by Theo Padnos
One of the officers with whom I spoke said that he had taken advantage of the time he had on phone to speak to his twin daughters, who were ten. He didn’t know what to say to them. He had tried to give them some words of advice about life in general. Perhaps he had wanted to say good-bye. But the mother had not yet explained to the kids what had happened to their father. The twins appeared to think that all was well. Another officer had spoken to a sister. Over the Jebhat al-Nusra phone line, she had been too terrified to say more than a handful of words. “Are you well?” the brother asked. There was silence. Then there were tears.
In the evening, several hours after the last of these phone calls, one of the commanders returned to us to announce that Jebhat al-Nusra had now officially done all it could do on the officers’ behalf. “If they were Muslims,” he said of the government, “they would try to save you. But there isn’t a Muslim among them.” Henceforth, he said, the matter, as far as he was concerned, lay in the hands of God. With that, he turned on his heels. He stepped out of the cell, then slammed the door.
In the moments after this commander left the room, the conclusion hanging in the air was too obvious to speak of: Our lives had been delivered into the hands of a disorderly, shambolic, slacker God. He made absurd demands. Then he shrugged, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and walked away. Evidently, Jebhat al-Nusra hadn’t reckoned with the recalcitrance of the other side’s negotiators. Nor had it imagined much about the fuss and bother of feeding us, hiding us away from the world, attending to our problems with lice, making up stories for us about a possible breakthrough in the negotiations, all while escorting us out, every few hours, to the bathroom. What a lot of bother we were.
* * *
At the beginning of May, an older, more august, more menacing species of cleric began to appear on the threshold of our cell. These clerics brought little crowds of bodyguards with them, many of whom wore something like a uniform, with similar-looking tactical vests, combat boots, and Kalashnikov magazines bulging from every pocket. Sometimes stone-faced teenagers milled around behind these visitors in little clusters and lesser beards. They wore sneakers instead of combat boots, and knives in their belts rather than handguns.
Sometimes the door would open on a tableau of hulking, big-bearded men in suicide belts. The lesser warriors—the ones without the suicide belts, evidently—would be arrayed in a circle behind the big men. These elders would glower at us, murmur at one another, rub their teeth a bit with the minty sticks—siwak—with which the Prophet is thought to have rubbed his teeth, then leave without a word. What was the purpose of such exhibitions? It felt as though the exhibitors imagined us to be an audience at a fashion show, that they were runway models, and that their suicide belts were this season’s most audacious item. Soon they would be parading their suicide belts through the marketplace and selling them in the market stalls. They were fashion-forward terrorists who knew how to pout, to invite stares, and to exhibit their indifference to being stared at.
Since we knew these men were trying to terrorize us, we shrugged our shoulders at them—after they had left the cell, of course. But toward the beginning of May, these clerics began inviting unlucky prisoners to step outside of the cell with them. These were purposeful, well-executed, often silent exercises in terrorism whose purpose, if they had a purpose, we could not fathom.
They happened like this: In the late afternoon, as the light was draining out of our cell, the twenty-eight of us would be sitting on the floor, murmuring among ourselves and hoping to be fed. Footsteps would sound in the corridor. The prisoners sitting closest to the door would stage-whisper a warning to the rest of us: “They’re coming!” Or: “It’s them!” A hush would fall over the room. As keys jangled in the lock, we would avert our eyes from the door, then press our foreheads into the walls against which we had been sitting. Such was the attitude in which we were supposed to greet the opening of the cell door. The visitors would keep us in this position for thirty seconds or so as they stepped into the cell. We would feel their eyes on us, listen for a clearing of a throat or a cocking of a gun, and eventually, in the silence of their staring, in slow motion we would turn our faces toward the door. The visitors would stare for a moment more, and then their leader would whisper the name of a village or neighborhood in which one of the prisoner’s families lived: “Krim” or “Safita” or “Baniyas.” Sometimes we knew that a regime-orchestrated atrocity had occurred in one of these places. Other times, we had no idea why they were angry at this place. Perhaps they meant to avenge some crime that had been committed by a previous generation of Alawites against the fathers of the current generation of fighters. Perhaps they were angry at a custom or the rumor of a custom. Among the Jebhat al-Nusra fighters, it was widely believed that Alawites do not marry but rather pass their wives around among themselves, as one farmer will pass a fertile cow or a sheep to another farmer, since Alawites, the Jebhat al-Nusra fighters believed, did not hold women to be fully human. Many of the fighters believed that in the Alawite prayer the man prostrates himself to the woman’s vagina. When the commanders screamed at us, they made allusions to such occult Alawite practices. Did Jebhat al-Nusra mean to punish the officers for their heresies? We never knew. But what if the heretical practices existed only in the commanders’ minds? They never made explicit accusations. We could only defend ourselves against the general one: unbelief.
