Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  So his fib to me about his name might have been more like a wish—a fiction he would make fact in the fullness of time. The rest of what he told me that night was true. For instance, here he is as a photographer.

  A 2012 self-portrait from Abu Osama’s Facebook page.

  Somehow, in Antakya my feeling was that activist-journalists only advanced the revolution through peaceful means. If they had wanted to be combatants, they might have been, I thought. Instead, principle or temperament or talent led them toward documenting the infinite quantity of facts that would advance the cause of the Syrian people.

  I know now that in an Islamic state kidnapping, killing, activism, and journalism are one. The most loved, most widely celebrated citizens do all of these things well. The activist-citizen makes the dream of a caliphate real by rallying the faithful. The journalist builds it by sending out photographs of victories, family happiness in the streets, and the togetherness of the men at prayer. When he puts the video of a killing on Facebook, he shows the world that here, on this stretch of Syrian ground, while the black flag waves, the enemies of God are coming to grief.

  When I met Abu Osama, I had no notion of how important the activist-journalist was in the social phenomenon underway, a few kilometers away, on the far side of the international boundary. What does it take to build an Islamic state? A glance at his Facebook page might have brought deeper understanding, though the fake name he gave me would have made it hard to locate. To his 3,124 friends, in any case, and to all others inclined to drop by (his settings were adjusted to “public”), he made his declarations in an international, impossible-to-misinterpret language of symbols.

  Here they are, in a self-portrait on his Facebook page. The camera symbolizes journalism. It delivers tidings to the global body of believers, the Ummah, which might not otherwise know of the phenomenon unfolding in the overlooked, untouristed regions of the world. The book gives the law. The Kalashnikov slays the enemy. The face mask—impersonal, unknowable, watching—represents the state. Why can’t a believer deploy all of his talents on behalf of the state at once? He can. He should. The brightest believers do.

  Sadly, on the night I met these young men I had no notion of civic virtue in an Islamic state. I wanted to know that these young men were journalists, not militants. I dreaded being dragged into the midst of a battle I hadn’t the courage or the equipment to document. I hoped that these new friends had found some means of supporting themselves in the profession, unlike me. So I asked Abu Osama where he published his photographs.

  “Among the opposition,” he said, using the Syrian expression for press outlets operated by government opponents. “TV. Newspapers. Anywhere.” It wasn’t an implausible story. The opposition television had offices in Beirut and Dubai. I hadn’t known they paid photographers in Antakya. But why not?

  Abu Osama in 2013, somewhere in Idlib Province, also from his Facebook page.

  I turned to Mohammed. “Peaceful demonstrator,” he said. “And photographs, too.”

  I decided that Mohammed was the warmer, more talkative one of the pair. He said that his purpose was to help the opposition.

  “Any particular branch of the opposition?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “We help them all.”

  “And by helping, you mean…?”

  Mohammed smiled. He shrugged. He shifted his gaze to the rooftop bric-a-brac. I have badgered him into silence, I told myself. Didn’t I have a talent for this? Mohammed’s clamming up, I felt, with a twinge of annoyance at myself, was a mark of his intelligence. My questioning proved my naïveté. A canny Syrian, when confronted by a curious stranger, particularly a foreign one in a foreign place, shuts his mouth. I knew this. Yet I had behaved as if I were having a chat on a bench in a London park.

  So there were indescribable ways in which these young men helped people of no known affiliation. Fine. Indescribability interested me. I liked secrets. Later, perhaps, after I had earned the trust of these two journalists, they would confide. In the meantime, I meant to control my urge to pry.

  Some moments of uneasy silence passed, and then Abu Osama wondered, apropos of nothing, what I wished to see in Syria.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I’m open.” I wanted to travel and to learn. I meant to write an essay. He nodded. I asked him if his current trip to Antakya involved journalism.

  “No,” he said. On this trip, he was picking up supplies.

  Perhaps they’re not journalists after all, I thought. Or if they were journalists, they made their money carrying goods from Turkey into Syria. Did they deal in alcohol? Cigarettes?

