There are aspects of this affair which I hadn’t previously considered:
[T]he tape contained no demands from her captors, and offered few clues to their identity. There were no masked gunmen or Islamic banners such as those in the videos of Mr Bigley and the two American colleagues taken with him.
Mrs Hassan appeared in close-up, against a plain white wall, wearing a white open-necked blouse, not an orange jumpsuit like other hostages.
She is also unveiled, suggesting that she may be held by secular Muslims rather than extremists such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of Tawhid wal Jihad, who executed Mr Bigley. They would regard it as un-Islamic for a woman to be bareheaded in the presence of men who are not close relatives.
For a moment there, I read it as un-Islamic for a woman to be beheaded in the presence of men who are not close relatives.
Meanwhile, the helpful Paul Bigley role (“Mr Blair has blood on his hands”) has been taken:
[A] close friend of Mrs Hassan, the film-maker Felicity Arbuthnot, said that if a woman as tough as Mrs Hassan was weeping “that is really bad, because this is a woman who is frightened of nothing”.
She accused Mr Blair of “signing her death warrant” this week when he publicly “slagged off” her kidnappers.
Arbuthnot “worked as senior researcher on the film Paying the Price—Killing the Children of Iraq, which investigated the devastating effect of United Nations sanctions on [the] people of Iraq.” So, a woman with a profound understanding of the situation. Here she is in March 2003:
I personally am convinced that this will be a nuclear war. […]
The country has been held together, not perfectly, but more cohesively than at any other time in its history. Had we allowed normality to return by lifting the embargo, it would progress and sort itself out. Saddam is a flicker in the eye of history. […]
Israel will use the opportunity to clear out Gaza and the West Bank—in other words ethnic cleansing. According to many people, they have chosen a place in the eastern quarter of Jordan near Iraq—a completely empty quarter—called Ashraq. I was initially quite dismissive but I have heard so many well informed Jordanians, including newspaper people, saying there is a lot of American activity up there. I know that a whole 1,200 kilometre stretch between Jordan and Baghdad and suddenly there is this huge new army camp that has been built slap on the Jordanian side of the border. I asked my driver whom I always use what it was. He said that is the new American base for when they ship the Palestinians out.
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