by Theo Padnos
I told myself that either Mohammed and his friends would quit trying to play me for a fool reporter, open their hearts to me, and speak to me about their lives—frankly, without the lies—or they would not. If they did, the voyage would continue as we had planned it, on the balcony in Antakya.
If they did not, I was not going to tear out my hair. So I wasn’t destined to become BFFs with a small-time smugglers’ gang on the Antakya-Idlib border. Oh well. In that case, the next time a convenient moment for a leave-taking presented itself—when we arrived in Aleppo, say, or at a busy café, preferably one next to a bus stop—I would shake the hands of all four travelers, look into their eyes, thank them, then be off.
In the meantime, I decided, I required coffee.
The taxi happened to be passing through the revolutionary outpost Binnish as my thoughts brought me to this moment of resolve. On the outskirts of town, an enterprising coffee seller had parked a pickup whose side panels opened up on a mobile coffee bar. I dropped a hint to Mohammed. He slammed on the brakes. The five of us poured into the morning sun. I insisted on buying each of my new friends a coffee. I wanted a picture of the steam rising from the coffee man’s espresso bar. The steam floated through a shaft of morning sunshine. How picturesque, I thought. Abu Dujanna saw me taking this picture, then asked to have his picture taken with me. He had Abu Osama stand with my phone—that is, the phone the lot of them were about to steal—in front of the two of us.
In these moments, the clock my kidnappers had set on my dreamworld was ticking away its last minutes. I, however, felt the dream would last forever. In that dream, I had friends, my journalism career was on the cusp of success, and the wave of violence rolling through the Syrian countryside was soon to give way to a time of justice for the victims of the Assad regime. I wanted to document the promise I felt in the air then, so as Abu Osama clicked the button on my camera app—his camera app, that is—I made a jaunty smile. I leaned into Abu Dujanna. I had to keep myself from putting an arm around him, so much did I want to communicate the warmth of our relationship to whatever Facebook friends might someday look at the picture.
Such were my thoughts then. Now I suppose that Abu Dujanna, who asked to be photographed with me, wanted an image documenting the serenity of my dreamworld. He meant to slip into the illusion for a moment, to level an even gaze at the viewer and to say, without breathing a word: Peekaboo!
A few days later, by which time I had disappeared into the clutches of the actual al Qaeda organization, my kidnappers appear to have spared me a thought. I suspect they assumed I was about to be killed or had already been killed. Perhaps they only meant to remind a future me of how blind I had been on this morning in Binnish. Anyway, from my iPhone they emailed me a copy of this tourist snapshot, with the subject header “Abu Dujanna.” I found it in my inbox, years later.
Sunday morning, October 21, 2012: Abu Osama used my cell phone camera to snap this picture of Abu Dujanna and me as we stopped for coffee in the town of Binnish.
CHAPTER 2 A KIDNAPPING
Binnish-Taftanaz Highway, October 21, 2012
A few miles outside of Binnish, amid spindly olive trees, the kidnappers pulled off the highway. Abu Osama got out of the car. He walked to a cluster of houses at the end of a lane, knocked on the door of a single-story cement farmhouse, spoke briefly with an invisible personage at the door, then motioned for Mohammed to park the car in front of a similar, flat-roofed house about a hundred meters away. Behind this house, a fruit-laden olive orchard rolled away toward the Turkish hills.
This house’s front door, we discovered, had been left ajar. In the entryway, children’s clothing lay strewn across a tiled hall. A chandelier had been yanked from the ceiling, then tossed to a corner. In the master bedroom, coat hangers, ties, and shoes had been scattered across the bedspread. The closet’s double doors stood open, as if the master of the house had woken, thrown his closet doors aside, then vanished. He had left his suspenders on the floor and a box of mismatched shoes.
The glass in a child’s bedroom window had been shattered. The shards lay on the floor amid dust, children’s slippers, and a naked plastic doll. In the kitchen, an open suitcase, empty except for a pair of child’s socks, sat on the floor. Under the kitchen sink, I found a row of five-liter buckets packed with olives.
