Lawfare Daily: Elizabeth Tsurkov on Her Captivity in Iraq

[Intro]

Elizabeth Tsurkov: When something humiliating like this happens, like we bought the explosives that blew us up. It just, it really undermines this kind of driving force, the sense of enjoyment of being part of this scare group because they're part of an axis that is linked. So the failure of Hezbollah is their own failure as well, right. And the weakening of Iran and the weakening of Hamas, et cetera is their weakening, this is how they perceive it.

Benjamin Wittes: It is the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare with Princeton PhD candidate Elizabeth Tsurkov.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: In Israel, after the gag order in Israel was lifted about my kidnapping in July of 23, because of my political views, because of my support for Palestinian human rights, there was basically a campaign of incitement against me on social media by right-wing, prominent media personalities, and a great deal of schadenfreude that, ‘Look at this lover of Arab being kidnapped by Arabs,’ you know.

Benjamin Wittes: Tsurkov was held for 903 days by an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq.

In this conversation, we talk about the circumstance of her detention, American policy toward hostages under both the Biden administration and the Trump administration, and the sociological study she made during her captivity of the people who were holding her.

[Main Episode]

So, I wanna start with your very unexpected Atlantic article, which I think when most people come out of captivity at the hands of a terrorist group, the first thing they do in writing is not kind of to make fun of the terrorist group.

And you wrote an article, I believe the headline was, “I've been Kidnapped by Morons” or “Idiots” or,

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: And a lot of the article is deadly serious, but it is also funny and a lot of the point of the article is that there's something comical about how stupid the people who tortured you were.

So talk to me first about the relationship between, you know, why when you were in, when you came out as the first thing you're gonna write in a major publication, kind of poking fun at Kata'ib Hezbollah.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah. Thank you for having me here. The article is titled “I was Kidnapped by Idiots.” I basically wrote a draft of it already while in captivity.

Benjamin Wittes: Wrote in your head or wrote on—

Elizabeth Tsurkov: I wrote it—I wrote it initially in my head when I was in a torture prison for the first four and a half months of captivity. And then in the second prison where I was provided with notebooks, I literally wrote down the outline of the article already. And then after I came out of captivity, I reconnected with Syrian and Iraqi friends and Iranians and spoke with them about my experience and to see if it tracks with them as well and what kind of insights I could gain from this really, obviously horrible experience that had also many funny elements to it.

And humor helped me stay sane while inside and at times when I was feeling. You know, utter horror 24/7. At any moment there would, there was no precise timing for when they would come and torture me. So it's basically, I was on constant alert waiting for the next torture session and humor helped deal with that.

Of course, when things that really bad things stopped being funny. But really, I remember for the first month or so of captivity, basically, you know, during the first month there was, there was minimal torture, I would call it. I used to think that, you know, after I come out of this, and I expected to come out very quickly, you know, because I knew that I've been kidnapped for a ransom so that should be easy to arrange.

I thought that I would go on the standup tour and talk about this experience and how funny it is, and I would tell this standup routine to myself, you know, to cheer myself up, right. And, you know, I was always surveilled by two cameras and basically the captors, they would occasionally see me in the cameras just laughing to myself and not knowing what, like, probably thinking that I'm losing my mind.

But in fact I was trying to preserve it, obviously without kind of doing it in a cognizant way, like this is how I preserve my mind from slipping, you know, and there is a, an element of vindictiveness to, to this article. I understood that while interacting with them that the reason why many people join these militias—and I've then, you know, spoken to friends who've also interacted and unfortunately had interactions with such with such militias and such regimes—obviously people joined for a salary, but also because of the element of the ability to instill terror and to feel powerful and to feel scary.

People enjoy this, enjoy, for example, being a member of Kata'ib Hezbollah in, in Iraq and knowing that your neighbors are afraid of you, knowing that you can, you know, park your car in their driveway, and they're not going to dare to say anything because they're terrified of what you'll do to them because you can literally kill them and get away with it.

So when you poke fun at them, it is something that undermines their power. Actually, the person who probably the most wanted person in Iraq right now is Ahmed Albasheer. He is the John Stewart of Iraq. Of course, he cannot live in Iraq, and his program cannot air on any Iraqi channel, even if he's abroad, because the channel would be basically blown to pieces.

So he's broadcasting on Deutsche Welle, a German channel, Arabic and on YouTube. And the show is incredibly popular because it is against the militias, but it also pokes fun at them. And this is something that is deeply, I think it's much more effective than just saying, you know, these guys are, you know, are Iran's puppets or something like that, which is the common criticism of them in Iraq.

They're actually not too ashamed of being, you know, of serving a foreign state. They are, however, very displeased with being found out to be morons.

Benjamin Wittes: Alright, so before we backtrack and get the story of how you came to be in their custody in the first place, I wanna stay on this theme for a minute.

When you and I first talked about this, when you were released, you mentioned to me that your mother had a similar history and had been in the Soviet Union, prosecuted for, among other things, jokes.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: And so tell me about your family history of making fun of authoritarian torturers.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah. So, both my mother and father were jailed in USSR for political crimes. My father served seven years in prison and two years doing hard labor, and my mother spent three years in prison. And my mother, she did a whole lot of things against the regime. Both of them were dissidents seeking to change the regime, replace it with a democracy, and my mother, she would be involved in Samizdat.

Samizdat is basically the production of books and literature that is banned in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union controlled all the printing presses, controlled all the Xerox machines, and basically people would use other methods to basically move around this banned literature.

And there was tamizdat, which is, which are books that were printed outside of the Soviet Union and were smuggled in, and samizdat, it means self-production in Russian. And that was basically my mother would type up entire books on her, you know, typing machine—his was before the era of computers—and basically would make copies after copies of books of poetry.

