Of the many humiliations James Loney suffered during his terrifying captivity in Baghdad, the worst was his kidnappers’ promise—delivered and broken, over and over—that he was about to be set free By Gerald Hannon

James Loney in his Parkdale apartment. His memoir about his kidnapping ordeal, Captivity, is out this month (Image: Derek Shapton)

Baghdad, in November 2005, was a war-ravaged, frightening, almost unlivable city. The streets were plagued by chaotic traffic jams and had become a crazy patchwork of potholes, smoking garbage, rubble and abandoned cars. Telephones rarely worked and electricity was undependable. The air was often thick with smog. You could count on seeing men with guns roaming the streets. You could count on hearing gunfire. Kidnappings had become a daily event, the work of insurgents with political motives or criminals after a buck. The first kidnapping of a foreigner happened on April 5, 2004. By the end of the month, 42 more had been taken. Just a year and a half later, the Washington Post reported that 425 non-Iraqis had been kidnapped. Of those, nearly a fifth had been murdered. The situation was even worse for Iraqis themselves—the same paper noted that a minimum of 30 citizens were kidnapped each day, their ransom averaging out at some $30,000 per, though the affluent could expect to pay considerably more. Even arriving at Baghdad International Airport was dangerous and terrifying—planes had to drop suddenly from 29,000 feet in a tight, corkscrew pattern in order to avoid fire.

Among the passengers flying into Baghdad from Amman, Jordan, on November 21 were 41-year-old James Loney and 32-year-old Harmeet Singh Sooden, both from Canada, and a 75-year-old British citizen named Norman Kember. Tom Fox, a 52-year-old American, was already there, awaiting their arrival. (Though James knew Tom slightly, the others were all meeting for the first time.) They were members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, an inter­national organization that documents evidence of human rights abuses in war zones, and sometimes asks its members to put their bodies on the line, to stand peacefully between two volatile factions, in hopes that violence might be averted. James was the group’s Canadian program co-ordinator. He’d visited Baghdad before. When it became clear, post 9/11, that the United States would invade, he volunteered to be part of a 10-day CPT delegation that went in January 2003 to assess the situation. He returned a year later for a 10-week stint, experiencing first-hand how the early exhilaration at Saddam’s removal had evaporated as infrastructure crumbled and the clumsy and often brutal hand of the coalition forces provoked a growing rebellion. Another delegation was planned for November 2005. James, aware of the dangers but committed to the CPT philosophy of “risky peacemaking,” asked if he could lead it. His offer was accepted.

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