AN AMAZING DEBRIEF

What if you were being held by the maniacs who had been lopping off hostages' heads? And what if, as a woman and a Muslim, you figured you had a better chance of talking them out of doing anything to you than your colleague did -- since he was a Canadian? Wouldn't you feel some responsibility for trying to talk them down for both your sakes? A Turkish journalist who was released -- along with her Canadian colleague -- told her story to the Times.

Of course, this comment just seems silly:

Everywhere they were taken, she said, people appeared eager to help anyone they thought was part of the resistance.

"I saw that around Mosul, everybody is the resistance - not terrorists, but not civilians really either," she said. "They used the small kids to bring them water, and nobody treated them like children. They'd be with the men who were talking about cutting heads, and the kids would be standing guard, like little men, so you become afraid of the children too."

What does that mean "around" Mosul? Obviously the terrorists aren't going to make the fact that they've got hostages with them visible to anyone who isn't a supporter. And the hostages' view is going to be highly limited. Were they left without blindfolds at all times? Just driven right through the center of town? I'm enormously skeptical that would be the case. Which in turn means the significance of this comment is enormously diminished.

But her insights into the men who were actually holding her are important:

These are people who think they are living in the time of the Crusades," Ms. Tugrul recalled in a four-hour conversation at an Ankara cafe this week. "They say they are fighting for Islam first and Iraq second. They think their religion is being attacked."

Her abductors in the ethnic Turkmen city of Tal Afar identified themselves as members of Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist Muslim group that set up a Taliban-like enclave in northern Iraq before the war.

The American authorities have linked the group to Al Qaeda, and the kidnappers described Osama bin Laden and the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as brothers. They spoke Turkish, Ms. Tugrul said, but also claimed to be Sunni Arabs, and not Turkmen of the Shia branch of Islam. Ms. Tugrul said they also spoke a very different Turkish dialect from the Turkmen. They eventually handed the two journalists off to Arabic-speaking men in Mosul.

All those who held them, she said, were equally hostile to anyone they called kafir, or infidel. Again and again, they lashed out at Mr. Taylor, calling him a "Jewish pig" or an American spy.

"For them, there's no difference between a Christian and a Jew, a Canadian and an American," Ms. Tugrul said.

The original kidnappers in Tal Afar appeared ready to release her and Mr. Taylor once they were convinced they were journalists, but other groups expressed only bottomless hate.

"The last group," she said, shuddering as she recalled how they kicked her and whipped her with a spiked belt, "they just wanted to torture for nothing."

These aren't the nationalist insurgents or the former Ba'ath. These are the out of towners, the jihadists, and they're waging a war against anyone who isn't ready to live the way they think they should be living. Before the war these guys were waging their own war against the Kurds and, as the article indicates, turning any village they took into another part of their little Taliban-wannabee dystopia.

And note that piece about their not making distinctions between enemies. It is all the same to them. We may be number one on their hit parade because we're the strongest, but this is a war against anyone who isn't "them" and the rest of the West better figure that out.