Mohammed and Abu Osama fetched their backpacks from the car. Without saying a word to me, the four kidnappers set themselves to tidying the place up. They were a crew of conscientious, silent housemaids. The shards from the shattered window required sweeping up. Mohammed found a broom. In the kitchen, there were cobwebs, deceased bugs, and, over every surface, dust.
Abu Osama folded towels that had been tossed to the floor in the bathroom. Abu Dujanna, I noticed, busied himself making order out of a box of straps and leather belts he had found in the master bedroom. The reverence the young men felt for this absent family’s belongings expressed itself in the care they took in folding up the discarded clothing, in their busy sweeping, and in their silence.
Now, at last, I felt, I was observing these young men at work. To those places in which the government had dealt out chaos, they restored order. They brought respect and cleanliness where the government had inflicted panic. They are preparing a field headquarters for the day, I told myself, but their deeper purpose was to do this vanished family a good turn.
During the course of the day, I told myself, they would carry out whatever errands had brought them to this spot in the Binnish countryside. Perhaps they wouldn’t want me to accompany them? That would be fine with me. In the child’s bedroom, I found a desk but no chair. I’ll sit on the desk, I told myself, and commit further reportorial thoughts to my notebook.
The windows in this bedroom gave a pretty view into the olive grove. Above it, on a distant horizon, I could make out the silhouette of a Turkish ridgeline.
From the front hallway, I brought in a scattering of multicolored throw pillows. I arranged these along the back of a foam-rubber mattress, on the floor in the child’s bedroom. Now we had a colorful divan. The bed needed to be remade. I made it.
After a half hour of silent labor, Mohammed declared our work to be finished. Abu Dujanna, I noticed through an open window, had drifted outside. I saw him standing on the doorstep, pointing an expensive-looking video camera at the sky. I joined him on the doorstep.
“Do you see it?” he said of a tiny mosquito-like object floating over a village about three kilometers away. I did see it: a helicopter—a barrel bomber, for all I knew—on the way to administer its daily dose of death to the villagers. It seemed to dangle and sway beneath the clouds. It hovered in this way for a minute or so, declined to fire anything, then withdrew. Abu Dujanna and I watched it making downward-spiraling corkscrew turns for several minutes. Eventually, it touched down in a field. This was the regime’s military airport at Taftanaz, Abu Dujanna said.
We were close enough to this helicopter to see the shack next to which the helicopter had landed. We could see the pilot opening the helicopter door, then walking across his landing pad, toward the shack. It would have taken us fifteen minutes, not more, of strolling through open fields to arrive at this shack’s front door.
“Why doesn’t anyone shoot at the helicopter?” I asked. Abu Dujanna grunted but did not reply. He carried on with his filming. And then I understood. So we are carrying out reconnaissance on a target, I told myself. The target was the military airport. The resistants were my fellow travelers. The saps who were daydreaming the last hours of their lives away were the regime airmen. Perhaps I would write up a report about our spying on the regime operations. The report would discuss how cleverly surreptitious Mohammed and his friends had been in their approach—traveling about in a beat-up taxi—and how their discretion prohibited them from breathing a word about the purpose of their mission before they brought it off.
I half-wondered if the attack was more imminent than I thought. Maybe it was happening, like, now? I scanned the fields for
soldiers creeping through the grass. They would disable the helicopter with their shoulder-launched RPG rounds, I thought, then send their homemade rockets at the shack. Mohammed and the others remained indoors. They were cautious, I told myself, perhaps even fearful. I, for my part, did not feel even a twinge of anxiety. Is this my first battle? I wondered. I hadn’t wanted to see one. But here I was. If it happened in front of me was I supposed to turn my eyes away? No, I would take hold of my notebook. I would say reportorial things to my journal.
I waited several minutes on the doorstep, hoping. Sadly, nothing happened. Trucks and passenger cars rolled, as they had been doing all morning, along the Binnish-Taftanaz highway. Nothing at all.
