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Chapter 1: What stories of escape resonate with our cultural imagination?
There are certain stories that have burned themselves into the cultural imagination. Stories of escape, of the impossible made possible through patience, ingenuity and sheer refusal to accept the walls around you. Most of us know them through films.
The Great Escape, based of course on a true story as it happens, where allied prisoners of war in a Nazi camp spent years digging tunnels beneath their captors' feet, moving the earth one spoonful at a time.
Shawshank Redemption, fictional but feels so real that generations of people have watched Andy Dufresne crawl through 500 yards of filth and felt something close to joy as he breaks out into the night sky and feels the rain on his face for the first time in years. And of course, Alcatraz, the island prison in the middle of San Francisco Bay, the one they said was inescapable.
On the night of June 11th, 1962, three inmates, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin, spent six months preparing a breakout. They tucked papier-mâché heads into their beds and broke out through ventilation ducts and an unguarded corridor and departed the island on an improvised raft. Of course, no conclusive evidence has ever surfaced about their fate to this day.
No one knows whether they made it.
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Chapter 2: How did Nigel Brennan and Amanda Lindhout's ordeal begin?
However, we root for these people every single time, whether we know their story is real or fictional. Something deep in us responds to the image of a person refusing captivity, of a mind that will not stop working, of a body that runs when every rational calculation says stay.
We watch these films from our sofas, hearts hammering, leaning forward, willing the person on, screaming at them to make it through the next door, over the next fence, across the next yard, before the lights come on. But here is the thing about Nigel Brennan and Amanda Lindhouse.
With their story, there was no director, no script, no stunt coordinator standing just off camera, no second take if something went wrong. The guards outside their door were certainly not actors, and the guns were not loaded with blanks. The country beyond those walls was no film set.
It was Somalia, in the grip of civil war, controlled in large part by one of the most dangerous militant groups on earth. Everything that was about to happen, the hole in the wall, the running, the escape, was real. And it was about to begin.
Moon in the sky I'm looking at the moon in the sky It shouldn't come as a surprise but I can't sleep War in my mind I'm trying to fight a war in my mind I don't know who's the winner tonight, but it ain't me.
Chapter 8 Fuck. I am so terrified.
So with this sort of, I guess, amazing news, I raced back to the room and knocked up the wall and said to Amanda, I said, I'm pretty sure I found a way for us to get out of the house. And she's like, what is it? I said, the bathroom, there's a weakness. The problem is if I get caught, they're going to absolutely beat the shit out of me.
So I said, what I need you to do is the door of her room basically looks straight down the hallway to the front of the house, which is where the captors would sit pretty much most of the day. And if we wanted to go to the toilet, we would have to bang on our door. And then the captors would basically come down the hallway, open the door and say, what? And we'd be like, let's go to your toilet.
And they're like, go. So I said, pretty much, I need you to be my eyes and ears. She said, look, there's this really tiny pinholes in the metal door that I can look through. And because she wears contact lenses and by then her contacts were rude and she said, my vision's not really good. But when it's a pinhole, I can actually see quite well.
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Chapter 3: What strategies did Nigel use to plan their escape?
Want to hate Muslim? We are Muslim. And then started to say the profession of faith. And then straight into the first surah of the Quran. So I've got this verbal diarrhea. And then two older gentlemen sort of came up to us and said...
who are you, what's going on in English and explained that we had obviously been kidnapped for five months and that we were Muslim and as I'm sort of explaining things to them, I just get coward punched straight to the back of the head. So Jamal and Abdullah are now in the mosque behind us. Jamal's punched me and then he's grabbed my arm
And he's trying to pull me out and I pulled away from him with such force that it's just literally ripped the sleeve straight off my shirt. Trying to get away from him. Abdullah has ripped off Amanda's hijab and just has her by the hair and he's pulling her backwards. And then the next door neighbour and there's two older men
you know incredibly heroic uh unarmed so these guys these two young kids have got ak-47s and these three older um somalian men literally grab these guys by the scruff of the neck and throw them up against a wall and just start berating them in somali And then other people sort of come to shepherd us and, you know, I'm asked, have you prayed? It's like, no, I've never prayed.
I've never prayed in a mosque. I want to pray in a mosque with people. And they're like, come, we'll let you pray. And, you know, people are saying, assalamu alaikum. I'm like, wa alaikum assalam, doing all the things to show that I am, in fact, Muslim and don't get the opportunity to pray. We're sort of pushed into the pulpit of the mosque and told to sit down, you know,
And I can remember there were two windows on either side of us and I was just like, I saw this big black figure sort of appear on the left-hand side. I was like, can we shut the windows? Because I was scared that someone was just going to stick a gun through. It was actually a woman in the full black hijab where you could just see the eyes. And we're sitting there, Amanda and I, you know,
I'd read A Thousand Splendid Suns, actually was the book, not The Kite Runner. And in that book they talk about, obviously, it's obviously Afghan custom to get the Quran and kiss it and touch it to your head. So I'm like, that's obviously what you do. So I've got my Quran in my camera bag. So I pull it out and I'm kissing it and I'm touching it to my head.
And they're all sort of looking at me like, what's a white dude doing? It's crazy. It's crazy.
At one stage, that black figure, which was the woman that had pushed her way into the mosque and sat down beside Amanda and I, and Amanda's obviously trying to communicate with her. She doesn't speak English. Amanda doesn't speak Somali. It's a commotion. It's complete chaos. More people are coming into the mosque, obviously.
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