by Theo Padnos
Around eleven, when combat vests had been donned, handguns tucked into shoulder holsters, and packages of cigarettes stuffed into breast pockets, it was decided that the time had come to set off in search of the criminals. I murmured words of protest. They were ignored.
A jeep whose markings indicated that it had been appropriated from the former government sat in front of the police station. I climbed into the front seat. The weight-lifting soldier dropped his Kalashnikov on the bench seat next to me. He swung himself into the driver’s seat. Two Kalashnikov-bearing soldiers hopped into the rear seat. A second jeep followed us. Our posse rolled forward, along the avenue I had sprinted down at dawn that morning. The purpose of this mission was to apprehend bandits and to recover my stolen property. Since I was telling the soldiers where to go, I was in charge. As we drove, I tried to think thoughts along these lines, but ten minutes into our search, when the jeep stopped in front of a dirt pit by the side of an apartment building and the soldiers dismounted, then pointed with their Kalashnikovs down a flight of stairs that had been chopped into the clay, I declined to go where they asked me to go. They uttered courteous phrases: “Be our guest.” “Don’t be afraid.” “You’re with us.” I couldn’t do it. Eventually, one of the soldiers walked down the stairs himself, smiled, shone his cell phone about, and then reached for my hand.
Inside the pit, following a warren of passageways that led toward the nearby apartment building, we found a second set of stairs that led upward, into a neat, silent, unoccupied apartment. It could have been a hotel room for business travelers. Its windows had been shuttered. The bed was made. The kitchen was spotless. We sat for several minutes on a couch. When the soldiers from the other jeep turned up, one of them handed me a plastic bag. It contained new shoes, underwear, pants, a shirt, and a razor. I was shown to the shower.
My old clothes went into the trash. A soldier pointed me to a bottle of cologne in a medicine chest in the bathroom.
Thus spritzed up, I returned with the soldiers to their jeep. We came across Abu Osama right away, within a hundred meters of the apartment. He and a friend I did not recognize were emerging from a fruit and vegetable seller’s shop. Abu Osama held a bunch of bananas in his hand. A soldier descended from our jeep, accosted him and the friend, and then I watched from the safety of the jeep as an argument erupted in front of Abu Osama’s taxi. Passersby gathered. Other soldiers descended from the army jeeps. Abu Osama stood stricken in front of a crate of apples. He stared at the crowd for a moment, began to shout, and then one of the soldiers delivered a sharp smack to the side of Abu Osama’s head.
This ended whatever argument had begun. Abu Osama surrendered his keys. He allowed the soldiers to search his car. On the floor of the back seat, a soldier found the red backpack that came with me from Turkey. The weight lifter had it brought to me.
The soldiers conferred for a moment. It was decided that one solider should sit in the taxi back seat with Abu Osama and his friend, while another drove the taxi wreck back to the police station.
When we arrived, the weight lifter escorted me to the chalkboard office in which, by this point, a gathering of some twenty-five men, most of whom wore long beards and combat vests, had assembled. A voluble discussion was underway in which each of the twenty-five, it seemed, wished to hold the floor.
The discussion abated for a second as I took my seat at the conference table. Eyes fell on me, but no one spoke to me. Abu Osama and his friend, I understood, were being taken to a cell. As my eyes adjusted to the interior light, I could not help noticing that the new men at the station, even the two watery-eyed, gray-bearded sheikhs who watched me with gaping, quivering mouths, were covered in weaponry. The younger men, most of whom were standing, had turned up at this meeting with knives and handguns tucked into their belts. The elder men wore their handguns under their shoulders in police-style holsters.
After he had made his greetings, the weight lifter asked me to pour the contents of my backpack onto the conference table. The items Abu Osama and his friend had left me were the Paul Theroux book, a pair of orange plastic sandals, and a loaf of Turkish bread I had brought for snacking. The contents were returned to the pack and the pack returned to me.