As it happened, three months later Jebhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham used suicide truck bombs to clear the checkpoints the soldiers at this base had erected to keep their enemies at bay. The base really did fall. So my fantasy about the incipient attack was realistic, though I had the timing of it off. Of course, I didn’t manage to suss out who would be playing which part, either.
When the filming had finished, Abu Osama came outside. He gave a lecture. With the Syrian Air Force busy, he said, and God only knew what kind of spies passing on the highway, everyone’s safety required me to remain indoors. I could watch from a window, he said. He escorted me into the child’s bedroom.
Here, I discovered, Abu Osama was in the midst of setting up a minor TV studio on the child’s bed. He had planted a tripod on the floor, opened a laptop on the bedspread, and was connecting these to a tangle of USB cables. He motioned for me to sit on the floor, on the foam-rubber mattress—my multicolored divan. Mohammed happened to be lounging here. He was staring out the window, into the olive groves. I plopped myself down next to him.
I peeked at my iPhone. It was almost noon. In another hour or so, my mother would be waking up in Cambridge. “You know what, boys?” I said. I needed to make a phone call. “There is a phone shop near here?”
“It’s too dangerous out there,” Mohammed said.
“Later,” Abu Osama mumbled. “Not now.”
Right, I told myself. As soon as my journalist-recon-smuggler friends get on with their morning errands—I imagined them piling into the taxi, without me—I’ll take a walk. Probably by the time I ambled away to the nearest village, my mother would be settling down with her morning cup of tea.
Yes, Mohammed and Abu Osama would be annoyed that I had wandered away when they wished me to stay put. I didn’t care. My phone conversation with my mother, I told myself, mattered to me, as their airport surveillance mattered to them. I needed to check in with Mom, to tell her that all was well, to hear her voice. Was life carrying on its predictable, peaceful way in Cambridge? I needed to be told that it was.
These thoughts must have distracted me enough for me not to notice as Abu Dujanna and Abu Said took up seats on the child’s bed, next to Abu Osama. Without a word, Abu Osama began fixing the video camera to the tripod. He pointed the camera lens at me. He grinned. He checked the viewfinder, then grinned again.
“You are making a film?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“For the opposition TV?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. The report, it so happened, was going to be about me.
“Ah,” I said. I frowned. I didn’t like the idea.
The arrival of a foreign journalist, particularly an American one, can sometimes be taken as a news event in rural Syria. This report, which I suspected he meant to flog, as I was flogging my imaginary essays—which is to say, without success—was going to narrate the nonevent of an international journalist’s two-day tour through northern Syria. Could there be a worse idea?
Lacking anything interesting to do with themselves (where were the buyers of their bullets?), they meant to deploy their journalistic powers on me.
I, for my part, had been meaning to write about them. But this is too silly, I told myself.
So journalists would interview journalists. This is how the professionals back in Antakya liked to pass their time. Their affection for this form of laziness was the forty-eighth item on my list of reasons to despise them.
“Look,” I told Abu Osama. “Really?” I was certain I could persuade him that the thoughts of a trucker, a farmer, an olive picker—any flesh-and-blood Syrian at all—deserved more attention than mine.
I made a suggestion along these lines. He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. “You said you wanted to interview Mohammed, yes? So interview Mohammed.”
As it happened, Mohammed was leaning his left shoulder against my right. I glanced at him. He grinned. It wasn’t as if I had much else going on.
“You want to be interviewed?” I asked him. He nodded. I sighed. No one would ever see this report, I felt, since Abu Osama was probably having the same luck with his editors as I was having with mine. “Fascinating,” they were telling him, “but not for us.”
“Is the camera rolling?” I asked him. He nodded. I turned to Mohammed. “Your name?”
“Mohammed.”
“Your age?”
“My age is twenty-five.” He was from al-Tal. He belonged to Ahrar al-Sham. Before the war, he had been a student at the university in Damascus.
I asked him about his favorite day of the revolution to date and his least favorite one. By producing a dull-as-dishwater dialog, I meant to establish, on the record and for the camera, how useless our exercise was.
Though I never saw Abu Osama’s film, it didn’t take me long to realize that he wasn’t the least interested in a straight-up news report, as I had assumed, and that he was working in a newer, far more interesting genre.
