by Theo Padnos
In the silence after this visitor left the room, one of the Alawite officers leaned forward, then stage-whispered in the direction of the Palestinians, “May God release you from this captivity.”
The Palestinian prisoners replied as a group: “May he release us all,” they said. “May he return us to our families, each of us, healthy and sound.”
This exchange of civilities, it turned out, ushered in a veritable competition of gallantry. Abu Sofiane wanted the officers to know that he loved Syria and that he considered all Muslims to be brothers. In Abu Sofiane’s view, the problems in Syria were the fault of the American government, which, out of hatred for Islam, was encouraging Muslims to destroy one another. He elaborated on this theme in a loud whisper for several minutes. Meanwhile, many of the rebels, in Abu Sofiane’s view, wanted to spread destruction because they were bored and because destroying things was fun. The right thing to do, he said, was for the Muslims to leave off bickering among themselves and to take the fight to Israel and America—inside Israel and America. Alas, he said, Arabs loved pursuing their family squabbles more than they loved fighting their true enemies.
In this cell, these were anodyne sentiments. They were the equivalent of declaring April weather pleasant. Abu Sofiane spoke for several minutes in these tones. His words brought saddened, knowing smiles to the prisoners’ faces. Everyone agreed that the Arabs must unite and that at the root of everything lay the machinations of the Jews.
As the comfort these clichés brought spread through the room, a cadet whose military academy had been overcome by a coalition of rebels nudged me in the ribs. He wanted me to know, he said, that he regretted the manner in which I had been treated during my time in Syria. He cast a bewildered look at the steel door of our cell and at the line of prisoners huddling on the floor beside it. “We are meant to show you the beautiful things,” he said. “Here you are seeing the worst.”
If I were to visit him in his city, Safita, in the mountains to the west of Homs, he said, I could live for weeks without seeing a hint of war. Also, Damascus—well, most of Damascus—was peaceful. All along the Syrian coast there was peace. “Why didn’t you go there?” he wondered. I shrugged my shoulders. Next time, if there was a next time, I said, I certainly would.
That night, we were so eager to talk and talked so volubly that the ranking officer from among the military men, a colonel, had to raise his voice to us more than once. Whispering, we skirted all the sensitive issues, as conversation in downtown Damascus often does. We relied on the formulae for expressing good wishes in which the Arabic language abounds, and when we had exhausted these we asked about the names of one another’s children and for descriptions of the things our new friends missed most from home. It was obvious to us all, I think, that while we might still be killed, we didn’t exactly belong to the war anymore. We had become spectators. Having withdrawn to the sidelines, it was obvious to us that a madness was consuming Syria. It had possessed us all, and now, inside this villa basement, it did not possess us. We were coming back to our senses. Nobody wanted to kill anybody else. We rather wanted to live and let live.
Toward midnight on our first night in this cell, the Jebhat al-Nusra guards brought us five pots of rice and twenty-eight rounds of bread. In order to spare us the indignity of having to scrounge around in the darkness for the food, they brought us flashlights. There wasn’t enough rice to feed half of us, but we were so determined to exhibit our best selves that each person scooped a handful of rice for himself, nibbled at it thoughtfully, as if his mind were on higher things, devoured the bread, then pronounced himself full.
During the course of our dinner conversation, it emerged that Jebhat al-Nusra was working out a swap with the Syrian regime in which inmates from the Aleppo Central Prison would go free in exchange for the seventeen army officers. The Palestinian prisoners would likewise be freed in exchange for Jebhat al-Nusra–friendly Palestinains in regime custody.
The following morning, when the guards came to the cell with breakfast I made my way to the door. I tapped a middle-aged Jebhat al-Nusra factotum on the arm. This person was dressed in an Oxford shirt and pleated trousers. Perhaps he had been a businessman in an earlier life? Perhaps he still was a businessman. “You are negotiating with the Syrian government to free the others,” I said. “Are you negotiating with the American government, too?”
