Volunteers' rescue a relief for Utahn

William Van Wagenen was relieved Thursday when he heard three fellow members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq had been rescued.

Tom Fox, Van Wagenen's roommate while on a CPT mission in Iraq last year, was not as fortunate.

Fox, 54, a Quaker and grocery store manager from Virginia, had been shot to death. His body was found March 10 near a west Baghdad railroad.

"It was really wonderful to hear that they're safe and free," Van Wagenen, 28, said while at work in Provo. "I was worried they would be killed as well."

Van Wagenen, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in German. He went on to graduate with a master's in theology from Harvard Divinity School. He also speaks Arabic.

Van Wagenen heard of the Chicago-based CPT while in a study abroad program in the West Bank, near Ramallah. He became interested in CPT's mission of human rights advocacy and volunteered to help document abuses against Iraqis by the U.S. military.

Prior to leaving in May 2005, Van Wagenen had heard about a large number of kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq.

"It's a danger we all thought about even before we went," Van Wagenen said. "It's something you have to realize is a possibility."

About six weeks after Van Wagenen returned home to Provo, being captured became a reality for Fox, Canadians James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, and Briton Norman Kember, 74. Van Wagenen said he had met Loney on several occasions but that he didn't know him as well as Fox.

Van Wagenen said word had spread through Baghdad since before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 that CPT workers were welcome there. He said the CPT had good relations with clerics from different mosques, and they worked with other Iraqi human rights organizations.

CPT members had also been reuniting Iraqi detainees with their families. Iraqis accepted the CPT presence, according to Van Wagenen.

"They had no problem with the fact that I was American," he added. "They realized it was quite risky for us."

Before Van Wagenen went to Iraq, no one from CPT had ever been kidnapped, he said.

The Associated Press Thursday reported that "weeks and weeks" of planning had gone into rescuing the remaining three CPT members from a "kidnapping cell" in a western Baghdad house.

Christian Science Monitor freelance writer Jill Carroll was kidnapped Jan. 7 in Baghdad and is still missing.

Van Wagenen said he needs to make a decision within the next three weeks whether he will return for a second CPT mission to Iraq.

"It's something I'm thinking seriously about doing," he said. "I kind of have to re-evaluate that still."

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E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com