Sean Langan: Kidnapped by the Taliban | P2: The Capture

I've ever had that feeling, a tightness in your chest, the voice in the back of your head whispering to you that something's just not quite right. That sixth sense that evolution gave us to keep us alive. That primal alarm system that kicks in when danger is near, even when you can't quite articulate it. Every instinct is screaming at you, turn around, walk away, don't get on that plane, take

the meeting or go down that road. Most of us, in our comfortable lives, really face moments where that feeling actually matters, where listening to it might be the difference between life and death. So when it comes, we rationalize it away, we tell ourselves we've been paranoid over thinking, letting fear control us.

“But what if you're someone who regularly puts themselves in harm's way?”

Like say, going to war zones, meeting insurgents and terrorists? What do you do when that feeling shows up before risky decisions? If you listen to it every time, if you let fear dictate your choices, or you wouldn't be able to do your job, you wouldn't get that incredible story. Other people learn to manage it, to distinguish between useful caution and paralysing anxiety,

to push through the fear when the risk feels worth it.

But the question is always there, isn't it?

How do you know when to listen and when that quiet voice of warning is trying to save your life? . Chapter 3. Fuck yeah, no one understands.

“So Sean Langen had made the astronomical jump from a journalist who was covering nightclubs,”

DJs and the party scenes of London and abroad, to now covering war zones abroad. A field of journalism that often put him in extremely dangerous situations, and it wasn't

always while conducting interviews with armed insurgents, because he's also spent a lot

of time with those fighting on the other side. In fact, at the same time that he was creating the documentary meeting the Taliban, he was also filming one called Fighting the Taliban. Where he shadowed British troops and the Afghan National Police, as they fought side-by-side against the Taliban for control of areas within the Hellman Province.

And to say things got dicey, would be an understatement.

“On dispatches tonight, the story of the Battle of Garam Sir, a six-day battle, the ministry”

of defense didn't want you to see. The battle that raised his questions about Britain's war on terror in Afghanistan. It turned out to be the most intense, biggest battles of the entire time they were there in the Hellman of the years. And it was just intense, hundreds of Taliban surrounding the small unit, and it went on

for about a week in the army, British soldiers run out of ammo, food, and they're having to be air supplied. So that was at the same period, and just to add a note, a serious note here, something was wrong with me, something was wrong with my logic, I have two children, you know, I have two children, they were very young at that point.

And the fact that I went back to make this other film when I got kidnapped, less than a

year later, I always think of it that I was like, "Icarus, the Greek myth."

Icarus who's flying ever closer to the sun, and these wings he'd made out of feathers with his father, and his father had always warned this don't fly too close to somebody. He is forever drawn to this light, and he flies too close to the wings all melt, and he falls to his death. When I look back on my childhood, you are, you know, as a kid, I was going to holiday to Portugal,

I used to dive off cliffs, and what I liked about it was that sense of being on the edge and being terrified, and then overcoming that as you do a dive.

It wasn't the adrenaline junkie element, but it was actually the sense that you're doing real journalism, journalism that counts, not like the lifestyle, celebrity journalism, my previously done, that here was stuff I knew was being watched in Parliament or even in place where decisions were being made, stories that affected all our lives, but also the real

importance of trying to understand the other side and all these films, I'm always going with

the other side, whether it's Taliban, Arab and certain seeds in Iraq, because it's very

“important that we see it less now in today's world, trying to see the other side's point”

of view. And now it's almost banned, you know, we're now cancelled if we dare interfere with our mass support, whatever side or the Russians, you know, I'm a great believer as a journalist reporting all sides. Time and time again, Sean is placing himself in the most hostile places in the world to

cover the most dangerous conflicts of the time, and he says he couldn't have been more

fulfilled by what he was doing. And it was also incredibly fulfilling that I was making these films, no, no one wanted to go with me, creatively, to film, to edit, direct, is incredibly fulfilling.

“And, you know, when you're doing creative work, it's part of life to be creative in any”

shape of form, it's good, but fuck, I'm also having the time of my life in these places. The summary is that I couldn't stop. I've watched many documentaries around the war in Afghanistan, and also the Iraq War and other conflicts around the world. I've watched all of Sean's work, and there's a common theme that you sort of hear among

those who have served, and it's about what happens when they come home.