Yes, we do believe, we said.
No, you don’t, Jebhat al-Nusra replied.
When the men with the guns called out the name of a village, the prisoners’ faces would turn to the person from that place. “Come,” a commander would say. The prisoner would rise, then walk to the front of the room. Here underlings would blindfold him, handcuff him, then lead him away.
Moments later, we would hear him screaming in another room. What had he done? Why had he been selected? He would be returned to us after twenty minutes. We would stare at the redness in his face and at his flaring eyes. “What did they do?” one of his colleague officers would whisper.
“Nothing,” the victim would reply. Or: “Some hitting. End of story.” Or sometimes the officer would utter a single word, then look away: “Sticks” or “cable,” he would say, or “electricity.” Anyway, he attached no importance to the matter. Neither should we. He would refuse to meet our eyes. He would ignore other questions. Over the following hours, these victims wouldn’t speak. They would stare daggers at the walls.
Eventually, the big-bearded men began eliminating prisoners from our cell. The calling out of a place-name would be the same, and the handcuffing and the blindfolding would occur as usual. From the hallway came the same screaming. But as we waited for these prisoners to be returned, it would dawn on us that they were not going to be returned. What had become of them? Why had they been selected? We never knew. To replace these men, Jebhat al-Nusra began bringing new prisoners in ones and twos. These men would stay with us for a night, and then, during the following days, they, too, were blindfolded, cuffed, and led away.
One of the commanders who used to carry out these subtraction exercises seemed to feel that my fellow prisoners ought to be giving me, the only non-Muslim in the cell, proper religious instruction. My fellow prisoners had all day every day to convert me, yet they hadn’t accomplished a thing. Why not? One afternoon, this commander, a certain Abu Dujanna, issued an order to the entire cell: “Teach him!”
“We’re trying to teach him,” Abu Sofiane told him. “He’s a Christian. What can we do?”
Abu Dujanna tilted his head at me, smiled for a moment, stepped toward me, then launched himself into an Islam-for-children homily. “You see,” he said. “The Jewish people believe Moses to be the Prophet of God, and this is a species of kufr.” (The word kufr means “infidelity” or “unbelief.”) “The Christian people believe that Issa,” he continued, using the Arabic word for “Jesus,” “may his name please God, is the Prophet, and the Alawite people believe that Ali, may his name please God, is the Proph
et. All of this is kufr. The Prophet of God is Mohammed, peace and blessings upon him. For many, many years, the Syrian people have been asleep to this fact. Now, however, the Syrian people are waking up.” As the words “waking up” fell from his lips, he nodded at the cell windows. He spread an arm toward the pleasant springtime weather. Jebhat al-Nusra’s habit of burying windows under plywood, brush, old tires, and plastic tarps prevented us from seeing it. We could scarcely smell it. We could feel the presence of the springtime, but only faintly.
An awakening? I thought. Perhaps it was true. It had been six months since I had been out of doors. In the hours after Abu Dujanna delivered his homily, I imagined citizens throwing the blankets from their beds, sunshine streaming through the Aleppo parks, and schoolteachers and bank clerks resolving, in 10 million tiny ways, to slough off their old habits, to live holier, healthier lives, to be less afraid, and to stand up for universal rights. Untoward behavior of any kind would have frightened the Syrian government. The generals in Damascus despised anything that didn’t bow and scrape before it. Now an unruly, uncontrollable mass awakening was underway. Probably the Assad government was trying to suppress it with artillery barrages. Probably this encouraged the awakeners. It could all be true, I thought. Why not?
