We’ve seen the videos and images of the beheading of the journalists who were held captive by Islamic State. It’s reported that there have been at least 23 foreign hostages, mostly from western countries.

Finally, there are details of what happens in captivity.

Pieced together through interviews with five former hostages, locals who witnessed their treatment, relatives and colleagues of the captives, and a tight circle of advisers who made trips to the region to try to win their release.

In one anecdote, a fellow hostage tells how James Foley’s spirits soared when his captors took him away and asked him “three intimate questions, a standard technique used to obtain proof that a prisoner is still alive in a kidnapping negotiation”. He also believed that his government would start negotiating his release.

But the future was not so bright.

Hostages were routinely beaten and subjected to waterboarding. For months, they were starved and threatened with execution by one group of fighters, only to be handed off to another group that brought them sweets and contemplated freeing them.

With emotions running high and hope rising and falling constantly, it was months of emotional and physical torture.

Anything that could be an offense was punished with torture.

“He told me how they had chained his feet to a bar and then hung the bar so that he was upside down from the ceiling. Then they left him there.”

Check out The New York Times.