And she would smuggle that around. She would travel around the USSR and smuggle it around and distributed to France, distributed to other people. You know, for example, the works of Solzhenitsyn, the works of Strugatsky, and other, Kalich, who was a popular kind of, bard, poet. Those were the types of works that she was distributing.

Also, George Orwell was banned, so that as well, so translation of 1984 and Animal Farm. And she also, she would also meet with families of dissidents who were jailed, would collect information from them about the conditions of their incarcerated family members. She would then speak to Radio Free Europe and give them the information about conditions in, in the gulags.

And one thing that she did kind of for fun was. You know, maintain this collection of jokes and basically grow it gradually to encompass hundreds of political jokes.

Benjamin Wittes: And for people who don't know Soviet-era jokes, it's a, it's like an art form. They are, they're unbelievably dark and funny.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: It is. It's a very developed and sophisticated form of, you know, political satire was basically transferred from one person to another as a form of resistance that is, you know, could be called a, the weapon of the weak, right—in a different context, but basically it is a way to resist that is risky, but you know, not terribly not, you know, like going out into a protest against the regime, which is obviously very dangerous. Or, you know, taking the bars or whatever.

So, so my mother maintained this collection of jokes and while she would never keep in the house any samizdat work that is kind of, you know, political, the classic samizdat that, let's say the writings of Solzhenitsyn, she kept the collection of jokes because she was so, you know, this is jokes, you know, so then when the KGB raided her apartment, they found nothing except this collection of jokes.

So this is what she was sentenced for it, even though she did a whole lot more, you know, talking to Radio Free Europe, traveling around, smuggling the samizdat,

Benjamin Wittes: But what she actually went to prison for is a joke book.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah. So the article in the law that she was sentenced for was [Russian], which is spreading lies about the common Soviet order.

And the lies are the jokes, basically.

Benjamin Wittes: And you told me that during her trial, they had to read the jokes as evidence.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: So, so this was during the interrogations, basically, they would ask her to tell them the jokes because that was basically the case against her. And initially she resisted, she's like, oh, you're not going. Like, are you fucking kidding me? Like you are going to then sentence me before telling this joke now. So I'm not going to, you know, double up my sentence here. They’re  like no, it's okay. You can just tell us. So she started telling them the jokes and the funny thing is that they tried to avoid laughing, right?

Because they need to be taking this seriously, but the jokes are genuinely funny. So they just started laughing. So then she would just, you know, pass the time and by telling them. And then afterward, after she was sentenced, she was, the trial was in Leningrad, she was transferred basically to serve out a sentence in Siberia.

And while she was on the train, like the guards were accompanying them who were not KGB were just, you know, ordinary soldiers of some or internal security or one of some kind, ask her, is it true that you were jailed for jokes? She's like, yes, I was jailed for it, and I was sentenced, you know, three years.

And they're like, tell us some of the jokes. She's like, are you trying to get me sentenced for more years? Like, no please. And she's like, no, I'm not going. And then they told her, why don't we, why don't you come to our cabin and you will have, you'll have dinner with us and you'll tell us the jokes.

So the offer of the dinner was very tempting. So she came in and basically what they had, there was a big jar of homemade jam and she just devoured this jam while she was telling them the jokes. So that was her payment for the performance. And indeed, she was not they didn't, you know, rat on her. They told her, you know, we're just commissioned, you know, you know, we are doing like our obligatory service.

You know, we don't have anything to do with the KGB. We're not going to rat you out. Just come and tell us the jokes. So that's what she did. She told them the jokes in exchange for jam.

Benjamin Wittes: So you, your parents moved to Israel when you were young?

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: You are Israeli, Russian, and a graduate student a PhD candidate at Princeton.

How did you end up in Iraq, which is not a place that people expect Israelis to end up? How did you end up in Iraq and how did you end up specifically in Iraq, in the loving embrace of Kata'ib Hezbollah?

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah, so I was in Iraq. This was my seventh visit to conduct field work for my PhD dissertation.

The dissertation is in the field of comparative politics. It basically compares two political movements. One of them in Iraq, the Sadrist Movement, which is the largest political movement in Iraq. And it compares it with a Lebanese party a Maronite party, a Christian party in Lebanon. So I did field work in both countries.

And basically, you know, you come into a country and you start through the connections that you have to recruit interviewees. And I was basically recruiting people who are for interviews, people who are Sadrist and former Sadrist in particular, and also informed individual people from their family who are not Sadrist, et cetera.

And my initial end was through activists who are members of the 2019 protest movement in Iraq called the Tishreen Movement, which was very violently crushed by the militias. They basically slaughtered about 800 of these protestors; kidnapped many of them, tortured many of them, and many of them are former Sadrists.

And therefore they were my “in” into the Sadrist community. And also I would just travel by myself to Sadrist areas and interview people. And basically the—Qasem Soleimani, who was, you know, assassinated by the Trump, the first Trump administration in 2020, oversaw the mass murder of these protestors and their repression.

He arrived shortly after the protest began, and basically held the meeting with the leadership of these militias and oversaw basically the repression of these protests that were really nationwide and in comp—millions of people came out into the streets across Iraq, and interestingly in, mostly in majority Shia areas.

It was a revolt of the Shia against this regime that is supposedly, you know, ruling in their name. So the repression was very violent, and the Iranians similar to what, you know, how they present the, you know, the last wave of protests in, in, in Iran, they presented the protests that were taking place in Iraq as a foreign conspiracy basically led—that basically the Americans made people come out into the streets and protest—whatever, which is obviously bullshit, but this is something that they genuinely believe in.

So if you perceive them to be a foreign threat, the protestors, you basically, then once the protest movement ends, and they're still activists out there, what the militias did, I turned, I found out very unfortunately, only while in captivity, was to basically recruit people from this protest, you know, this activist milieu and also plant people to spy on other activists.