  “I see,” I said. “Supplies?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Many different sorts of things.”

  A new silence fell over our discussion. Abu Osama looked at the moon. Mohammed rescued the conversation. He said that he had recently taken an Italian journalist on a tour of the Aleppo front. The journalist’s name had been Marco. Marco Something. Actually, he couldn’t remember Marco’s family name. I asked who Marco worked for. Mohammed searched the air above the balcony. He couldn’t remember who Marco worked for.

  So there was no Marco, I concluded. Or maybe Mohammed had seen Marco months earlier, on television perhaps, or in passing, in a van filled with combat-vested, pith-helmeted journalists.

  “Very famous reporter in Italy,” he said. “I can find you his number if you need it.”

  No, I didn’t need it.

  Abu Osama interrupted. He had a question for me, if I didn’t mind. “Are you Muslim?”

  In the Syria I knew, before the war, this had been a rude question. It sometimes meant “in your personal life do you abide by any kind of moral code at all?” Sometimes it meant “I don’t trust you.” But there were times when it meant, simply, “I have never met anyone like you.”

  “Does it matter if I’m not?” I said.

  “Not at all,” he said. He was merely curious.

  “Good,” I said. “Because I am not a bit Muslim.” I told him that I respected Islam, had studied it, but had never thought of converting. Was this a problem?

  “Not at all,” Abu Osama said.

  * * *

  That evening, the three of us spent about a half hour sniffing at one another. It wasn’t unfriendly sniffing. It wasn’t hostile. Toward the end of the conversation, Mohammed asked how long I wished to remain in Syria.

  “Two days,” I said. “Then back here.”

  Mohammed thought about the program for a moment. He looked at Abu Osama.

  “Would that be a problem for you?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” Mohammed said. Yes, in fact, now that he had given it some thought, that would be easy indeed.

  I wanted to know if the voyage they were planning would take them to dangerous places.

  “Of course not,” Mohammed replied. He went only to the safe places. But what gave him confidence in the safety of those places? “Isn’t it our country?” he asked. “We know the roads. We know the people. It’s our country.” He smiled. “We grew up there, so we know.”

  “I see,” I said. I asked if he could bring me to one of the field hospitals in which European doctors were helping wounded rebels.

  “Doctors?” he said. He turned to Abu Osama. Abu Osama nodded.

  “Certainly, doctors,” Mohammed affirmed.

  “What about foreign fighters?”

  “The muhajireen?” Mohammed asked, using a colloquial term meaning foreign fighters. “Yes, of course.” He smiled.

  Everything is “yes” to these people, I thought. Of course it will turn out, I told myself, once we start moving on the ground in Syria, that many things are “no” while only some are “yes.” So they were over-promising. Was this wrong? Not particularly, I thought.

  During the first summer of violence in Syria, before I gave up my apartment in Damascus, I had heard rumors of foreign journalists who, hailing a random cab, failed to suspect that the driver was an incognito regime agent. They asked to be d
riven to notorious, revolution-fomenting mosques. The drivers agreed, tore through the alleys in the helter-skelter way customary among Damascus taxi drivers, then delivered the journalists to the front steps of the Syrian National Security HQ. The greenhorn reporters were arrested, accused of wishing to kiss up to terrorists or, worse, funding them, jailed, and, after many days of unpleasantness, expelled from the country.

  As Mohammed was assuring me of the availability of foreign fighters and foreign doctors, I stole glances at him. I eyed his friend. I took a deep breath. Regime agents? I wondered. It’s not their sort of thing, I told myself.

  Rather, they were out to make a buck. Was this wrong? It was not. Now that the border crossings outside of Antakya were in the hands of the rebels, some among Syria’s vast population of underemployed, undereducated young men wished to establish themselves in the import-export business. And so? Had I been in their place, I thought, I would have done the same.