He gave me a blank look. “Yes, of course,” he said. He flashed his cell phone at me. The number on the screen, he said, belonged to the American ambassador. He didn’t say which ambassador or where this ambassador lived or what business he, the man who distributed packages of bread to prisoners, had with the American government. I didn’t care. I was anxious for good news, even if there was more fiction to it than fact. Perhaps the bread man really was working a sideline in international hostage negotiating. It could be. Why not?
Over the ensuing days, I pestered the other business-casual Jebhat al-Nusra visitors to our cell. Perhaps they were also moonlight negotiators. For good measure, I importuned the bright-eyed twentysomethings who appeared before us, as if from central terrorist casting, with the testament of faith emblazoned on their headbands. I questioned the stone-faced middle-aged men in robes and one gang of teenagers who wanted me to know that they had recently arrived in Aleppo from a city on the Iraqi border called Al-Bukamal.
All these visitors told me what the bread man told me. Yes, of course negotiations were underway. No, they knew nothing of the details.
During my first days as a Jebhat al-Nusra prisoner, I had scoffed at the idea of the US government horse-trading with the Syrian branch of al Qaeda. If al Qaeda was calling, I didn’t think the US government would pick up the phone. I didn’t think Jebhat al-Nusra was capable of finding the right phone number. But time had passed. Now, after six months in their custody, I understood that Jebhat al-Nusra was competent enough to keep the Syrian army at bay in Aleppo, to control roads and villas outside the city, and to besiege the Aleppo Central Prison. Evidently, it was working out the details of a twenty-five-person prisoner swap. The reason there had been no progress in my case, I deduced, was because Jebhat al-Nusra didn’t have the competence to carry on negotiations with a faraway government.
I felt I could supply the missing know-how, so one morning, after about a week in this cell, I tugged on the sleeve of the bread-delivering businessman just as he was closing the cell door. One of the magazines I had worked for in the United States, I whispered, exaggerating boldly, if not quite lying, had lately been bought by the Facebook founder.
He gave me a quizzical look. “Wait, I remember his name,” he said. He scoured his memory. No, he couldn’t recall.
“Zuckerberg,” I whispered. Actually, I explained, the new magazine owner was Zuckerberg’s best friend. Anyway, both of them behaved like Saudi princes with their money. I was their star reporter. Naturally, they would pay for me. Zuckerberg and his friends were capable of spending a million dollars on breakfast or a birthday party or a remodeling of their swimming pool. “Whatever you want,” I said, “it will come quicker and there will be more of it if you put me on the phone.”
The bread man made a chivalrous smile. He handed me a plastic bag containing a single round of bread. He didn’t want money, he said. He certainly didn’t want Zuckerberg’s money, which was for Zuckerberg. “What do you want, then?” I asked.
Again came the chivalrous smile. “We want what we have always wanted. The victory for Islam,” he said. “And we want death.”
* * *
Whatever grandee owned the villa in whose basement we were imprisoned had planted ornamental trees in his garden and had laid down crushed gravel paths, which were now frequented by Jebhat al-Nusra’s sheep. Inside our cell, we could hear the tinkling of the sheep’s bells. We could hear the sheep browsing on the shrubbery. In the evening, when the fighters went out for a stroll, we could hear the garden’s gravel pathways crunching under their boots.
Though the guards had boarded u
p three of the four cell windows with plywood, the fourth one, against which a pile of dead tree branches and broken crates leaned, permitted a view of a miniature weeping willow. During the long afternoons, while many of the prisoners slept, some prayed, and others huddled with the Koran, scatterings of prisoners used to collect in front of this window to peer out at the willow and to catch a glimpse of the browsing sheep. This was our entertainment in those days. We didn’t know if we would ever return to the world of willows and sheep, so we watched them carefully, as if by studying their movements we might somehow recover what we had lost.