So basically, there were several people in my environment who basically turned out to be plants of these, of these militias, and they used them to essentially lure me out of my home. They used one of them to lure me out of my home during the evening time and to be, for the meeting to be held very, very close to my home so that I don't take a taxi and therefore walking on foot and therefore kidnapping is easier.

And this is how it was. I was kidnapped.

Benjamin Wittes: And they did not know at the time that you were Israeli, right? That you were not kidnapped because you were a—

Elizabeth Tsurkov: No

Benjamin Wittes: secret Mossad agent. You were kidnapped because you were available.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Exactly. They didn't know that I'm Israeli. They actually thought at first that I'm American because I'm coming from a U.S. university.

I presented myself to everyone as a Russian, which I am, and so they thought that I'm American and Russian, but then they asked for the passport of my phone. You know, they were, they, the kidnapping itself was extremely violent. So I knew that I have to comply.

And then according to the records that I now have, they basically opened my phone about two and a half weeks after my kidnapping and then rummaged through it. And then after a month came, you know, found enough evidence to show that I'm Israeli. And then basically came in and started torturing me, demanding that I confessed to being a spy.

Benjamin Wittes: So just to be clear, you have no relationship with any intelligence agency?

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Well, since coming back, I have been questioned by several intelligence agencies.

Benjamin Wittes: Right. But you had no relationship—

Elizabeth Tsurkov: No, I mean, I did my obligatory military service in in Israel which is compulsory for both men and women, and the director of intelligence who was an intelligence analyst.

But that ended in 2007.

Benjamin Wittes: And how did you come to speak good enough Arabic to conduct field research, not just in Iraq, but also in Lebanon and Syria over many years, in—your Arabic is, as best as I can tell, near native at this point.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah, so I started learning Arabic in 2014 so quite late in my life.

This was driven by basically a changing dynamic on the ground in Syria. So when, I joined kind of social media and Twitter and became connected to many Arab activists back in 2008, in late 2008. And then many of these activists became, you know, prominent members of the uprisings that occurred across the Arab world, then known as the Arab Spring.

So I very closely followed, you know, developments in, in, in Tunisia and Egypt and Bahrain, and of course was very supportive of those. I think due to kind of very much the legacy of my parents and reading a lot of new conservative literature as a young adult, I would say. So I was very supportive of those uprisings.’

I remember speaking to Syrians before the uprising in Syria started. They were debating, will it happen here or not? You know, the regime is so brutal that is known for its brutality. Last time people rose in ‘82, in Hama, you know, tens of thousands were killed. Entire neighborhoods flattened by half a regime.

And then the uprising started, I started following it along with following all the other uprisings in the region. And, you know, while other uprisings succeeded in Tunisia and in Egypt, others were crushed very violently, like in Bahrain. Others petered out in Syria, kept going, and was more and more violent.

And I just, you know, kept following the developments and connecting with more and more Syrians. And initially basically knowing English was sufficient not to do any kind of high-quality research, but just to just follow events. And then, my contacts and friends, people who became my friends in Syria, who spoke English, were either killed because the regime very much targeted, this kind of liberal elite that played a role in, you know, leading the uprising, particularly in urban areas and during the first months of the uprising.

So those individuals were targeted very heavily for arrest, for killing. And many of them, as a result, those who were not jailed fled the country. So to be able to continue to follow events, I started basically learning Arabic. It was, it took a long time for me to be able to you know, to speak fluently, for me to be able to read and write, it takes time.

It's not also the—Arabic also has multiple dialects. So, you know, I learned, initially I learned Palestinian Arabic with a Palestinian teacher. Then I had to adjust to Syrian Arabic to some extent. I studied with Syrian teachers who were my friends, basically, and I would pay them to have conversations with me. Well, Princeton would pay them to have conversations with me. And that very much helped.

And then in Iraq, I just picked up from France, basically. I would ask them, what's the Iraqi word for this? Because Iraqi is quite different from Palestinian, from Shami, Syrian, or Lebanese Arabic.

So this is how I picked up the language and then. You can—during the second part of my captivity, the prison without torture. I was given books in Arabic, much of them in kind of classic Arabic, kind of, sixth, seventh century Arabic. And basically had an opportunity over the span of the 25 months that I spent in the second facility to also improve kind of my classical Arabic. 'cause I studied it at university, but no one actually speaks it. There I was held in isolation without contact with people and just, you know, really—

Benjamin Wittes: It's a great, it's a great opportunity to learn a classical language.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Exactly.

Benjamin Wittes: Because it's not like, it's not like you need dialogue with people.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Exactly. There was very minimal dialogue, unfortunately.

Benjamin Wittes: So a lot of listeners are gonna hear this story and say, it is one thing to be an Israeli who learns Arabic, who reaches out by Zoom and other electronic media remotely to lots of activists in the field—it is quite another thing to pick up and go on multiple occasions to Iraq and Syria and—

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Lebanon.

Benjamin Wittes: Lebanon, none of which have relations with Israel, all of which have factions that are likely to view any Princeton graduate student who happens to be Israeli as a spy. Why did you think that this was something you could do safely?

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Because I am, well, first of all I think that I'm not a widely known figure.

I'm not a journalist who is out there, and even Israeli journalists have traveled to such countries. But I am basically known to quite a limited number of people, basically, mainly people who follow me on social media, on Facebook, on Twitter, things of this kind. So therefore, I'm not, you know, my face is not well known.

On top of that, the name on my passport, the Russian passport is, my name, but it's just the way it is pronounced in Russian, if you Google that name, it does not lead to my English name, basically. So therefore, in theory, and no one actually ever did that; in theory, someone you know has access to my passport and Googles my name, they will not find anything that links—

Benjamin Wittes: Because it uses Tsurova or what? '

Elizabeth Tsurkov: cause basically it's a, the Russian way of pronouncing my first and last name.