  At the time, in October of 2012, a single Western journalist had disappeared in Syria. That evening, this person, Austin Tice, was on my mind. I wanted my new friends to know what I knew about Austin: An adventurous freelancer and law student from Texas, he had set out for Syria about six weeks earlier, in August of that year. From Antakya, he had traveled to a village in Idlib Province called Khan Sheikhoun. He had been taken in by a family there, according to his Twitter feed, and had then traveled deeper into Syria, toward Damascus. I thought I might be able to learn something of his disappearance from the citizens he had met in Khan Sheikhoun.

  I asked Mohammed, “Can you maybe take me to this town?”

  He reflected on the question for a moment. “Khan Sheikhoun?” He turned to his friend. “Can we take him to Khan Sheikhoun?” He turned back to me. “Why, yes, I believe we can.”

  “And how much do you want to take me there?”

  Again, Mohammed turned to his friend. The wise thing to do when contemplating an excursion with any Syrian driver, I knew, was to insist on an agreement up front, before any debts were incurred, and to repeat it several times, so that the terms could be affirmed, out loud, by all concerned. Drivers sometimes pretended to be offended by a discussion of money. “Pay what you like,” they often said. Later, bitter arguments ensued.

  After conferring with Abu Osama, Mohammed turned to me. He held my gaze. He didn’t find the question rude in the least. “Your voyage is free,” he said. He spoke evenly, in a quiet voice, with a touch of indignation in his tone, as if I had asked to pay for the tea he had offered me. “We’re going there anyway,” he said. “You are our guest.”

  I wasn’t inclined to believe in “free.” I wasn’t inclined to believe that these twentysomething hipsters had given me authentic names, or genuine hometowns, either. I was, however, curious about what they got up to in life. What if their work involved something very illicit? In that case, a voyage in their company would give me a marketable story to pitch. So what was their line? Alcohol? Women? Phones? I meant to find out. The finding out, apparently, would be free. So much the better.

  Because understandings concerning money in Syria have a way of unraveling if left unattended, I returned to the money matter a few minutes after Mohammed had uttered the word belash—literally, without a thing. I put my understanding of our agreement in quasi-legal terms, to make sure that we understood how things were to work between us: “You, Mohammed, and you, Abu Osama, agree to take me into Syria, and to return me here, to Antakya, in two days’ time, in exchange for nothing whatsoever?”

  “You will pay in a restaurant, for instance, if we stop for breakfast,” said Mohammed.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll pay for the gas, too.” I would be happy to pay more, I explained, but I was a freelancer. I made my money after the reporting, not before. I was sorry about this. I, too, didn’t have much. Did they understand this?

  They did understand. They nodded. They turned their faces away.

  A moment or so of silence passed. I contemplated the view. Who knew how jagged and piney the peaks in Syria could be? They contemplated my stupidity. Who knew Americans could be such fools?

  “When do you want to leave?” Abu Osama asked. “Tonight?”

  Was he kidding? No, apparently, he was not. He was ready to leave that instant.

  I explained that I needed to prepare a traveling bag. I needed to change my Turkish liras into Syrian liras. “Should I take my passport?” I asked.

  Mohammed thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Sure,” he said.

  “How much money should I take?”

  “How much do you have?” he asked.

  “Very little.”

  “Do you have five hundred dollars?”

  “No.” I did not. I squinted at him. It was only two days. Five hundred dollars in Syria, I felt, was a fortune.

  He shrugged. The checkpoints sometimes required bribes, he said. Gas was becoming expensive. It was best to take extra cash into Syria because there were no ATMs, at least not any connected to the outside world.

  “I’ll take what I’ve got,” I offered.

  We talked about blankets (no need to bring one) and food (falafel and tea, a few pennies per day) and then Mohammed, wondered, out of idle curiosity, nothing else, how many phones I planned to bring.

  “I have two,” I said.

  “One is a satellite phone?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  He sighed. He twiddled his fingers through his beard. It was just that he had known other correspondents who traveled with satellite phones.

  “Well, I don’t,” I said.

  “That’s fine,” he agreed.

