‘I was captured and beaten by Islamic terrorists – I escaped and took revenge’ world | news

Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, dressed in brown Bedouin-style clothing, was shouting about a man on the TV screen in our hotel, saying he was “British special forces, working for NATO and helping the revolution”. It was April 2011, and Libya was torn apart by a bloody civil war, with rebels fighting to overthrow the man who had ruled the North African nation with an iron fist since the 1960s. “$100,000 on his head!” Gaddafi screamed and tore up the photo of an alleged rebel supporter and threw it at his head.

The man seen in the photo was me and there was a bounty on my head by a cruel madman who was determined to crush the revolution by every possible violent means. “I’m a Welshman, not a Briton”, I thought, “and I’m worth more than that”.

I was watching Gaddafi put a price on my head in the Uzu Hotel in Benghazi, a rebel-held city in eastern Libya that was a revolutionary stronghold. The name for a rebel, or fighter, in Libya is Thuwar, and unbeknownst to Colonel Gaddafi, he gave me that nickname which has stuck with me to this day. “We can get $100,000 for you, Thuwar,” the revolutionaries laughed in the lobby of the hotel where I was staying as a safety and security adviser to Al-Jazeera journalists covering the war.

Close security engagements in Libya were my bread and butter, and having spent nine years in the 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards Regiment, seeing what I had seen in Bosnia, Kosovo and the second Gulf War, I knew a thing or two about how to protect myself and others. The reason Colonel Gaddafi was shouting and waving my photo was that just 24 hours earlier, we had been almost torn to pieces in the desert, and it was all captured on camera.

We were filming at the port in Benghazi. I was accompanied by senior correspondent Abdul Adim, Lebanese cameraman Issam and our driver Hamid. We were headed back to the front lines near Brega when I noticed something strange on the horizon, a convoy of black SUVs speeding straight towards us. I took the group off the road and into some “dead ground” as the soldiers call it, which is an area safe from any direct fire if this happens.

Once the black SUV roared to a stop, General Abdul Fatah Younis, the head of the rebel forces at the time who had defected from Gaddafi’s regime, got out of the car. Our cameramen and reporters got ready for the interview, and I sat in our van with our driver, Hamid. Hamid said the general was from the same tribe as him, the Obeid tribe, and he asked me if he could go over and say hello, even though the drivers had to stay in the vehicle. I agreed. He left his AK-47 in the footwell next to me.

At that very moment, I heard a voice in my head telling me to get out. I grabbed the AK-47, took two steps away from the van and an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) came from the front, went straight through the seat I was sitting in and exploded in the back of the vehicle. I didn’t have time to fall to the ground.

Mortar shells began to fall and small arms fire began, apparently a government attack on the rebels. Everyone was running for their vehicles. Running forward, I grabbed the reporter, and we ran about 600 meters away from the van before I pushed him into the sand.

Hamid was injured by shrapnel, and I ran back and pulled him to safety next to the correspondent. When I looked up again, cameraman Issam was still filming, but behind him I saw a head emerging from behind a small hump in the sand. It was one of the attackers firing at us, so I raised my weapon and sent him a few messages.

I managed to follow the desert pylons to safety on the coast before we were picked up by friendly forces.

I was back in the hotel in Benghazi again when the place echoed with chants of “Allahu Akbar”, meaning God is great, and I looked up and there was the footage that Issam had filmed of me running to get Abdul Adim. A few minutes later, Gaddafi was on TV calling for my head.

This is where my new name, Rebel Reece, stuck, my yellow Labrador is called Rebel, and for my work as a pastor, I am known as Rebel Reverend.

There was a happy atmosphere among our group at the hotel at this time, but I had no idea that I was about to experience the darkest chapter of my life. I was prepared to go out with a new group and wait for the reporter who would arrive in a few days, but we were driving through Benghazi in the van when suddenly two cars cut us off in front and behind.