Because the thing that soldiers almost never say out loud is sometimes they want to go back,

not because they love the violence, not because they're adrenaline junkies, but because after months of dodging RPGs, after weeks sleeping in the dirt with a rifle across your

“chest, after days where every street corner could be a last, you come home, and suddenly,”

nobody understands you anymore. You mates back here, I want to talk about football, the weather, meaningless things that feel impossibly small when you've spent every waking hour, hyper alert, scanning rooftops, watching for movement, living in a state of focus, so intense it's almost transcendent. And the men you served with, the ones who would have given their lives for you, who saw

you at your absolute worst, well, for a lot of them they're still over there, and you're here safe, comfortable, but alone, it's a paradox that makes no sense to anyone who hasn't lived it, how do you miss a place that tried to kill you, how do you crave the company of war, but many soldiers do, veterans have described it as the only time they ever felt truly alive, former Special Forces soldier Jason Foxy, who may know from his now work on TV, said

during a documentary that he created on his return to Afghanistan, was that part of PTSD, which is what he was diagnosed with, is knowing you won't relive the moments you felt most alive, and for some people journalists, documentary filmmakers, walk our respondents, this poll is just as strong, because they choose to return again and again and again and again. Sean Langin chose it, over and over again, Afghanistan and Iraq, the most dangerous place

is on earth, and each time he came home, something inside him, whispered, go back. At one point during the documentary, fighting the Taliban, you have this conversation with this British soldier who is talking about how nobody understands what they've been through. When you go home, you talk about what you're going through, the person doesn't really understand, you try to explain it, it's the best you can, no matter how hard you try, they don't

understand. But it's just such an honest moment you had with this guy, it was so emotional, when you could see he was pretty broken, I felt he had enough, I felt he was doing his job.

don't have a rifle in your hand, but you are there with them through everything, the

bullets flying, the bombs dropping, and I wondered whether it was the same for you and why

“you kept going back. After that trip, it was like, I think we were there eight or nine”

days, every day felt like a lifetime, you're not sleeping, you're packed with adrenaline, we were either dealing with wounded, you know, I had to put my camera down to help with triage, and then fighting, eating, very little time for sleep. And when you, when bullets fly past your ear and explosions, you just your body gets just shot through with all sorts of adrenaline, causes all, and it's quite a phenomenal effect. So it's like a high, but

not like a drug high, because you're incredibly lucid and clear headed. But then when you're under real close fire, you know, an hour feels like a lifetime, you know, when you're trapped somewhere, then it just becomes of that week. But I remember going back

“to, you know, relating to the man with the beard. When I got back, even before I got”

back, I was in a hotel in Dubai. And now I'm in my hotel room, and I wake up in a having a nightmare of the dead bodies of the Afghan soldiers I'd seen, and some of them the faces were recognized, well, because I had got to know them by face. And I'm looking at these bodies covered in dust, like they would have been in the Afghan helmet desert. This sort of sand, a bit of blood walking towards me, and it wasn't frightening. They were

kind of dead men walking towards me. I wake up, I was, that's quite an extreme nightmare. And I turn the light on, there they are, still walking towards me. And I have that twice in London, where I wake up from a dream, seeing the dead bodies of soldiers used

“to walk towards you. You wake up and they're still walking towards you.”

But to me, it was like this, when you, it was such a powerful impression, it's like a Kodak Instagram photographing taken. At the moment, that image is so visceral on your brain, the memory of those people, the death that it kind of leaves in an imprint that takes a while to fade away. And that is when you see traumatic things, it's like footprints in the snow, with the memories, but it's so powerful, it stays with you. And some things,

some experiences are so intense, so visceral, they never quite fade into the past tense,

you know, with my kidnap, very easy, 15 years later, 12, 15 years later, I just have to close my eyes, think of the moment, and I'm backing that room. It's never really past tense. Now, the soldier you're talking about, they've been ambushed only about four weeks before, you know, really bad ambushed, where they're coming down, tell about an attack, the front line, the line, the back line, the convoy, they lost men and man, lost an arm, you know,

so weeks before. So they're having, and you've seen that film, the relationships are incredibly intense. I mean, those soldiers didn't particularly like me, I'm a judge, they're not predisposed to liking the journalists. Within five days, we were like brothers and sons, relationships are forced, you go through a lifetime of emotions, and then in their cave, their cave, they've been ambushed and lost these lifelong friends. You then call

