LONDON, 3 July — Yvonne Ridley is the Express reporter who was captured donkey-riding on the wrong side of the Afghan border shortly before the US bombing began last October. She was jailed for 11 days before being set free by her courteous and respectful Taleban captors.
Ridley wrote a few hundred thousand words on the subject in her paper on her return, but it was only in her subsequent book that one really got a sense of how long and truly terrifying those 11 days were, although of course, as she never fails to point out, the Taleban were very polite. And, as a comrade who has read her book points out, nothing very exciting actually happened once she’d been wrestled from her donkey.
But the Ridley story does not end there. First, there was her return to Kabul and a "highly-charged" reunion with the two men who guided her into Afghanistan and who were captured alongside her.
Now Ridley is converting to Islam. This week she told the BBC that one of the conditions of her release was that she read up on "the faith". This she did, and now she is ready to put her drinking days behind her. (The Guardian)