One of the new men in the office was the chief to whom I was meant to relate my saga. But which one? I scanned their faces. None of them seemed eager to discuss matters with me, but when the soldier who had driven Abu Osama and his taxi to the station appeared in the office doorway all the eyes in the room turned to him. He turned his eyes to me. “You are from the CIA?” he said. He smiled. I smiled back. The absurdity of the remark spoke for itself, I thought. “Anyway,” he said. “They arrested you for spying.”
I protested. The phone call to Mom and Dad, the quarter kilo of gold, the al Qaeda claim—I blurted out the details of the story I had related earlier in the morning. As I spoke, my eyes darted around the room. The assemblage listened to the first words I spoke, but a wave of deep-throated argumentation overwhelmed the second sentence and the third. I persisted. I sought out the weight lifter’s eyes. He ignored me. The argument increased in volume.
I tried to chip in. After five minutes or so, a lull in the argument gave me my chance.
“The CIA is against Bashar al-Assad,” I said to no one in particular. “They’re on your side.”
The weight lifter turned to me. “Bashar protects America’s baby girl, Israel,” he said under his breath. “No matter what they say, under the table, the Americans will always be on Bashar’s side.”
“I am not from the CIA,” I said. I held my cheap backpack and my plastic orange sandals in the air. “This isn’t CIA stuff,” I said. The weight lifter glanced at my exhibits for a moment, smiled, but perhaps only to himself, then returned to the argument his colleagues were having. I tried to follow it. It concerned previous military engagements, places I did not know, and people I had never heard of. I waited for someone to bring order to the gathering.
After ten minutes or so, a gunshot went off in an adjoining room. The argument stopped dead. Now they have killed Abu Osama, I thought. I made eye contact with the weight lifter. He listened for a moment, then made a sheepish grin, then shrugged. The tea boy appeared in the doorway. His face radiated impish happiness. He held a Kalashnikov in one hand. One of the soldiers—an elder brother?—barked at him. The boy had had permission to fire the gun into the air, he said, but not from the courtyard next door to the conference room. “What is wrong with you?” said the elder soldier. The boy lowered his head. He walked the Kalashnikov back to its owner, surrendered the gun, took a playful slap on the cheek, then walked out of the room, his eyes dancing with happiness.
A few minutes later, when Abu Osama was brought before this assemblage, the backpack he had brought from Turkey into Syria was emptied out onto the conference table, as mine had been. He had staggered under the weight of that backpack two days earlier, during our crossing over. Now I watched as a little treasure trove of handcuffs, balaclavas, black woolen gloves, a bundle of plastic zip ties, a pair of Leatherman-like foldable vise grips, a scattering of empty cell phone cases, camera bags, cables, and flashlight lasers spread itself across the table. The weight lifter swirled his hand through the loot. He picked up, then dropped a heavy wad of American bills. There would have been several thousand dollars in that bundle. The weight lifter shone a laser flashlight around the room, then returned it to Abu Osama’s little lake of goods.
Abu Osama launched into a defense. His panic made him blurt out his sentences in a pitter-patter of disconnected phrases. He knew for sure that I was a spy because I spoke Farsi (I do not) and Hebrew (I do not), had been exchanging messages in Russian on my mobile phone (true), had CIA contacts in the Kurdish Mountains (a lie), had spied for years in Yemen (more lies), then come to Syria in order to track down Muslims the CIA might wish to assassinate. “They’ve been training him for years.” He explained that during the arrest, I had fought like a lion, was far stronger than I looked, and ha
d mastered a series of mental tricks. “He knows how to break out of handcuffs. He doesn’t sleep! He doesn’t eat!” The weight lifter did not bother to dignify these accusations with a reply. He smiled indulgently at Abu Osama. He did not look at me.
Eventually, one of the Falcons spoke up. If Abu Osama had begun to doubt that I was actually a journalist, the Falcon asked, he might have brought me directly to the police station. What business did he have in detaining me overnight? He was not the law enforcement authority in Marat Misrin. “You have no job,” said this soldier. “Where do you get your money from?”
