Tommy Caldwell
As I last blogged about two months ago, we traveled to the Kyrgyz Republic (a Central Asian country more widely known as Kyrgyzstan) during the last part of March and the beginning part of April 2012. While we were there we heard a tale about several American mountain climbers who had been kidnapped by Islamic militants in the south of Kyrgyzstan. Apparently they escaped by killing one of their captors. I was fascinated by this story of abduction and daring escape and had to research the tale further.
The Kyrgyz people adopted Islam as a result of conquest and because of persuasion from merchants who came through their country on the Silk Road. They personalized Islam to their culture. To this day the Kyrgyz follow some of the traditions of Islam but do not always pray five times a day or go to a mosque on Fridays. Some in the south are more observant, but on the whole it is not a ripe recruiting ground for Islamic terrorists.
Beth Rodden
However, there are groups in Uzbekistan who are extreme and occasionally this affects the Kyrgyz Republic. This is what occurred in the 2000 case of four rock climbers from the United States who were kidnapped by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in the southwest part of the country.
The four American alpinistas (as mountain climbers are called in Central Asia), three men and a woman, all in their early twenties decided to travel to the Kyrgyz Republic in the summer of 2000. Jason Smith, John Dickey, Beth Rodden, and Tommy Caldwell were all expert climbers. Three of them lived in California and Caldwell resided in Colorado. The company The North Face sponsored their trip in order to get pictures they could use in advertising. John Dickey was an up and coming rock climbing photographer. The group was going to hike in the Karavshin region of southwest Kyrgyzstan, an area that is world renowned for its big-wall climbing. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, a steady stream of international climbers had been to this region.
During the 1990s The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which had links to Al Qaeda, rose up with a desire to overthrow the Uzbek government and create an Islamist state. The IMU declared war on Kyrgyzstan in the late 1990s because they said Kyrgyzstan was helping the Uzbek government stay in power. There were State Department warnings about travel to southwest Kyrgyzstan as a result. These warnings included notice that four Japanese geologists had been kidnapped and released a year before The North Face trip during an offensive by the IMU against the Kyrgyz army. The probable motivation for their capture was ransom. The four American climbers skimmed the warnings before their trip and were not told by their travel agency about any potential danger.
Jason Smith
The North Face Four arrived in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan on July 27th, 2000 and traveled by helicopter to the Kara Su valley where they made their base camp. On August 12, while sleeping 1000 feet off the ground in portaledges (portable cliff tents) on the Yellow Wall, the alpinistas were awakened by gun fire directed around them. They were forced to climb down by IMU terrorists and were taken prisoner.
For six days the four Americans were forced to lie hidden under brush and rocks in bivouacs for up to 17 hours a day as the terrorists tried to elude the Kyrgyz army. A Kyrgyz soldier who had been taken captive before the hikers was executed soon after the capture of the climbers. They ate half a power bar a day. At night they would be forced to move to a new hiding spot for the next day. During their time in captivity they had several chances to escape. The terrorists even gave them their guns a couple of times, but the climbers did not seize upon these chances. Fear and complacency kept them captive.
Finally, with food running out and a possible life threatening storm approaching, the Americans decided they had to act. They were divided as to what to do. Smith and Dickey wanted to kill their captors but Rodden and Caldwell did not want to commit to killing anyone.
When one of their two remaining captors left and the other captor directed them to climb a steep cliff Smith and Dickey decided they would push their captor, who seemed to trust that they would do him no harm, off the mountain to escape. Rodden and Caldwell stayed back a bit to let them act. However, Smith and Dickey were unable to follow through on their plan. It was left to Tommy Caldwell who finally seized an opportunity and pushed their last captor off a ledge. He tumbled 30 feet down to another ledge and then slipped off that ledge beyond where they could see.
John Dickey
The climbers were sure he was dead but feared the return of the other captor, the one who scared them the most. Therefore, they moved quickly through the night, covering 18 miles over difficult terrain until they came upon Kyrgyz soldiers who fired upon them at first and then helped the climbers once the soldiers figured out who they were.
In the end the American rock climbers made it to safety and out of Kyrgyzstan. The captor who left was killed by the Kyrgyz army and the one Caldwell pushed unbelievably survived the fall and was eventually taken into custody. Since the climbers returned home there has been some controversy about their story. Some have questioned its truthfulness or whether they embellished it to sell books and a movie. However, the preponderance of evidence suggests its accuracy.