Force For Hire

The day Russell Frost and two former American soldiers were kidnapped was an unusual one, even by the standards of 2016 Baghdad. On Jan. 15, as the battle against Islamic State raged across the country, Frost and his two fellow contractors — former U.S. Army soldiers Amr Mohamed and Waiel el-Maadawy — found an interpreter to assist in their government mission of training coalition forces. The interpreter was a strange one, Mohamed said, offering the men liquor and women in an area where such things at the time could lead to death. Against their better judgment, the three men met at the interpreter’s house to finalize a working relationship over tea. As night began to fall, Mohamed insisted they leave. When the Americans attempted to do so, they were surrounded by dozens of armed men, members of a Shiite militia supported by cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. What followed was a horrific, 31-day ordeal in which the three — accused by their captors of being CIA operatives — were brutally tortured and imprisoned in inhuman