The room erupted in new volleys of shouting. So no one is in control now, I told myself, the argument is the point, they adore shouting at one another, and when the excitement of it all passes, a ranking officer will allow me to say my piece.
So when this stormy weather passes, I told myself, I will recount the facts. The officers will listen. Eventually, I knew, someone would bring me my passport and my cell phone. Someone else would bring me back to Turkey. The community would deal with Abu Osama, in the fullness of time, however it saw fit.
As I was thinking these thoughts, Behajat burst into the office. “Salaam alaykum to everyone!” he called out. He greeted the officers by name, then reached across the conference table to shake these colleagues’ hands. I stood up to offer him mine. He declined to shake it.
Behajat launched himself into a speech. His cousin, as everyone knew, had a strong faith in God. Behajat urged anyone doubting the sincerity of Abu Osama’s commitment to Islam to consult with the religious authorities of Marat Misrin. In addition, Abu Osama had been present at the most important battles in the war to date, which he had filmed, then uploaded to the internet. There could be no doubting his valor. As for the American spy, Behajat said, he didn’t know if I had come to spy for Russia, America, the Jews, or all of them, but having spoken to me the previous evening and having examined my passport and my mobile phone, he was certain of one thing, which was that my story about being a journalist was a lie. “If he is a journalist, let him show you a press pass. A business card? Who does he work for? No cameras. No colleagues. Why has he come? What business does he have here? Ask him. He will lie to you in five different languages.”
Toward the end of his speech, Behajat asked that I be removed from the room. A younger soldier, carrying a Kalashnikov, showed me to a chair in the center of an adjoining empty room. From this office chair, I listened as Behajat fulminated for several minutes. At last, the soldiers from my earlier morning posse came to fetch me. They took me by the elbows, escorted me outside, down the police station’s front steps, and then into a crowd of about twenty young men who had gathered in the street. “Welcome!” voices in the crowd called out in English, and, “Hello, my friend!” And also: “Fuckyoo!” and “Donkey!”
The soldiers asked the crowd to make way. I was allowed to climb into the back seat of a Land Cruiser. One of the soldiers sat to my left, another to my right. Other soldiers climbed into other jeeps and Land Cruisers, and soon a minor expeditionary force composed of pickups, Land Cruisers, and one beat-up taxi was rolling out of Marat Misrin, into the fields beyond.
It took us about twenty minutes to reach the border-crossing station at Bab al-Hawa. As we were pulling into the parking lot in front of an administrative building here, the driver of our Land Cruiser rolled down his window. A sentry approached. “It’s Monday,” said the sentry. “The court doesn’t meet on Mondays.”
“Bring the judge,” our driver said.
“You bring him,” said the sentry.
This exchange prompted the soldiers in our Land Cruiser to get out, to consult with the other drivers in our column of SUVs and pickup trucks, and then everyone was tapping numbers into mobile phones.
“Where is the judge?” the soldiers near me said into their phones. “Can he come now? Why not? When can he come?”
“I’ll bring him myself,” our driver barked into his phone. “Where is he?”
Eventually, the judge’s transportation to the court was sorted out. It was agreed that the Falcons and I would wait for his arrival in his office.
Thus about twenty soldiers, Behajat, Abu Osama, and I were escorted upstairs, into one of those spacious wood-paneled offices in which, not so many months earlier, a portrait of the president would have beamed down from above the enormous desk at the front of the room.
There were no portraits in this office. A man with a mustache and neatly trimmed hair, wearing a button-down camouflage shirt, sat at the desk. A pair of elderly gentlemen, their hands resting on their canes, napped on a sofa to his left. The Falcons settled themselves into armchairs and a dilapidated sofa. The younger man sat on the floor. Now we were all at the mercy of someone else’s bureaucracy. The Falcons knew just what to do. They pulled out their mobile phones and their cigarettes. Abu Osama and Behajat sat together in a corner. They whispered between themselves.