At the time, when I was coming to know Abu Osama—when he was dreaming about his upcoming production—a samizdat film, a genre popular among the millions of powerless, video-clip-loving young men in the Arab world, showed an American truck or armored personnel carrier lumbering down a rubble-strewn highway, somewhere in Iraq. Over this footage, an a cappella chorus sang about the self-involvement and purposeless of the earlier days, before the great coming back to God. “I regret, I regret,” the voices said. “How I’ve wasted my days. I’m returning to my prayers. I’m coming back to God.” Sometimes the voices (always without instrumental accompaniment) spoke of a coming back to God that had occurred long ago, when the singer and his beloved were one. “Where have our days gone? Vanished in the blink of an eye,” those voices sang. In that sort of song, the work of making that beautiful time come again had fallen to the current generation.
Such singing carried on for the first twenty seconds of these films, as the American trucks lumbered and swayed. Then the IED exploded. Sometimes, in some films, bodies could be seen hurtling through space. They were little rag dolls, rolling and tumbling in a shower of debris. Sometimes the Americans came staggering out of their wrecks. Their clothes were on fire. Or they wandered around in circles until snipers shot them from faraway rooftop parapets. Always the survivors collapsed. Always the music continued.
These films were popular in Syria long before the outbreak of the war. The most spectacular ones, with many episodes of destruction and much music, could be purchased wherever pirated DVDs were sold, which is to say in every suq, in every city.
The jolt these films administered was in the undeniability of the evidence they supplied. Each episode told the same story, and the story illustrated a fact everyone believed but, until the arrival of these films, couldn’t prove. The evidence in these films showed that powers far more powerful than the Americans—neither visible to them nor comprehensible to their machinery—lay beneath the surface of things in the Middle East. In those films, the people of Iraq—the ubiquitous “us” and “our” and “we” in the soundtracks—had resolved to change their lives. They regretted that they had estranged themselves, in the bother and hustle of daily life, from the invisible powers. Now they were combing over their accounts. They were putting things right. They were coming back to God—and so bringi
ng themselves into harmony with the powers no one could see and everyone could feel.
Popular as these video clips were, by 2012 the good bits had been seen a thousand times. The soundtracks were old, the plots mechanical. As for the filmmakers, they hadn’t much embraced the possibilities of the genre: Here were stories about Americans confronting the eternal powers of the place in which the confrontations were observed from one thousand meters away, through a telephoto lens. There were no voices in the films, no reaction shots, and no notion of character. Nor did any of the believers appear on the scene afterward to read out the lessons the Americans ought to have learned ages ago.
Abu Osama, the journalist-activist, was also an ambitious documentarian, as his Facebook self-portraits show. He meant to improve and update. What does the American’s face look like in its time of arrogance? What inanities does he utter? When he is the victim of shock and awe, what does the face look like then? On beholding the true powers in the land, what exactly does he say? Abu Osama’s film would give the answers.
In the event, when the actors were in position and the camera rolling, the two protagonists in the drama, I’m not at all sorry to say, gave uninspiring, lifeless performances. My heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t much like the filmmaker. I disliked his idea of my acting out the part of the inquisitive journalist. Anyway, I was in a hurry for the four of them to wrap things up, to pile into their yellow-and-white wreck, to be out of my hair, and to leave me alone to call my mom. I’m sure my impatience rubbed off on my fellow thespian, Mohammed. He, too, I sensed, wanted to get on with things.
After the first minute or so of filming, I decided I had asked all the questions I was going to ask. I was bored. I looked around the room. I took a deep breath. I tossed out a final volley of questions, out of courtesy: Did Mohammed ever wish he could go home to al-Tal? (No.) Did he regret anything he had done in this war? (No.) Could he imagine reconciling with his enemies? (No.) I doubt he answered a single question sincerely. I listened, watched his face for reactions, felt sleepy, bored, then irritated, and then I turned to the cameraman, Abu Osama. “I’m done,” I said. “Let’s move on.”