In earlier times, our basement cell would have been the grandee’s hot-weather sitting room. There were crown moldings at the tops of the walls, a frieze in the ceiling for a chandelier, and a row of windows set inside round-headed arches, as in a monastery or a country library. Lately, a cinder-block wall had been run through the middle of this divan. A steel door had been substituted for whatever had gone before. On the other side of the wall, Jebhat al-Nusra was constructing a row of single-occupancy isolation cells.
I never saw more than a glimpse of the outside of this villa. During our first week in its basement, however, we learned that somewhere above us a swimming pool needed to be emptied of the leaves that had drifted in over the winter, then scrubbed. Also, Jebhat al-Nusra’s fleet of trucks and SUVs required washing.
To perform these tasks, a Jebhat al-Nusra commander chose a fisherman from among the officers and a barber. One afternoon not long after we had settled in, a commander who appeared before us surrounded by a retinue of well-armed teenagers happened to remark, out of sheer happiness, apparently, that the villa had also come with a tennis court. Yes, and the most unfortunate thing about it, he said, was not one of “the boys”—he nodded at the teenagers behind him—knew a thing about tennis. The commander seemed to have been genuinely saddened by this circumstance. He stood on the threshold of the cell, cast his eyes over the twenty-eight prisoners at his feet, then gave his beard a contemplative pull, as if he was trying to puzzle out a solution for his men.
“I’ll teach you,” I offered.
He turned to me. He smiled. For an instant, I thought he liked the idea. He unslung his Kalashnikov from his shoulder, knit his brows, then waved the gun in an arc over his belly. “Like this you do it?” he wondered. It turned out that he didn’t want tennis lessons after all. His men were busy with the jihad, he said. There would be time enough for play when they reached paradise. But could they not practice up a bit now, I asked, for the great tennis games to come?
The commander did not reply. Perhaps he hadn’t heard me. The half-dozen teenagers and twentysomethings in his entourage did, however, hear. They smiled at me with their eyes, as if they would have been happy to have a game or two of tennis were it not for their crummy boss. I smiled back. I would have liked to make it clear to them that tennis is preferable to slaughter and that they could have a game right now, without bothering to ascend to paradise at all, if only they could manage to give their boss the slip. Of course, prisoners are not meant to invite guards into sedition. These guards weren’t meant to speak to the prisoners at all. So I grinned at them for a few moments, they grinned back at me, and then the commander herded his charges out of the room.
* * *
Over the following days, I learned that these younger Jebhat al-Nusra fighters had adequate means of supplying their own form of amusement. Many of these younger men would have served for a time in the national army. Their idea of fun was to run the prisoners’ twice-daily bathroom excursions as a kind of satire on the parade ground drills the officers would have imposed once, in an earlier time, on those under their command.
The mechanics of it worked like this: At about midday and just before dark, a teenager ordered the twenty-eight prisoners to form a line at the cell door. When a Jebhat al-Nusra sentry in the doorway gave the word, the prisoner in the front of the line was to break into a run, hurl himself through a corridor, then into a bathroom, relieve himself, wash, then sprint back to the cell. “Twenty seconds!” the cubs, as the Jebhat al-Nusra preteens referred to themselves, called after us. They crackled their cattle prods in the air: “Nineteen. Eighteen…”
Over time, this exercise developed mockeries appropriate for CIA officers (stress positions at the base of a wall) and the member of Parliament (he was made to crab walk to the toilet and to sing an anthem in praise of Bashar al-Assad as he scuttled along).
Some of the prisoners had once belonged to the ruling class in Syria. In addition to the MP, there was a general, two captains, and a handful of lieutenants. All of these men had studied at universities. They owned cars and houses. Their children would have frolicked by the sea during family vacations. In the government offices, the families would have been greeted by courteous clerks. Those clerks would have served the officers with a smile as if they had never dreamed of demanding baksheesh from anyone.