London, and you have this distant call, it's always the telephone calls, always feels

so cold and lifeless. And then you come back, and of course, fuck yeah, no one understands, you know, chapter four, the mad moller. Sean's documentary, meeting the Taliban is a hit amongst the audience and TV executives alike, it would go on to win the Rory Pack Award in 2007. The Rory Pack Awards have honored the skills and bravery of freelance journalists worldwide for more than 30 years, and off the back of its success, Sean is approached

with a pitch for a new TV show, a sort of follow-up documentary. The actual proposal, and it wasn't mine, the TV company, it reads more like a suicide note than a television proposal for an idea, and the idea was, you know, we loved your film, meets the Taliban, and you know, I didn't realize my U.S. period's called a horrible media term, unique selling

the narration, it's watching this guy almost get killed. And I think in Channel 4, the broadcast,

it was like my nickname was Dead Man Walking, but the idea was to cross the border from Afghanistan into the tribal areas of Pakistan, the most dangerous place in the world, and that's where they

“had the secret al-Qaeda training camps. They thought that's where a song was in line”

was at the time, and we found out later it wasn't. But it's where the Taliban fighting in Afghanistan with cross the border, it was their place, their safe place to recoup, rearm before going back into Afghanistan. So everyone knew, when I say everyone, the American military intelligence knew it was a hopeless war in Afghanistan because you can't win a counter in certainty when the insurgents can cross a border and be safe. And an American commander said to me,

"All we're doing in Afghanistan is mowing the lawn, the real seeds of this insurgents here in the tribal areas of Pakistan." So for someone like me, that was like the Holy Grail. No one had been there. I wanted to cross the border illegally from over the mountains, get into the tribal areas, and fill on the secret Taliban training camps. I'll kinder and I can barely bring myself to tell you what the plan was because that was suicide.

So he was going to head into the hidden training camps of now, one of the most infamous regimes in the world, the Taliban. But how? The way I did it, I spent months, which is how I had done it before, and it worked, you have someone your fixer, your main fixer, your trust with your life. A fixer is a local contact, often a translator, but so much more than that. They're your guide, your cultural interpreter, your network, your early warning system, and sometimes

“the only thing standing between you and a catastrophic mistake. They know which roads are safe,”

and which ones are controlled by insurgents. They know which tribal leaders will talk to foreigners, and which ones see outsiders as targets. They can generally read situations in ways a Western

journalist never could, the subtle shift in rooms, energy, the tension in someone's voice,

and the danger signs that would be invisible to foreign eyes. So for sure, now not just wanting to access the Taliban in Pakistan's tribal regions, but also wanting to see their secretive training camps, a good fixer isn't just helpful, it was an absolute essential. Because he cannot, as a white British filmmaker, simply walk into Taliban territory and start asking them questions. But here's the thing about fixers, you're also putting your life in their hands completely.

So you've got to trust that person, a hundred percent, and you send them off to me a contact

“in a village, someone they trust, and it doesn't take long, and that's why we lost those”

wars to everyone in Afghanistan in a certain part, the passions will know someone six degrees

of separation is in the Taliban. So I started negotiating and I did the same thing I'd always done,

which was no one's told your side of the story, you're killing people and getting killed yourself, but you had, surely you want to tell the Western media, your side of the story, you know, and that appeals to them because they realize, you know, media can be useful. So I negotiated about five months to cross the border and they said, "Yes, come and film our secret training camps." Sean wasn't just chasing any Taliban faction, he was going after the Harkani network.

