He was facedown."

#5. The Kidnappers Tried To Be Good Hosts

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Okay, so Abdul is clearly a "bad guy." As in "It's bad to shoot a helpless person in the head." He and his team were terrorist kidnappers. But at one point, after escaping a firefight, the captives and their captors found themselves huddled in the dark with no food at all.
"Obert reached into his pocket and pulled out five pieces of hard candy, doing the math ... you saw him count it out, and he took one and gave us four the other pieces of candy."

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We know "strangers with candy" aren't necessarily benevolent, but bear with us for a sec.

Singer said, "That was the moment I knew we could manipulate these guys and escape. They weren't bad people; this was just a job they signed up to do, in an effort to improve their own lives.
"The Quran teaches that travelers are a gift from God ... they were having this sort of dichotomy between being good kidnappers and being good hosts. I sensed that they wanted to take care of us ... and I knew we could exploit that element to turn the tables on these guys."
How would you exploit their desire to be good hosts to earn your freedom? Are you going to passive-aggressively shame them for not bringing a proper kidnapping gift until they let you go? Not quite ...