Nawar Ismar, 31, received the critical telephone call at 2 a.m. At 5:45 a.m. last Tuesday, the Iraqi physician, who now works in Rome, and Italy's top Red Cross official, Mauricio Scelli, 48, departed from Rome's Ciampino Airport on a delicate mission to Baghdad: They were to free Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, two 29-year-old employees of the Italian aid organization "Un ponte per ..." (A Bridge For ...), who had been in the hands of a gang of Iraqi kidnappers for the past 21 days.

An unknown man, identified by the fact that he was carrying medication, was waiting for Scelli and Ismar at the airport. The two men were blindfolded and driven to a house somewhere on the outskirts of Baghdad. There they were greeted by other men who took away their cell phones and forced them, still blindfolded, to sit on the floor. The men negotiated and polemicized "for eight hours," says Scelli. Scelli was afraid, believing that everything had been lost and that he too had become a hostage.

Only after Ismar, the son of a respected Baghdad professor, swore on the Koran that the Italian Red Cross official was an honest man and that the two young women were not spies, but pacifists and good people, did the situation become more relaxed. The kidnappers called a taxi and had Scelli and Ismar taken to a place near the Umm-al-Kara mosque.

When the Italian women, who were already waiting there, carefully raised the dark veils from their faces and, overjoyed, ran toward Scelli, a camera recorded the moving scene for the Al Jazeera Arab television network. By 5:30 p.m., the images were already being broadcast all over the world: A touching fairy tale ending from bloody, nightmarish Iraq, with its daily barrage of new attacks and kidnappings.

At 11:15 p.m., the successful negotiators and "le due Simone" landed in Rome, and Italy celebrated the happy end of a dramatic hostage crisis: with cheering, singing and tears. The Coliseum was bathed in bright lights, a practice employed, as Rome's mayor, Walter Veltroni, explained to the two rescued hostages, when someone who has been sentenced to death is pardoned.

The Italian government did everything in its power to rescue the two likable aid workers. According to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, his emissaries opened "16 channels" to reach the kidnappers. They asked the Kuwaitis, Syrians and Jordanians for assistance in establishing contact with the hostage-takers. It was a difficult task, because the group, which had kidnapped the two Italian women and two Iraqi assistants on September 7, did not issue any public demands, did not send any videotapes of their hostages to television stations, and did not release any statements claiming their allegiance to any particular group. At first, it appears that the kidnappers even tried to sell their hostages to the religious fanatics surrounding beheader Zarkawi. According to rumors, however, Zarkawi's men declined the offer: no women, and especially not the aid workers revered by so many Iraqis.

This led the kidnappers, who, despite claiming to be terrorists with religious and nationalist objectives, were apparently also interested in cash, to respond to the Italians' efforts to establish contact. However, much of the incident still remains unclear, contradictory and mysterious. It appears that the hostage-takers demanded, in addition to gaining Italy's promise to provide humanitarian and medical aid to Iraq, five million dollars, and they probably received at least a million.

Intelligence services and the military had already discovered where the hostages were being held by last Monday, and had considered attempting to free the women. But Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi decided not to move forward with the plan.

The two rescued women showed little gratitude to their prime minister for his efforts. At the festivities celebrating their return, they thanked "Italy, the Islamic world, the pacifists, and the Iraqis." At first, they didn't even mention the administration in Rome or negotiator Scelli. Only after two days were they finally able to bring themselves to issue an obligatory statement of gratitude toward "the political forces of the majority and the opposition party."

However, the women were able to find warm words for their kidnappers. They said that the kidnappers treated them decently, fed them well and, in the end, even apologized for their actions. The Italian women felt that it was a "gesture of friendship, of peace" when their kidnapers gave negotiator Scelli a pistol to take home. It was the pistol, the kidnappers claimed, that they would have used to shoot their hostages if the negotiations had been unsuccessful.

On their way home, the two Simonas carried their kidnappers' farewell gifts as if they were precious objects: sweets and a ten-volume, English-language edition of the Koran. The women, both devout Catholics, now plan to study the Koran. Most of all, however, they plan to return to Baghdad.

Berlusconi is gaining more recognition for his administration's contribution to the successful outcome of the hostage crisis in neighboring France, where there has been growing public pressure to buy the freedom of journalists Christian Chesnot and George Malbrunot, kidnapped on August 20, and to abandon political efforts to free the men.