Engel said he was told the kidnappers wanted to exchange him and his crew for four Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen and two Lebanese mercenaries captured by the rebels while fighting for the Assad regime.
“They captured us in order to carry out this exchange,” he said.
He said the gunmen shot and killed at least one of their rebel escorts on the spot and took the hostages into a waiting truck nearby.
Around 11 pm on Monday, Engel said he and the others were being moved to another location in northern Idlib province.
“And as we were moving along the road, the kidnappers came across a rebel checkpoint, something they hadn’t expected. We were in the back of what you would think of as a minivan,” he said. “The kidnappers saw this checkpoint and started a gunfight with it. Two of the kidnappers were killed. We climbed out of the vehicle and the rebels took us. We spent the night with them.”
Engel and his crew crossed back into neighbouring Turkey on Tuesday.
Iran has a history of using kidnappings as an instrument of foreign policy in the past, particularly during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980’s and during the aftermath of the Iraq war. On August 5th of this year, 48 Iranian revolutionary guardsmen from Iran’s terrorist Qods Force, who were in Syria as military advisors to the Syrian regime, were captured by rebels. It was reported by the PMOI (MEK) at the time through intelligence obtained from inside Iran that senior IRGC commanders were among the captured guardsmen and that Iran was considering various options to free them. Engel’s testament to the kidnappers plan to exchange his crew with Iranian guardsmen might be part of an Iranian regime plan to conduct similar kidnappings in Syria.