  It took my new friends another minute or so to work through the rest of their desiderata. Did I have a bank card I wished to bring? I did have one, but what good would it do me? Mohammed thought I should bring it on the off chance that we would run across a bank connected to the outside world. What kind of cameras did I have? I had none. I had a laptop. I didn’t want to bring it. What if it should be seized at a checkpoint?

  “Good point,” Mohammed said. “Very clever.”

  There wasn’t anything else of value in my possession. When this realization dawned on my new friends, a silence overtook our dialog. They sighed as if I’d given them news of the death of a distant friend.

  They had been hoping, I supposed, that American reporters would behave like Saudi princes, tossing $100 bills in the air, smiling at everyone, and passing out spare video cameras like party favors. After I have disabused them of these notions, I thought, they will see that I have as little as they have. Perhaps then we could get on with our journalism, our travel, and our friendship.

  In the meantime, I didn’t object to them hoping. Westerners, in general, have. They can always get more. Young men in the Middle East have a bit but not much. They cannot get more.

  Rationalizing their acquisitiveness thus, I propped up my feet. I watched the moon rise. My new friends drifted into a whispered conversation. They made warm noises, but not to me. Before I got up to leave I told Mohammed that I could be ready the following day.

  “Okay,” he agreed. “Nine?”

  “No,” I said. “Noon, at the earliest.”

  We agreed to meet at the café next to the Hotel Ercan at 12:00 pm. We shook hands. We wished one another the blessings of God.

  I woke the following morning at seven twenty-five. If I hurry, I thought, I can catch Adnan and Gibriel, my friends from the Ercan, before they set out. The three of us would engage the Syrian police in a cat-and-mouse game across the breadth of the nation. Whenever a checkpoint presented itself, we would hike through the forest, chatting, laughing, and never getting caught. In the evenings, we would share our meals. It would feel like On the Road meets Dispatches with an undercurrent of homelessness.

  I threw a notebook, a can of beer, the two cell phones, a passport, $50 in US cash, a paperback copy of the Paul Theroux book Dark Star Safari, and my running shoes into a daypack. I put on a white neoprene
cycling jacket I had picked up at a used clothing store in Berlin a few years earlier. I was in no mood to try to pass myself off as a local. Locals did not wear white cycling jackets. I didn’t mean to present myself as a war correspondent, either. I meant to present myself as me. So I tucked my iPod into the vest pocket of the cycling jacket, then hurried from the hovel. On the way to the Ercan, I practiced the hale-fellow-well-met greetings I would utter to Adnan and Gibriel when I met them in the lobby. “They left this morning at seven thirty,” the hotel clerk told me.

  At the taxi stand in the center of town, I drank a cup of coffee. I had a stroll. I contemplated the trash in a culvert through which the Orontes River flowed. At noon exactly, Abu Osama was waiting for me at a table in front of the Ercan. A duffel bag sat at the side of his chair. He made an unctuous smile. “Would you like a coffee?” he asked. Syrians never arrive early for anything. When a Syrian agrees to do a favor for free, then waits around in a café, grinning and offering to buy a stranger a coffee, something is up.

  “Where is Mohammed?” I asked. Abu Osama, it seemed to me, had a taciturn—even a sour—disposition. I was to travel with him alone? My heart sank.

  “Mohammed? Oh, he is waiting at the apartment,” he lied. “No coffee?” I declined the coffee.

  We caught a minibus for Reyhanli, a Turkish village hard on the Syrian border. In the apartment in Reyhanli, a third kidnapper, also in his early twenties, introduced himself as Abu Osama’s brother. He was to be called Abu Said. Abu Said shook my hand. He muttered a welcome, but his blank face and his fleeting eye contact told me that he didn’t wish to welcome me at all. He directed me to a couch.

  As I sat, the brothers settled into a pair of armchairs on the far side of a carpet. I surveyed their flat: It was no bachelor pad but a cleanly, nicely appointed family home. There were carpets in the living room, a prayer room, a heavy television, a vase of plastic flowers on a coffee table. Someone had vacuumed. Someone had arranged a line of pillows along the back of a sofa. Where were Mom and Dad?