Benjamin Wittes: I see. Right.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: And basically, so that offered me some protection, I felt. And indeed I was kidnapped not for being—

Benjamin Wittes: Right.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Not for being Israeli. And you know, many of the regions to which I went, for example, Northeastern Syria, Iraqi Kurdistan, it's not even hostile to Israeli, right?

It's not even a problem to be Israeli. And then Iraqi Kurdistan, I would tell people that I'm Israeli. In Northeastern Syria, the people who were my friends and people I was meeting through them all knew that I'm Israeli. It was not an issue, obviously when I was in whole camp, you know, that was holding ISIS families.

I'm not going to announce there that I'm Israeli.

Benjamin Wittes: So you get kidnapped and after a few weeks they figure out that you're Israeli. You have described the torture that you underwent elsewhere, and I don't want to dwell on that except to say that it was appalling. One of the very striking things about your engagement with this group of people over 903 days that they were holding you is that you made something of a study of them.

And at the Middle East Institute yesterday, you gave a talk in which you described—it's unlike any talk I've ever heard anybody give—a sort of a sociological study of the psychology change in the Kata'ib Hezbollah universe over the course of the 903 days that they were holding you.

Without rehearsing the entire speech, which I urge people to listen to, and which we will link to in the show notes, give us a little overview of how their psychology changed. What's the two- to five-minute version of the 35-, 40-minute talk you gave yesterday?

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah. So, you know, I was kidnapped in March of 2023, and obviously October 7th happened afterwards. And then, so I was already held in the second prison when this happened.

And October 7th was really the most joyous I've ever seen. My captors, they were very happy. They thought that this is an amazing victory to—

Benjamin Wittes: And what were the, what were they happy about? Were they happy that, did they believe this was the end of the state of Israel? Did they believe that? Were they joyous that a lot of civilians had been killed? What was the source of the joy?

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah. First of all, I think they generally don't have a problem with the death of civilians, right. As a, I don't think they make any kind of distinction and Hamas doesn't make either. And this entire axis doesn't, they kill, you know, these militias, Kata'ib Hezbollah was the main actor responsible for killing protestors in 2019, or clearly civilians.

So they don't make those distinctions. They were happy because it was a huge blow for Israel. It was really something quite unprecedented. The way also it was represented in media that was supportive of Hamas and of the axis of resistance like al Jazeera and Al Mayadeen, et cetera, and Iraqi channels that are financed by the militias basically, is that, you know, this is an unprecedented blow.

It is a successful military operation. It was of course not represented as mass slaughter of instant people and kidnapping of overwhelmingly civilians. It was presented as something very different as you know, constantly, I heard the TV of my guards, you know, they were constantly talking about prisoners, not hostages.

They were constantly talking about soldiers, even though very few of them were actually captured. Less than 10 or so soldiers alive, you know, were captured. Actually most of them, six of them, were female soldiers were not armed. And the others were male soldiers who were indeed armed and were disarmed somehow.

And the rest were either civilians or corpses. So this was something that was not told until this day, not told to people to watch these channels. So they viewed it as a highly successful military operation and as something that is really puts Israel at risk. And this is something that in November of ‘23.

And IRGC commander in Iranian, came to demand that I record a video in which I, you know, repeat the confessions that I made under torture in the first prison, and then also add on top of it certain elements that are connected to October 7th. And he told me, started debating with me before the recording saying, you know, what do you think about this attack? And, you know, about October 7th, et cetera.

And, you know, I said, clearly this is a huge failure on the part of Israeli, you know, intelligence agencies. This is unprecedented. Nothing like this has ever happened in Israeli history. That this, the magnitude of this failure. Then he said, yeah, and the state of Israel, is it risk? It's going to disappear. All the Israelis are leaving Israel en mass. This is also another thing that was often repeated on these outfits, that basically there's a wave of immigration from Israel and there is immigration, but it's not something that is you know, significant and any kind of a statistical manner.

Basically he asked me to repeat that on camera, that basically Israel is at an, you know, unprecedented risk to its survival. The survival of the state itself is in question and that, you know, immigrants are leaving in huge numbers. The, you know, basically Israel is done with, right? And I didn't want to say it because it's nonsense.

And you know, as a, obviously people who would watch it and understand that I'm speaking under duress, but this part is like analysis, right? So that made, people—

Benjamin Wittes: You were afraid—you were afraid of giving bad analysis. Your torture,

Elizabeth Tsurkov: I’m an analyst, you know, like this is obviously bullshit.

I don't want to be saying this, so I don't mind like, repeating confessions that are already made on the torture. They're obviously, you know, bullshit. But this is analysis. So in theory people may think, oh she's saying it. You know, because she agrees with this, right? This is genuinely what she believes.

But he insisted on it, and obviously this was only three months I was, after I was transferred from the torch prison, no one told me at any point in the second facility that I'm not going to be tortured. I was trying to find out, you know, no one would give me a clear answer. So I thought, okay I need to comply.

He insisted on it. He was, his tone was very firm, you know, I'm like, okay, I'm just going to say it. And so, this was genuinely their belief. Then things obviously started changing, you know, as time went on particularly a major blow for them was the killing of several Kata'ib Hezbollah commanders and other militias by the Biden administration.

This was in 2024. After basically, they targeted US forces in Jordan and in Syria and in Iraq. So that made it clear to them that the efforts that they made after the assassination of Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in 2020, those were in vain. They're still deeply penetrated, intelligence-wise. Then afterwards came the pager attack, and that was really—that day, they walked around, shell shocked. They were in utter, they were just so flabbergasted by what was done.

And there was a real humiliating element to this because Hezbollah purchased the explosives, like it purchased tracking devices that would track the movement of these. There were GPS trackers implanted into the pagers and into the walkie talkies and, but also explosives obviously.