Our bathroom exercises told us that the time in which this class of citizen ruled over Syria had come to an end. Now it was their time to hurry through a darkened corridor in a panic, as guards brandished their broomsticks at us. In fact, whenever a normal citizen in Syria wants anything from the government he must screw up his courage, step into a darkened corridor, then fling himself into an obstacle course of absurd regulations. The reward at the end of it all is never much more than a pile of dung. Perhaps these younger Jebhat al-Nusra fighters knew this and so meant to satirize citizen-government interaction in general.
Certainly, the guards knew that the time had come to smirk at the people who used to do the smirking.
When then guards called out, “Hurry!” we sprinted. If we ran too fast, the blown-out flip-flops we used for bathroom sandals flew off our feet. Or we tripped over the bags of cement the guards left strewn across the basement corridor. If we ran too slowly, school-age children ran after us, brandishing their Taser-like electric shockers. The shock these devices delivered wasn’t much more painful than a bee sting, but they emitted a hideous crackling and zapping, like tiny electric chairs. When the children ran after us, they zapped their Tasers at us, watched us leap in terror, then burst into peals of laughter.
Of course, the toilet overflowed. Of course, we had to wash ourselves with fetid water Jebhat al-Nusra had brought in in a bucket. Two pairs of bathroom sandals were meant to suffice for all twenty-eight of us. Of course, we tried to wash our sandals, which were half-destroyed and rotting to begin with. Of course, they got filthier as the exercise progressed.
Some of the guards, I felt, regretted this humiliation. They didn’t know us well enough to despise us. Many were too young to have developed a hatred for the ruling class. They wore preppy cotton sweaters, had bright, intelligent eyes, and though they brandished their cables and broomsticks at us, it was obvious, at least to me, that they were playing a part. The scornful, outraged look in their eyes was a pretense. Many allowed us extra time in the bathroom. The more thoughtful ones kept the cattle prod–bearing children from zapping our backsides.
One afternoon during our twice-daily bathroom humiliations, a Jebhat al-Nusra teenager I recognized from the eye hospital tapped me on the shoulder as I scurried past his spot in the corridor.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Remember me?”
“Of course,” I said. In the eye hospital, he had ladled lentils into my bowl. He had told me of a dream he once had to study economics in Germany. “You are the Sheikh of Economic Science,” I said, using the nickname I had given him a few weeks earlier. “How are things?”
He leaned toward me. He winked, then whispered, “What will you give if I let you go?” He cocked his head to the side, then allowed a smile to spread through his eyes, as if he meant to invite me into a private joke.
I promised him my car.
“Oh, yes?” he said. “What kind?”
It was a Subaru Outback. It had four-wheel drive. “Goes great in the snow,” I said.
He smiled again. “I wish I could,” he said
.
“You want my bike?” I asked. He did not want a bicycle. He did not want a million dollars. “Ten million?” I asked.
He smiled again. “Sorry,” he said. He was, however, curious about the snow. Back in the hospital, romanticizing with abandon, I had told him that at home it sometimes snowed for a week at a time. Now and then, drunkards were lost in the snowdrifts. They were old men without families. Their bodies turned up in the spring. Evidently, this public drunkenness problem of ours was still on his mind. He pointed out that Islam prohibited drinking. In Syria, he said, such disorders did not afflict the society and people in general were more respectful toward old people than they were in America. When he came to the end of this mini-lecture, a shadow fell over his face. He seemed to lose himself in thought for an instant. Had I ever come across a corpse in the spring snow? he wanted to know.
I was meant to be hurrying back to the cell. He was meant to be counting down my twenty seconds. Instead, he waited for me to deliver my thoughts about snow and bums in America, then made an embarrassed smile. He gestured with his eyes at a cluster of fellow teenagers who had gathered in front of the bathroom. They were thwacking the bathroom door with their broomsticks. “Hurry, you animal!” they were shouting at the door. When the prisoner in the bathroom did not emerge, they hit the door harder. “You are sick?” they shouted, and then, laughing, “Five seconds! Four… Three…” The sheikh of economic science shrugged his shoulders. He grinned and shook his head slowly, as if marveling at his friends’ zaniness. “Sorry about this,” he murmured.
