I left James Foley at the door when I walked into the interrogation room. I had first met the indescribably charming American journalist on a landing strip in Kandahar, Afghanistan, back in 2010. We had stood together alone at dawn for five consecutive days, hoping for a helicopter to fly though a gap in a sandstorm to take us to be embedded with US units fighting during the Afghan surge. I last saw Foley in Turkey, near the Syrian border. He was coming out from an assignment; I was going in. The British photojournalist John Cantlie was with him. That was back in 2012. A couple of months later, Foley disappeared. The next time the world saw him was in August 2014 as he knelt in the Syrian sand, hands tied, and was beheaded by a British Isis terrorist.
The two prisoners had already been seated down together by guards on a brown sofa the other side of the room when I walked in. They were handcuffed and blindfolded, and I found myself relieved by the separation this afforded, as it allowed me to take a seat opposite them without having to deal with the handshake issue.
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