Now, the Harkani network isn't some rag tag collection of fighters. It's one of the most sophisticated, disciplined, and deadly, and social organisations in the region, founded by Jalal Hiddinn Kani during the Soviet Afghan War in the 1980s. They once America's allies, which are Hiddinn fighters backed by the CIA to resist the Soviet invasion. But after the Soviets withdrew and the Taliban rose to power, the Harkani aligned themselves firmly with the Taliban cause. By the time Sean was

trying to make contact, the network was being run by Jalal Hiddinn's son, a ruthless and strategic commander, who turned the organisation into something closer to a criminal enterprise with a political agenda. They weren't just fighters, they were kidnappers, the extortionists, suicide bombers, and masters of complex attacks. With deep ties to the Pakistani intelligence, they operated with near impunity in Pakistan's tribal areas, and were responsible for some of the most spectacular

attacks against NATO forces in Afghanistan. The Americans considered them one of the most dangerous

Over the years, you pick up behavior, which is very useful. You pick up tips how to survive in a

“war zone. It's one of them army has. It's that whole cliché about checking your kit,”

and that song of the way to pack your oil, your worries into your kit bag. And what you're doing is you're going over and over your kits, and before I go on this road trip, everything, and what you're doing, you're mentally locking down. Because I knew this was, wasn't that I knew that it's dangerous, all my trips have been quite dangerous. I just had a bad feeling about this point. I wouldn't say premonition, but before I left London, I called my ex-wife,

I got to Zumba. They were age three and four at that point, and I don't normally say goodbye, but I was finding myself saying goodbye, as though I'd say my final goodbye to people. So I had a very strong feeling that this problem was going to go bad, and I still went through it,

because you always get that feeling. You don't want to be superstitious the point where you're

locking with you, think. So although his spidey senses were screaming at him that this one was different, he was off nonetheless, with his first hurdle presenting itself pretty early on. I tried crossing the border of the mountains, climbing the mountains legally, because I was terrified crossing the border into Pakistan from Afghanistan, the official border

that the Pakistan authorities would know what I'm doing, and that was my big fear.

“My big fear was the ISI Pakistan Secret Service, because the fact that there were training camps”

in Pakistan when Pakistan's are ally begs the question. And in fact when I said to the Taliban, I said, "Look, my big worries would get with the economy, the economy network, the ISI Pakistan intelligence captures me." And they kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm a question, because they were like, don't you get it? How can I, ISI, it's all one?" And that wasn't the surprise to me when they find the song being loud and you know, bass a bad few miles from the

big Pakistan military college west, because they are equivalent to west point. Pakistan is new full well, the Taliban were there and they were providing safe haven, you know, unofficially in this war on terror. And I tried to avoid the ISI by crossing the legally, and it was so

“dangerous up in the mountains, we almost got kidnapped. And at the end I just drove through the border,”

the official checkpoint. And I get to my hotel in Pashar and Pakistan, I check my camera kits.

So when I'm in Pakistan, checking my kit, I always had this thing I'd bring on these journeys,

you know, cigarettes, camera gear, photos of my children, some round tree, pastoral sweets, and I'm locking down on when I meet this mother who we'd arranged to meet and I switch cars, like getting to his car, we now drive off the main road and Pakistan into the tribal areas where there's a sign saying no foreigners beyond this point. And we're crossing in, I'm now in this car with a mother and a young Taliban. And I was traveling on my own without my fixer, which I'd never

done before, but this was for secure reasons we travel separately. I don't know why that was decided, but it was, you made it even more terrifying, so I had no one to translate. Sean is traveling in a car deep into rural Pakistan. In a vehicle with men, he doesn't know who are speaking a language, he doesn't understand. And all the while is convincing himself that everything is totally fine. This is just another assignment, another fascinating story,

but it's a story with an ending he wasn't quite prepared for. We got near to where we were up in the tribal areas, we stopped in a bizarre market town, and I'm in the back of this car and I'm just looking at hundreds of Taliban afghans, Arabs walking around this market bizarre, covered in dust, having come from the front line,

and I'm aware, like, wow, this is, this is, we never defeated the Taliban, they just put

wow, this is hostile territory. And we were driven, swapped cars a few times, up now,

behind the mountains, and I get out of the car, just a young afghan who's Taliban, spoke a bit of English. He said, again, little become very English. He said, "Do you mind if I put a blindfold on you?" and I said, "No, not at all."

