The Freelancers Are Free

The good news is that the freelance American journalists who went missing in Lebanon earlier this month have been found... in a Syrian jail. Yesterday, just a day after the US Embassy in Lebanon announced that Talyor Luck and Holli Chmela had disappeared sometime after leaving Beirut on October 1st for the northern city of Tripoli, the Syrian government revealed that they had arrested the two of them sneaking into the country without a visa and with the help of a smuggler.

So it turns out that we can breath a sigh of relief for their sake. And that my concern about a resurgence of foreign hostage taking was overblown.

Or was it? Back home in Amman, Luck, who along with Chmela is an intern at the Jordan Times, announced today that the two of them had in fact been abducted. Luck described being locked in the backseat of a taxi cab he and Chmela had hired to take them to Syria legally. But before reaching the official border crossing, the taxi veered off the main road and into the hinterlands, while the driver and an accomplice demanded money. Not long after, a military vehicle stopped the taxi and arrested the two Americans. Luck said he only realized he was in Syria once he saw a road sign for Crac de Chevaliers, Syria's most famous Crusader castle.

So who to believe? Were the two young journalists recklessly trying to sneak into Syria for a story about smuggling? Was this a simple case of banditry? Or has some group inside Syria -- perhaps a jihaddi cell -- put out a tender for American hostages and these two freelancers just got unlucky.

On the one hand, Luck's story (at least what we've heard so far) sounds a bit odd. What kind of self-respecting Middle Eastern thug tries to stage a kidnapping or robbery merely by locking someone in the back seat of a taxi? Where were the guns and blindfolds? And why would someone try to stage a cross-border robbery or kidnapping operation with some 10,000 extra Syrian soldiers currently reinforcing the area.

On the other hand, what have the Syrians done with the taxi driver/sumggler? What's he have to say?

Sounds like one more Syrian story without a proper ending.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut