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We need reporters on the ground to help us see through the fog of war, but that is always a messy task. In asymmetric early 21st-century conflicts in north Africa and the Middle East, almost all of them dealing at least in part with blowback from previous western interventions, it has become an awesomely difficult job. On battlefields with blurred frontlines, and multiple antagonists whose identities and motivations are obscure, journalists are as much of a target as everyone else. Donning a flak jacket and trying to send home a quote or image that makes sense of it all is not a job for everyone.
So what sort of guy was John Cantlie, the British photographer and reporter who was, most likely, killed by an airstrike in Iraq in 2017, having been kidnapped in Syria in 2012? Hostage spends three episodes trying to work it out. That it does so without the help of Cantlie’s family, who declined to participate, only adds to the feeling that there is much we cannot know. But, particularly in the initial impression given by the opening instalment, this is not the reverent tribute we might expect for a man whose vocation is usually held in high esteem. Cantlie comes across as a maverick who was a danger to himself and to others, as hard to analyse as the brutal chaos he kept throwing himself into.
“If we don’t make it out of this, it’s been fun!” says Cantlie in one of the first clips we see of him, a selfie video shot in Libya in 2011. He is with western-backed troops as they fight to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi and Cantlie is right on the frontline. Not for the last time, he has walked into a situation he might not be able to walk out of, a prospect that seems to delight him. Other foreign correspondents, on whose assessments the series relies heavily, recall a garrulous machismo carried over from Cantlie’s previous life as a presenter of motorcycling documentaries on British cable TV, his confidence hiding the truth that he was a struggling freelancer hoping to get the gigs with major media organisations that his contemporaries had already snagged. Yet Cantlie’s on-the-fly smartphone reports had a visceral immediacy that was at least the equal of more established rivals.
One of his colleagues was the US journalist James Foley, who worked with Cantlie in Libya and hooked up with him again after civil war broke out in Syria in 2011. There they were guided by local photographer/fixer/interpreter Mustafa Karali, the programme’s chief witness. He describes a first meeting with Foley and Cantlie at which he warned that their journey into the city of Binnish involved crossing an Assad regime checkpoint, where they could expect to come under fire. Foley assented calmly; Cantlie was exuberantly enthusiastic and visibly disappointed when they didn’t have to dodge bullets. “He hoped to be shot [at],” says Karali.
From there, Karali, who has a lot of affection for his lost friend and co-worker, tells a remarkable series of yarns about Cantlie’s interactions with a new group of fighters who would become known as Islamic State. They were notorious for their extreme ideology, ruthless kidnappings and for the shocking fact that many of them were from the UK. Cantlie developed a fascination that intensified when he was captured by jihadists not once but twice, rather fortunately being freed both times by another faction of the anti-Assad opposition, the Free Syrian Army. He now had the big story that could make his name. Ignoring protestations from various parties that it could put him in grave peril, he went back to Syria – where even the most prudent journalists could not guarantee their own safety – to search for young British men who had become violent fundamentalists.
In December 2012, Cantlie and Foley were abducted by IS and Karali’s account of that is jaw-dropping. It happened after an encounter in a Binnish internet cafe during which Foley apparently said words to Cantlie to the effect of: shut up or you’ll get us both killed. After a spell in captivity, Foley was murdered; Cantlie was kept alive, having made himself useful by presenting grotesque propaganda videos for IS. Whether he was doing what was necessary to survive or had been “turned” by his captors was the subject of much anguished speculation.
Cantlie’s time as a hostage takes up the remaining two episodes and we hear how the horror of incarceration and torture brought his courage and kindness to the surface. It adds nuance to the overall view of the man, but the picture remains tangled and incomplete, the whole truth lost to noise and smoke.