“"Bizarre, compensation." But I remember, as the blindfold's going on, we were quite close,”

the precipice of a mountain, and we started walking forward, and then I'm like, "Oh my god, it's taking me up here just to kill me." Because I'm now on the edge of a precipice with the gardener, he's got an AK-47, and I hear the rack shit, like, when you pull back, load the bullet. And it's like, "Oh, I'm going to be killed in that." And they just gently pushed me forward, right? Dumbled, and I fall down this, not, it wasn't a precipice, like, a hill. So I fall down.

And I'm like, "I'm not dead. I'm lying there with the blindfold. They come down. They're like, I saw you fell down the mountain. You're okay. Pick me up, and then we take me into this house. It's like a farmhouse with a mud compound. Blindfold's taken off, and I'm sitting in a room. It's a classic afghan, pastoon. There's a afghan rug, a paraphernalam." And I'm looking at these faces and the blindfold, and I'm sitting there, and it's the Taliban, the Taliban commander,

and he says, "Well, come, you know, you can start filming. They were keeping me stringing a

long at that point." So my first night there, I actually thought things were going well.

You may be listening to this thinking, things are going well. Is this man okay? He's been put in a car alone, driven deep into tribal areas of Pakistan, blindfolded, and heard the sounds of AK-47s being loaded. He's fallen down a hill, thinking he's about to be shot. But everything's going well.

“Well, you have to understand that this wasn't Sean's first rodeo. Blindfolds and secrecy and”

demodation, a man with beards in AK-47s is all just part of the job. However, he says he quickly came to the realization that things were anything but going well. I spent a day there, then the next day my fixer arrives, and he looks terrified. He comes into the home with a blindfold, and he's like something's not right. I'm assuring him. And then the mother of that night, who was our go-between, stepped in our room. So this room was probably, I think,

a room previously used for goats. It was like, we had two day beds. A window that had been boarded up. It was like a cement floor, like a little farm room. Not, I mean, there's only about eight feet by seven feet. So there's a small sound. There was a hole for the toilet. No

like people. There were no, and this mother was sleeping on the floor. I never get that first night.

I was still awake. He jumped to my bed with a knife. And she said, don't waste not for you. I just wanted to show you the knife I killed in an American way. I cut this throat, and I'm like, oh my god, theory, and I'm like this fucking guy. And he was on severe medication that guy

“was psychotic. So we call it the mad mother. He sleeps on the floor. I remember like saying to my”

fixer, that guy fucking makes the move. We have to kill him. He's mad. Next morning, I wake up in my bed, and it was like watching a play on the fold in front of you. And I couldn't understand what was being said, but it was quite clear. So I wake up in my bed, and they're on the floor, and this on our cell was this mother. And the Taliban commander facing each other. And the commandos just articulating and clearly accusing the mother of wrongdoing. And the mother was pleading for his

life, increasingly pleading. And I'm looking at my fixer who's just transfixed at what's happened before us. It's like it's like watching a show unfold, a play on fold. And then he starts the mother starts crying, and the commandos pointing in two masks, gunmen come in, put a hood over the molest head, drag him out, and then I'm hearing him being beaten. All the while, the commandos looking at my face, then the commandos kind of, as we hear this body being dragged off into the distance,

the commando looks to me and says, and now my translator translates, I know what he's saying. He says, look, don't worry about it. We arrest and kill our own kind all the time. We want to know how he

fuck, so they arrest and beat up the man, the mother who's their own guy for bringing me.

“The following day, Sean and his fixer are presented with allegations, allegations that meant”

only one thing. And my fixer's looking at me like I still don't get it because we've been accused

about that, or being charged with being spies, working for foreign enemy governments. And he

“looks at me, I hit me like we've been kidnapped and he went, Sean, you know, we're dead.”

Next time, on what I survived.

I'm trying to fight war in my mind. I don't know who's the winner tonight, but it ain't me.