So this is something that is, that, you know, as I mentioned, people join these groups to feel powerful, to lord over others, to feel that they're scaring others. And when something humiliating like this happens, like we bought the explosives that blew us up. It just, it really undermines this kind of driving force, the sense of enjoyment of being part of the scare group because they're part of an axis that is linked.

So the failure of Hezbollah is their own failure as well, right. And the weakening of Iran and the weakening of Hamas, et cetera is their weakening, this is how they perceive it. So, and throughout this, particularly in the first month of the war, there was a real sense among them that the war is about to end soon and that you know, they will be victorious and Israel will accept the demands that Hamas was making.

And basically in—on Christmas of 23, I was given a TV and I started following the news. I was given a TV in my cell, and I started following the news and I was seeing that this is utter nonsense. This belief that the war will end soon is utter nonsense. And I spoke about it with the nurse who was allowed to come in and check on me from time to time and speak to me.

He was the only one allowed to do so. And I told him, this analysis is nonsense. This is, this war is going to last for a long time. It is politically useful for Netanyahu to continue this war. It is very destructive to his coalition if he stops it. This will just continue for a very long time and there's no pressure from the Biden administration to stop it and.

He asked me to write this analysis for them. So basically I started basically writing, I wrote multiple analysis papers for my captors.

Benjamin Wittes: So this was a, they basically kidnapped a think tank.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Exactly. It was unpaid labor that I was performing for them, but it actually, you know, kept my mind busy. So I enjoyed this process intellectually, obviously there were exploitative elements to this whole story.

So, so the war dragged on and on. Then, you know, Nasrallah was assassinated. The war on Hezbollah—they clearly, even though the public rhetoric was different, and Hezbollah again proclaimed that this was another victory in the series of victories that it has achieved. They clearly admitted in private that, no, like, this is not true.

Like, we, like, Hezbollah lost. We lost, you know.

Benjamin Wittes: So you watch them go from a euphoria ‘Yeah. Our victory is imminent. Yes, it is unfolding before our eyes,’ to realizing that they had bought the explosives with which they were being targeted to realizing that they had been defeated.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah,

Benjamin Wittes: I mean, that must have been an incredible emotional development to observe.

This was after the period of your torture. Were you aware that you were watching something that basically no intelligent service has realtime access to? I mean, except in the deepest—but to actually insinuate, not merely a collector

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: But a, an a really first-rate analyst into Kata'ib Hezbollah to watch the emotional trajectory of this.

This was, I don't mean to make it sound like this was a good thing for you, but it was an incredible intellectual opportunity.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Absolutely. Absolutely. I definitely would've forgotten it. But it really was fascinating to observe it and also learn more because I purposefully, you know, one of the things I did to avoid getting kidnapped is never ask any sensitive questions, about anything related to military, to militia, to whatever.

So for example, with Shiites we would interview, they were often formerly members of Jaysh al-Mahdi, the Sadrist militia. So I would ask them, you know, tell me about your involvement with the Sadrist movement. And they would start speaking and sometimes they would talk about their military background and what they did. You know, this is information that is actually irrelevant at this point. You know, this was 2004, 2005, et cetera.

And I would never pry and never push, and I would never get close to militiamen, to these militias. Even though research-wise, it may have been beneficial to basically compare the motivations of these two groups.

But I avoided it on purpose because they're dangerous people, right. And here I got access to them, you know, and I'm already, the worst thing has already happened. I may as well, you know, use this opportunity to research them. So actually I got oral consent from two of my captors to conduct interviews with them for my PhD.

Benjamin Wittes: Wow.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Because it's very useful information to understand how their motivations and their worldview differs from that of Sadrist, because they're both Shia. But one went in the direction of—and one went in, you know, stayed with the Sadrist movement because many of these militias actually emerged from originally from Jaysh al-Mahdi.

They split it off from it.

Benjamin Wittes: And just for people who don't know the vocabulary, the, that's what English speakers call the Mahdi army, right?

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: So let's talk about the circumstances of your release and, but let's start with the circumstances that did not lead to your release. Which is you had one government, the Israeli government, that was otherwise preoccupied—

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: For most of the time, and did not particularly take responsibility for your case. You had another government on whose passport you were traveling, who if memory serves, told your family that you were a waste of oxygen; and you had a third government which is to say the U.S. government that you were not a citizen of I guess we haven't mentioned that, but you're not a U.S. national, but actually was the chief agent—both during the Biden administration and during the Trump administration—

Your sister, who was really the chief agitator for you the entire time was convinced that the avenue that would get you released was through American pressure. So talk to us about the three governments and the two iterations of the U.S. government. Because of course the Biden administration and the Trump administration were, as your story reflects quite different in this regard.

So let's start with the Israeli government. You were there not representing yourself as an Israeli, but as somebody who is an Israeli citizen who grew up in Israel, who's, and yet the Israeli government did not, you know, make you a headline issue the way it did with the hostages in Gaza.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah.

Basically Israel, my family notified the authorities there very early on, basically within the first 24 hours. And, a beneficial thing that Israel did was at the time was to ask the FBI to open a case into my kidnapping because the FBI has, you know, experts on Hezbollah because it has kidnapped and killed Americans.

And during the first months of my kidnapping prior to October 7th, there were efforts to get me out. The problem is that my kidnappers did not make any demands for a very long time. This is probably because they were assessing basically my value. They were trying to get all the confessions out of me, and basically through repeated rounds of torture, then the commander in the base to which I was transferred, the second prison on the border with Iran. He then also asked for my confessions to in written form. Took a very long time to produce them. They were very long to type them up for him. Anyway, this whole time, basically they didn't raise any demands.

So, Israel was quite limited in what it could do then basically. and then, and eventually when the demand came, it was basically contradictory from two different mediators. One asking for $600 million, the other for $500 million probably 'cause they wanted the, some, one of them wanted a larger cut, basically from the ransom.

