From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Christopher Morris and Anthony Suau knew they were in trouble when the Republican Guards stopped them at a shattered bridge on the outskirts of Basra. The two photographers, who were working for TIME, were headed for the Iraqi city to cover the fighting between government troops and insurgents in the wake of the gulf war. But the guardsmen seized Morris and Suau and more than 25 other journalists on March 3, a Sunday, and ransacked their cars. "It was as if we had walked into a den of 40 thieves," said Suau, 34. "Everything disappeared very quickly."

For the next six days, the group's captors shuttled the journalists from one site to another while deciding what to do with them, and the world wondered where they were. The first stop was Basra University, which was surrounded by tanks and artillery and swarming with Iraqi troops. Soldiers herded all the hostages into a small room furnished with two beds and half a dozen broken television sets. The weary journalists spent the night without food, water or much sleep, as rifle fire barked outside their windows and artillery rockets screamed overhead.

Fearing that the location was too dangerous, the Iraqis moved the hostages to a red brick barracks outside Basra, where they were confined to a bare, partly underground room. "I didn't think they would kill us," said Morris, 32. "But I worried that they would hold us for two weeks or a month. My big concern was food and sanitary conditions." Their daily diet was a piece of chicken and a slice of stale bread. That was more than their guards got. "They said we were guests," Morris added. "They didn't like the word prisoners."

By Thursday the Iraqis were ready to hand over the hostages to the Red Cross in Baghdad. But fierce civil warfare made all roads to the capital unsafe. So helicopters flew the group from Basra to Baghdad, dodging flares and tracer fire along the three-hour flight. In Baghdad, the Red Cross treated the famished journalists to what Suau called "our first really good meal in six days" before busing them to Jordan, where they were released. "The ironic thing," Morris recalls, "is that we went from Dhahran to Kuwait City to Basra to Baghdad to Amman, and not one roll of film to show for it." We regret that too, but we've settled happily for having the pair safely out of Iraq.