Danish photographer held hostage for 408 days says: ‘I didn’t want to give Jihadi John pleasure of executing me… so I tried to kill myself’
A VIDEO which emerged days ago of child jihadis, including a Brit, shooting kneeling captives in the back of the head, right, reminded the world of the brutality of ISIS.
The fate of those Kurdish fighters is one that seems terrifyingly close to home for Danish photographer Daniel Rye, who survived 408 days as a hostage in Syria.
Daniel’s ISIS captors tortured, starved and beat him.
Here, he tells ANDREW BILLEN the horrifying reality of what it means to be held hostage by the terrorist group.
“WHEN I finally stepped out,” Daniel Rye says, “I felt I was leaving something completely insane.
“You know how you can walk out of a cinema and you have a strong feeling that you have found release from this crazy movie? That was how I felt.”
Syria in the spring of 2013 was two years into a civil war between President Assad’s forces, the Free Syrian Army and al-Qaeda-linked jihadists.
ISIS was just beginning to make headway in the north.
Meanwhile, Daniel Rye, a 24-year-old former gymnast from the small Danish town of Give, was starting a new life as a photojournalist.
He became interested in portraying ordinary life amid the Syrian conflict.
Daniel travelled to southern Turkey and hired a “fixer” to guide him and liaise with the local people.
His intention was to spend just a couple of days in A’zaz, a smallish city across the border in Syria, but his fixer did not show.
In the end he made the crossing with a young nurse called Aya, who said she had contacts in the area.
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He was spotted almost immediately and warned he would need permission from the rebels now in control if he wanted to take pictures.
Barely had he entered the council office to seek it than he was blindfolded, handcuffed, beaten over the head and loaded into a car.
After a short journey he and his driver were thrown into a cellar, where they would be handcuffed and shackled together.
A week later the driver was released, leaving Rye alone. He was a hostage.
Initially, no one answered Rye’s cries, even to use the lavatory.
He defecated into bread and stuffed the results into an empty water bottle.
The people from the West were more cruel
On his tenth day captive, he was taken upstairs and handcuffed to a radiator. When he dozed, he was kicked awake and interrogated.
The torture proper began. His legs were locked between a car tyre and a stick and the bare soles of his feet lashed. His interrogator demanded he prove that he had once been a gymnast.
Handcuffed, he performed a backflip and a handstand. He was reattached to the radiator. He had gone three days without food or water.
He was being softened up, or perhaps toughened up, for Abu Hurraya, the prison’s sadistic torturer-in-chief.
Hurraya attached Rye’s wrists to a chain hanging from the ceiling and whipped him. He fell in and out of consciousness and soiled himself.
At this low point Rye used his feet to inch a table near enough so he could clamber on it.
From there, he wrapped the chain dangling from the ceiling round his neck and jumped off. He blacked out.
He says: “I didn’t want them to have the pleasure of beheading me, of doing some kind of video in which I told my family blah, blah, and then they saw me killed. I wished I was dead.”
When he came to, he was being held up by his guards, who beat him with a plastic tube then tied him to another radiator.
Before leaving for Syria he had watched Vietnam war film Rescue Dawn in which Christian Bale uses a nail to open handcuffs.
Now Rye, using spokes from a lampshade he had pulled towards him, sprang his own handcuffs. He jumped from the first-floor balcony and ran.
Hiding in a cornfield he was spotted by villagers who first shot at him, then grabbed him, put him in a car and drove him to a cellar where he was given water and a cigarette.
Having told them they would be rewarded if they took him to the Turkish border, Daniel dared to hope.
And then a familiar voice: “Hellooo Daniel! We have missed you.”
Abu Hurraya stood in the doorway, handcuffs dangling.
Rye explains: “I think they were afraid of what would happen to them if they didn’t deliver me.”
Hurraya continued the torture, squeezing Daniel’s testicle and inserting what felt like a candle between his buttocks.
Daniel was then moved to a former children’s hospital in Aleppo, where he met Didier François and Edouard Elias, a French reporter and photographer who would end up being released two months before him.
They were the first of 18 hostages with whom he would eventually share cells in various locations.
The hostages related their life stories and played board games they made using scraps of card.
Daniel says: “We all had the same idea of coming there and helping in some way. When I was talking to one of my friends, they would say, ‘F***, I’m stupid. I got caught.’ And I would say, ‘No, you’re not stupid because that’s your work. But I was stupid myself because I did this and this.’ And they would say, ‘No, you’re not.’”
But nothing could save them from the brutality of three guards in particular, a group of Brits they nicknamed John, Ringo and George.
They were dressed in black hoods. The captives guessed they may have originally been from Pakistan but perhaps had met in a London mosque.
I didn’t want them to have the pleasure of beheading me
George was the most violent, Ringo quieter, John the most articulate.
John — Brit Muslim Mohammed Emwazi — became known as Jihadi John after appearing in IS beheading videos.
A fourth, “Paul”, arrived later. When they were around, anything might happen, including waterboarding.
Daniel says: “The people from the West were more cruel towards us. I believe many came to Syria to escape something back home.
"The Syrians didn’t have a choice: it was either dying or joining.”
In February 2014, Rye’s family received a ransom demand for £1.5millon — but the Danish government had a strict policy not to pay or facilitate payments.
Instead, the family met the demands through loans and fundraising events.
On June 19, Rye was released and arrived at a Turkish border post.
He says: “Passing that border was the feeling of disappointment that we couldn’t all go.
"We’d all had this dream we’d get released and the first hotel that we came to we would eat the whole breakfast buffet.”
“John Cantlie (the British journalist who has been captive since 2012) is still inside. As long as he is inside, it will remind you every day.”
Once back home in Denmark, Daniel kept a promise he had made to fellow hostage James Foley to call his family in New Hampshire.
He had memorised a letter from the US war correspondent and recited it to his mother, Diane.
On August 19, Foley, 39, was beheaded by Jihadi John — making him the first US citizen killed by ISIS.
When Rye flew to a memorial service for him, the letter had been printed out for the mourners.
Rye still has nightmares about Syria but they are rare. He puts his recovery down to a happy childhood.
His life, he believes, is very much as it was before, his ambition to document suffering with his camera undimmed.
Captive's grim fate
SOME of Daniel’s fellow hostages were freed – but not all were so lucky. Here is what has happened to the others snatched by IS.
Released
FRENCH war correspondent Didier Francois, 55, and Edouard Elias, 25, a French photographer, were captured in June 2013 and released in April 2014.
Four other western journalists, two photographers and three aid workers have also been released.
Executed
US journalist James Foley, 40, was abducted in November 2012 and beheaded in August 2014. Russian engineer Sergey Gorbunov was captured in October 2013 and shot dead in March 2014.
Aid worker David Haines, 44, from Scotland was killed in September 2014.
The following month, a clip emerged showing Alan Henning, 47, a taxi driver-turned-aid worker from Salford, Gtr Manchester, being beheaded by Jihadi John. US aid worker Peter Kassig, 26, was beheaded in November 2014.
US journalist Steven Sotloff, 31, was beheaded in September 2014.
Still held
BRITISH journalist John Cantlie, 45, from Winchester, Hants, was captured by jihadis in late 2012 and is still in the hands of IS.
He has been forced to appear in several propaganda videos.
The last clip, which was released online in July, showed him looking gaunt.
— The Times Magazine / News Syndication. The Isis Hostage by Puk Damsgård is published by Atlantic Books.