And Israel and the United States treated it as kind of a joke number. Like basically this is like saying, you know, we want, you know, all of the ice cream in the world, you know, something ridiculous like this. And throughout the period of my captivity, this is something that, that both Israeli and US officials have told me since coming out the Kata’ib, you know, obviously they're deeply incompetent at their, you know, official, you know, role of, you know, protecting Iraq's security or even serving the Iranian regime.

And this is something I detail in the piece in the Atlantic, they're highly ignorant about issues related to intelligence, et cetera. Information that is not secret and is available out there. If you just read it, you would know all these different things. They were not aware of them, but there were also incompetent negotiators, which is not surprising, right?

So they would raise contradictory demands from different intermediaries. So it was basically very difficult to negotiate with them in Israel after the gag order in Israel was lifted about my kidnapping in July of ‘23. Because of my political views, because of my support for Palestinian human rights, there was basically a campaign of incitement against me on social media by right-wing, prominent media personalities, and a great deal of schadenfreude, that ‘Look at this lover of Arab being kidnapped by Arabs,’ you know, and the traitor who is now there.

So this political climate, the fact that I went into Iraq willingly, you know, was not sent there by my government in any way, is definitely something that reduced the motivation of Israel to work for my release. And indeed in particular, after October 7th, really the actions that were taken were not significant.

Now with the Russian regime, my family met with the Russian officials, reached high ranking Russian officials, to Bogdanov, who is the Putin's advisor on Middle East Affairs. And basically they refused to do anything they said, we have no relationship with these with these militias. The United States created them. They should be the one taking care of them.

And this is obviously bullshit because Russia is actually quite close to these militias. It could have gotten me out, but it refused to do so. And they were quite explicit when they met my family in D.C. at the embassy that they're refusing because of my political views, because of my critical writing of the about the Russian War crimes in Syria and Ukraine.

And that's when they said, you know, then I'm basically a waste of oxygen and it's better if I die. So they did nothing. Even though they could, Israel had more difficulty. It has no less—it had ful—

Benjamin Wittes: It doesn't have an on the ground presence.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Exactly. Exactly. And doesn't have a relationship with these militias as opposed to Russia that genuinely does.

And then the U.S. now, during the Biden administration, basically they didn't see me as their responsibility because I'm not a U.S. national. So, you know, it's an administration that follows things kind of by the book and doesn't see, you know, even though Kata’ib Hezbollah is a terrorist group in the U.S. it's hard.

Many Americans—

Benjamin Wittes: It fires on U.S. troops. Yeah. On a semi-regular basis.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah. Yeah. It used to, you know, before they got knocked on their head and now, they've stopped doing that because they're terrified. But yes, it has killed Americans and obviously. Some people inside the U.S. administration believed that it would serve U.S. national interest to get me out.

Particularly also because, you know, as a researcher, I was also, you know, briefing officials in many countries, including in the United States. So I was well known to officials inside the Biden administration

Benjamin Wittes: Including at very high levels.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yes. You know, I was, as someone who conducted research in the region on the ground, it is something that is appreciated in in the U.S. and in other countries as well.

So the Biden administration essentially didn't do much, and things really changed when Trump got elected and I'm saying elected because it was even before he was sworn into office. Now everyone knows that my political leanings are liberal, but. I genuinely believe, and that if Trump had not been elected, I would've just died there in captivity.

This is just the reality because the same people who were in the Biden administration running policy would've remained in the Harris administration, and they too would've believed that this is not in our interest to do anything to get her out. Some officials inside the Biden administration even believed that it would be harmful to U.S. interest if I got out, because it would cause a civil war between Iraqis, I don't know, maybe Iraqi factions like the Shia factions, Sadrists.

And—

Benjamin Wittes: do you wanna name names on that?

Elizabeth Tsurkov: I mean, I think that people who listen to this podcast are familiar with the geniuses who worked at the Biden administration and could venture a guess, as to who would think such utter nonsense, I'm out and I'm free, and there's no civil war in Iraq. Anyway, after Trump was elected, my sister, and Adam Boehler was appointed as the special envoy for hostage affairs, she reached out to him even before the inauguration and managed to meet him and his family home, him and his wife and he just agreed to take on my case.

He felt sorry for me. He realized there was no one else fighting for me. The governments whose passports I hold were, you know, not interested, not able, you know, to do much. And he took on my case. And he also recognized that U.S. has immense leverage over, over Iraq and over these militias because they're terrified of the U.S. and particularly they're terrified of Trump. You know, the former leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah, whom really the members worshiped like a god, you know, would kiss his hand when meeting him, really just saw him in this, you know, holy figure. Trump killed him like that. And he was even—

Benjamin Wittes: Collateral damage to the killing of Soleimani. Right?

Elizabeth Tsurkov: He wasn't even the target. It wasn't even the fucking target. So they, they genuinely fear Trump. This is something that I noticed in, during torture sessions when, you know, Trump came up, this was still during the Biden administration and the matter of the assassination of Soleimani came up, that they were incredibly, obviously they hate him but also they're terrified of him and they think that he's crazy.

And this is something that, so Adam Boehler got involved in this case and, you know, met with, flew to Baghdad, basically uninvited barged into a meeting with al-Sudani, with the head Iraqi Prime Minister, brought up my case, demanded movement, demanded to be connected to the kidnappers so that he can talk to them directly and get me out. Threatened that if they don't talk to him, he said bombs will drop on them.

And then at a later stage really in, in early September, Mark Savaya, who is an Iraqi American business person who is friends with Trump and participated in the 2024 campaign in Michigan, he traveled to, to Iraq and met with Prime Minister al-Sudani.