I introduced myself to the man at the desk. I told him that I was a journalist, that I had written about the character of the regime, and that I hoped to understand the deeper causes of the war. I repeated some phrases I had heard on the lips of a rebel in a YouTube clip. The war had started out as a popular uprising, involving all classes of people in Syria, I said, but the government had taken to mobilizing its own religious sect against the demonstrators. The result was that its sect, the Alawites, who practiced a religion that had almost nothing to do with Islam, was now making war, for God only knew what reason, against the Syrian people. “So, yes,” I said to the official at the desk, “it has become a sectarian war. A minority is trying to rid itself of the majority. This is what I write about. This is what I want the officials in Washington to understand.”
The official at the desk reached out his hand to me. We exchanged grave looks. “You are always welcome in Syria,” he said. He told me his name, volunteered to speak to the judge on my behalf, told me I was an honorable journalist, then offered me a glass of tea, which I accepted.
As he and I drank our teas, he examined his mobile phone. I turned to Behajat and Abu Osama. Catching Behajat’s eyes, I told him that I wasn’t angry, that I didn’t think he had done anything wrong and didn’t want anything from him. I raised my voice so that the entire room could hear. “There is nothing between us,” I said. “You owe me nothing. I owe you nothing. Okay?”
I was within a thousand feet of the Turkish border then. If my kidnappers had agreed not to press the issue, I could have walked myself to safety.
“Okay?” I asked again. I might as well have been speaking to the wind. My kidnappers did not reply to me. The soldiers watched me pleading but said nothing.
Eventually, the judge breezed into the office. He was in his mid-twenties. He wore a ponytail, a silky white shirt, and flowing Pakistani pants. He stood in the center of the room in order to better address everyone at once.
“What’s happened here?” he asked. “There is a problem?”
A white-bearded Falcon who later became known as Abu Jaber, the front man for a coalition of rebels calling themselves the Front for the Conquest of the Levant, spoke on behalf of the Falcons. Nodding at me, he said, “The young man said he is an American. He came to us this morning. He said he’d been kidnapped. The others say he’s a spy. That’s all.”
The judge turned to me. “American?”
“Yes,” I said.
He turned back to Abu Jaber. “You’ll have to bring us a translator.”
I didn’t realize then that something like a trial was about to happen, that I was a defendant, accused of spying for the US government, that the presence of two witnesses against me constituted something like an indictment, and that these witnesses would be my kidnappers. I had the feeling I was meant to explain myself to a judge. He would find the articles about Syria I had written on the New Republic website. Maybe he would look at my Facebook page. Satisfying himself that I was indeed a journalist, he would let me go.
“Never mind about the translator,
” I told him. “I’ll speak to you myself. I have nothing to hide.”
The judge smiled at me. “Excellent,” he said. “Shall we begin?”
He invited Behajat and Abu Osama into his chambers. I remained in the office with the soldiers. I drank more tea, stared out the window, and searched the room for a sympathetic pair of eyes. sky. After an hour of this, the judge returned Abu Osama and Behajat to the room in which I was sitting. He had a soldier escort me to an inner office. The judge sat behind a heavy wooden desk. He adjusted the video camera he had mounted on a tripod on his desk. “Sit,” he said. “Tea?”
I declined.
“You are not a Muslim?” he asked.
“No.”
“Do you speak Farsi?”
“No.”
“Russian?”
“Yes, a little.”
“How many times have you visited Tel Abib?”
“Never.”
“And Moscow?”
“Never.”
He paused. He gave me a sympathetic smile. “Are you afraid?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But why?” he wondered, in a baffled voice, as if I hadn’t a reason in the world to be afraid. “What is the reason for your fear?”
I said that I didn’t know why I was afraid. “I need help. I am not a spy,” I told him. If he could give me access to the internet, I said, I could prove to him in an instant that I was a journalist.
“I’m sure you have written many articles,” he said. “You’ll agree that that doesn’t mean you are not, also, a spy?”
He wondered what I had been doing during the two weeks I had spent in Antakya. I told him about Ashraf’s hovel, my dwindling supply of cash, and my plan to write a sweeping essay about Syria.
