Many American correspondents in the Middle East start out with an attraction not just to the adrenaline but to the exotic. They fall a little bit in love with the mullah's wail in moonlight and the scent of cardamom, even if the scent is tainted by shallow graves and the prayer calls punctuated with the sound of gunfire, off in the distance.

As a journalist on this turf, Sulome Anderson is sui generis. Not only is she both American and Lebanese, and so immune to the exotic; she is also the daughter of Terry Anderson. In 1985, while he was the Associated Press bureau chief for the Middle East, Terry Anderson was kidnapped and spent almost seven years in captivity, long before ISIS was a gleam in some mullah's eye, when hostage taking -- not beheading -- was deemed by militant Islamists and their affiliates to be sufficient to sow fear in the enemy.

Read the rest in the New York Times Here