The meeting was on other issues. But he brought up my case and he basically told al-Sudani, I want you to convey a message to the leadership of Kata’ib Hezbollah, that if Elizabeth is not released within a week, you will, guys will be killed. And that Trump is pissed. And he even gave him two photos that show Mark and Trump in the same photo and Trump looking angry basically. So he said, you know, tell them Trump is pissed. You know, this you need to get this done.

And indeed, I was released within a week. Mark remained in Iraq. He didn't fly out. He waited for me to come out. And then came, I was taken to, from where I was held captive near the border with Iran. I was taking to Baghdad. There I was in the Green Zone. Then I was handed over to the Iraqi government. Iraqi government brought me to a very fancy guest house in the Green Zone. And from there, Mark came to pick me up and took me to the U.S. Embassy.

Benjamin Wittes: I wanna dwell on a couple of themes that are latent in what we just, everything we've just talked about.

Your politics are extremely complicated. On the one hand, just within this conversation, you've described yourself as having your interest in this, having been inspired to some degree by neo-conservatives; you’re a figure of hate campaign in Israel because you have your pro-Palestinian stances on a lot of issues; you take Arab democracy in many countries extremely seriously, in a way that a lot of people do not; and you have advised and briefed many people in the prior administration on all kinds of analytical questions; and you're also very, you described yourself as left-leaning or liberal-leaning, and yet you are frank that the Biden administration was ineffective and that it is precisely the things that people fear about the Trump administration, which is the chest thumping willingness to violate rules that is the reason that you're alive and free.

And I want you to reflect, I was very struck by this in your MEI speech yesterday that you know, you are not afraid of the complexity of the world that you interact with, and you're not afraid to be a complicated figure in that world. Situate for us, your core commitments, who are you as a political being?

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah, so I think I would say that my core commitment is to human rights. However, I, in the current political climate in the U.S. and also in Israel, I don't feed fit neatly into any kind of category too well, because, for example, human rights organizations would object to the use of force to achieve a goal that is in my view, beneficial for the advancement of human rights and would revert to issues related to international law, and this is not allowed, et cetera.

I think that killing people who have harmed not just Westerners, most of the victims of these regimes, of this axis of resistance, the most and of oppressive regimes in general are—

Benjamin Wittes: And just to clear, when you when you say axis of resistance, you mean the Iran back world across Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen,

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Exactly. exactly. Iraq, Yemen, et cetera. Exactly.

My opposition to this, you know, axis does not stem from their, or does not just stem from their hostility towards, you know, Israel or the United States. My problem is much more in line with what locals in the region are saying is that these militias and these regimes are highly oppressive.

Most of their victims, overwhelmingly, most of the victims of the Iraqi militias, of the Iranian regime, of the axis regime, of Lebanese, Hezbollah are fellow Muslims and Arabs in the case of, you know, and Iranians. So I, for me, it is very important, and it was important before my captivity, and it's much more visceral now to acknowledge the suffering of these individuals.

So, for example, after the assassination of Soleimani, when, you know the people who are generally, you know, supportive of human rights and liberals, leftists would condemn this killing. I went and spoke to people who are victims of this man, or victims of Soleimani.

I spoke to Syrians and I wrote an article—it was published in The Forward—basically of what Syrians think about this, of people who survived for example, the siege on Kobani and Zabadani; those are two towns near the border with Lebanon that were besieged by Lebanese Hezbollah, you know, which is run was run by Soleimani, right—his network.

And children, they're starved to death. You know, people there, you know, in Syria, many of the kind of traditional ways of taboon, like a way to make bread, is basically those are ovens made with clay, mixed with salt. People would break them up because they were lacking with salt. They were fainting in the streets to just lick the salt off of the mud. This is what people were driven into.

And so of course, people who survived this horror will rejoice at the killing of this mass murderer. Soleimani, at the time of his killing, was probably the person responsible for the largest number of deaths alive because, you know, you know, the former North Korean dictator, you know, was dead, you know, during the famine in the nineties.

This is basically a person who's responsible for propping up the Asad regime. You know, since 2012, the Asad regime relied on Iranian advisors, relied on Qasem Soleimani personally, and relied on Shia militias to prop itself up. You know, lacked legitimacy, lacked popularity, and could not trust his own military not to defect. So it relied on these forces and could not rely on them to fight. So he's responsible for so much human suffering.

So this tendency to look at things from a legalistic and international law point of view, those international laws were inherently, you know, written by states. All of international law. It was not written by the people that are oppressed by different regimes. It was written by states and guarantees the rights of states and issues like sovereignty, et cetera. Now of course, I'm not saying go around violating other country sovereignty willy nilly, but when it serves an interest that advances human rights, I don't see why the rights of a state, meaning a regime, trump the rights of human beings that they oppress.

So, so therefore, I don't neatly fit into any kind of a box, but in my mind it is a very clear commitment to human rights. And of course, I would prefer human rights to be advanced solely by human rights organizations and writing statements and diplomacy. But this is not how it works. These are thuggish entities that don't hesitate to murder their own people.

So you cannot, you usually fail to deal with them through, you know, kind of regular means that you would negotiate a trade agreement with whatever country, you know, whatever democracy.

Benjamin Wittes: What are your future plans? I mean, they took two years out of your career and life. You emerged, we haven't talked about this, but with significant physical injuries, hence the comfy chair that you're in.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah. Thank for that.

Benjamin Wittes: What's next for Elizabeth Tsurkov?

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah. Yeah, I am I'm very determined to finish my dissertation. I'm actually working on it. Yesterday I sent a first chapter to my advisors that I've written kind of a rough draft. While I was in captivity, you know, I was disconnected from electronics and I had a great deal of time to think about my dissertation and really flesh out the theory.

And I wrote kind of the outline of my PhD while already in captivity, during the, in the torture prison. I would write it on cardboard pieces, then I would confiscate them and I would write it again and again. So I managed to memorize it and then was able to basically recreate it after coming out from captivity, because a notebook with research ideas that I kept in the second prison, I was not able, tragically, to take it up with me when freed.