Everyone was ordered out by armed men and they put hoods over our heads and put us in the van. It felt like we had been driving for six or seven hours, and I was worried we might be headed toward the Islamic extremist city of Derna. Al-Qaeda was largely active in North Africa and the Middle East.

Eventually, we stopped, and I was let out of the van. There was an engineer in our group whom I met at the hotel that morning. He was only in Libya for a week or two.

They took off his shirt and slit his throat in front of me.

All I thought was “This is al-Qaeda, and they’re going to kill me”, but I was taken into a building and pushed into a small room like a store cupboard, there was nothing in it, dirt on the floor, with a small window the size of a mobile phone.

The door slammed shut, and I don’t know how long it remained closed, but when the door opened again, they came in and started kicking and punching me until I was unconscious.

This continuous beating continued for several days. I would get dry rice or couscous, maybe once or twice a day, and in a cup of water they would spit or urinate. They used to urinate on me also. Sometimes they would put a cap on my head and a rope around my neck and take me out of the room and make me stand on a stool and tie my hands behind my back and start pushing me. This may happen seven or eight times a day,

If I fell asleep, they would kick me in the face, and my eye bone would be broken. All my nails were pulled out and once they even tried to burn my tattoos.

One day, they tied me to two benches; It looked like a small carpenter’s bench with an empty space in the middle. They pulled my left arm, and one of my captors jumped on it, tearing my rotator cuff and something called the scalene muscle, which grips your neck – I still struggle with the pain to this day.

After jumping on my arm he raped me.

I recently told someone about it for the first time in the last few weeks during a podcast with the Veterans for Veterans group, which helps former servicemen and women. My wife found out when it came up during a counseling session many years later. But until this year, I didn’t tell anyone else.

Even now, saying this on this page, I don’t feel any shame anymore. When this happened, I was clearly in turmoil and trying to understand what had been done to me: “Does this make me gay? What does this mean?” It’s kind of strange to think that amidst all that horror, my mind was trying to compartmentalize something so painful, but I survived by putting things in a box at the time, even though it can’t last forever.

After the rape, the beating continued and then, after two weeks, suddenly stopped. Eating also stopped, and I knew I wouldn’t survive much longer. I was hoping that someone would find me, or even that Gaddafi would come with his ransom, but now I knew that no one else would save me.

One day, the youngest boy came into the room. He had his AK under his arm and was distracted talking to someone on his mobile. I grabbed him, put him in a sleeper hold and choked him until I knew he would never get back up. I took his gun and put it outside. I remember climbing a wall. My arm was still in pieces, my eye socket was broken, I probably looked like Quasimodo.

Glancing up into the sunlight, I was stunned to see that I was on the same street in Benghazi where we had been snatched away and just steps away from a coffee shop where I had breakfast every morning. I was staggering around laughing and sobbing. Fauci, the boss, ran to me. After completely disappearing for several weeks, he came up to me and kissed my forehead, a deep sign of respect in Libyan culture.

He called the local press bureau and some rebels came to the café. That was the moment my military training kicked in and we crossed the street and headed straight to the front door of the building that had been my personal hell for countless weeks in the past.

When I went to the temporary office, there was the man who had done the worst thing I had ever done to me. I still remember the look of horror on his face when he saw me, it seemed as if his blood had completely drained out and he had turned white.

His AK was on the desk in front of him, he moved towards it and I pulled the trigger. I didn’t stop until you could hear the ‘click, click’ of the empty action after all 30 rounds had gone through. Fauci had to snatch the gun from my hand. Two days later I woke up in Cairo.

Returning to civilian life, I began to explore the idea of ​​faith. Then last April, my wife and I decided to attend a church service. The minister there is a perfect Scottish grandmother; She is approximately 4 feet 9 inches tall and has a quirky sense of humor. During the conversation I told her that I had been involved in Libya for 14 years and she told me that she had delivered two of Gaddafi’s grandchildren while working as a midwife in Libya in the 70s and 80s.

That day, after talking to the Reverend, I decided to become a priest myself. Now I use my faith to help veterans, and I pray every day.