But because of, I kept rewriting it, I managed to recall it. So this is definitely my plan and, you know, I'm interesting in doing something that affects policy. I very much enjoy academic work. I enjoy the process of research, the immersion really, in your field. But at the end of the day, I want to, in any way I can, you know, affect the lives of people in the region.

And this commitment has only been, you know, reinforced after, you know, previously, the commitment to the rights of the people of the region was from talking to friends, from knowing what they've gone through from, you know, hearing, you know, about the torture that they went through, you know, in Iraq, at the hands of militias, in in Iran, in Syria, in other countries as well, obviously in Egypt, in Bahrain, et cetera.

And this commitment, after experiencing it myself is so much deeper. So it's very important for me to do something that is impactful. And so, so my hope is to be, you know, based in D.C. and doing something in the policy-space basically, soon.

This of course really depends also on my health because at the moment I can't live independently because of the back injury. So it's—I need to do more physical therapy possibly if that doesn't work undergoing operation for my back. But yeah, that is my hope.

Benjamin Wittes: There's a lot in this conversation that is inspiring, but I wanna close it with something you said at MEI yesterday, which you mentioned only in passing, but I found inspiring and I think a lot of people who feel powerless in this political environment for a hundred different reasons with a hundred different causes will also.

Your sister—I have never seen anybody work harder on anything than she worked on your release for two years and that, one, for those who remember, she and I had a long conversation on this podcast I wanna say a year after you were captured, which we will link to in the show notes.

But one thing she did in the course of that campaign was when Iraqi Prime Minister Sudani came to Washington, she and your two other siblings went on a multi-day harassment campaign of the Iraq—visiting Iraqi delegation that included invading the Willard Hotel where they were staying and sort of, you know, buttonholing, individual diplomats, it included shouting him, the Prime Minister down at a Atlantic Council event.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: By the way, that became a crazy meme Iraq. One of my captors told me about it while I was in captivity. I didn't see the video since coming out, multiple Iraqi friends had sent it to me, but I'm also just seeing it pop up in my feed on Instagram and on TikTok. It's just, it has become a meme, you know?

Benjamin Wittes: You know, she did not ask my advice about that.

I would've advised her not to do it, and I would've been so, so wrong. I would've advised a polite question on the subject. So, you know, you never know what's gonna be effective, but this campaign that they went on you described an impact of it and a real-world impact that I want you to tell the story of what happened as a result of this, because I think oftentimes people think that the protests, they engage in, the activity that they're capable, the signs, the “no kings” protests, so whatever, you know, the don't actually have any impact on things.

So what happened as a result of your sister’s and brother and other sister’s harassment of Prime Minister Sudani?

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah, so I'll just preface it by saying that you participated in that campaign as well, and I'm very grateful to you for doing that. And I we've never met, you know, until yesterday.

Benjamin Wittes: Until yesterday.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: And it's really astounding how, you know, in this experience, I really saw a great deal of evil, you know. I really came face to face with it, you know? But I also saw so much goodness in people, in other strangers, you know, who really worked very hard for my release.

So, and you're, yeah. And you're one of those wonderful people. And so, I'm very grateful to you for that. Now, with regards to the campaign, so Sudani, you know, my family harassed him, U.S. officials spoke to him about me, and after he came back, he,—and I know this from friends of mine, Iraqi friends of mine, that they were contacted by the internal security, one of the internal security agencies.

And basically they were told that the Prime Minister has given an order to not spare any efforts to find Elizabeth, and that we have an unlimited budget. They were telling this to my friend, if you can think of any lead, we will pay you a lot of money to go and bring this information. So, they were making an effort actually to get me out.

And I've confirmed this also with other sources that they were really trying, particularly after this visit, they felt that this is an issue that matters. And they didn't like being embarrassed. And I'm sure the Sudani didn't like becoming a meme like, this is appearing my feed now, you know, years later.

So, at the time it was even, you know, it was just utterly viral and very humiliating for him. And, you know, the Iraqi government was actually, from my knowledge, never able to locate me, never able to find me. The area where I was held was an ex-territory that is not under their control, but it did matter.

They did make an effort and they also conveyed to Qatar—first of all, this is something that, you know, my sister mentioned that my captor, one of them mentioned to me about my sister doing this. And they, I'm confident because there's constant communication with them that he conveyed to them the seriousness and that she needs to be released.

And I think this, you know, contributed to them, to their final decision also to, to release me. This continues to be a problem. They're not getting anything out of it. It is only, you know, bringing on down pressure. And they're, they thought that, you know, they captured this, you know, this one-of-a-kind super spy that is running eight different conspiracies for two different agencies.

And they keep trying to sell me, you know, at the price that they think is logical for this and no one is buying it. So I think they kind of gradually lost hope and being able to salvage anything out of my captivity. And they saw it particularly after Trump came in, as just a liability that they and you know, this is something that I mentioned in the talk at MEI, because of the changing nature of these militias, you know, the kind of, mass embezzlement that they're engaged in of the natural resources that belong to the Iraqi people. They've gotten the commanders of Kata’ib Hezbollah and other militias have gotten incredibly rich and they, you don't steal so much to then become a martyr for the cause. You know, so when Mark made their offer to them to become martyrs, if they don't release me within a week, they passed on it very hard.

And let me go.

Benjamin Wittes: We're gonna leave it there. I am so glad you are well and back. And I think this conversation will give a lot of people, a lot of reason to explore your other work. Both from before and since your capture, and we will have you back early and often on the many areas of your substantive work.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: And thank you for joining us today.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Thank you so much, Ben. Thank you.

[Outro]

Benjamin Wittes: The Lawfare Podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. You can get ad-free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a material supporter of Lawfare at our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters.

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As always, thanks for listening.