On another occasion, in response to an officer’s question about the progress of his negotiations with the Syrian government, Abu Dujanna recalled a parable, to be found somewhere in the sayings of the Prophet, in which three men take refuge in a cave only to be trapped by a giant boulder when it tumbles into the cave’s mouth. For several hours after this speech, I pestered Ali, the military academy cadet, to explain the details of Abu Dujanna’s parable to me. God had eventually caused the boulder to move itself from the cave’s mouth, though of course the trapped men had spent their time inside the cave in prayer. Did not this mean that Abu Dujanna was telling us, “If you pray enough, God will set you free”?
Ali disagreed with my interpretation. During their prayers, the men in the parable had reminded God of the deep, inner virtue according to which they had lived their lives. God had examined the record. When he saw that they had indeed been virtuous, he nudged the boulder out of the way.
“Abu Dujanna thinks we have been bad, not good,” Ali explained.
I argued: “How does he know?” and: “If we were bad, can’t we make up for it in prayer?”
Ali’s face fell. “Maybe you can,” he said. “We’re Alawites.”
* * *
That spring, I learned to think about God as the Jebhat al-Nusra leaders wanted me to think. When they stood on the threshold of our cell, glowering, exhibiting their weapons, and rolling their weight over their haunches—that’s when I learned to read his signs.
I understood then, for instance, that wearing the suicide belt as one goes about one’s daily tasks signifies the depth of one’s love of God. It suggests detachment from the plane of life we happen to be drifting across at the moment and enthusiasm for departures toward higher planes. The suicide belt also shows, by the way, that the wearer can afford expensive explosives. It establishes that he’s important enough for the enemy to have identified him as a target, that he might be forced to climb to a higher plane in the next few minutes, and that he’s at peace with the situation. A person like this is aware that life passes by in the blink of an eye. He’s losing interest in the world of this life as he looks at you.
In contrast, the regime supporters think they’re here forever, so they build up their villas, lay out ornamental gardens, and dig their swimming pools into the ground. They lust after baubles. A man who wears the suicide belt has nothing and wants less. He will swim in a pool, fine. A few minutes later, he will allow the angels to carry him away to the highest plane of paradise—finer.
That spring, I learned that the Jebhat al-Nusra wanted to be thought of as lovers of Syria’s natural world. They symbolized their connection to it adopting names that recalled important natural features of their hometowns. A commander from a city by the sea called himself Father of the Seas. A person from the hill country in the northwest was known by the name Father of the Mountain. One of the fighters called himself Hud-Hud, after a bird, prized as a scout and mentioned in the Koran. Many called themselves after the towns in which they had grown up. We had several al Saraqibis and many al Taftanazis.
Often, the younger men in Jebhat al-Nusra liked to go around in bare feet. Were they showing their affinity with the time before shoes? With the pebbles and dust on the local goat paths? That they disdained adornment? I took them to mean that they were children of the nature of this place. They wanted its dirt in their toes.
In their Islamic-state-to-be, the rebel commander symbolized his coming into his own during the course of the war by his girth. He is fat and surrounded by the fruit of his loins. During this period of my imprisonment, Jebhat al-Nusra was feeding us a round and a half of bread per day, handfuls of olives, scatterings of rice, and, if we were lucky, a ball of falafel. It was our time to squabble over crusts. It was their time in the full flush of life. They were living off the fat of the land. We were being expunged from it.
* * *
A crevice in the pile of debris that had been stacked in front of one of our cell’s windows permitted a view of a miniature willow in the villa gardens. Behind it, a swatch of gravel pathway twisted away into underbrush. Several times that spring, evening rainstorms sent sheets of rain crashing into this garden. These were dramatic, even violent events that made the scraps of plywood in front of our windows rattle and thud under the pelting of giant raindrops. Once or twice, there was hail. The willow writhed and thrashed. Inevitably, the hullabaloo outside would cause little knots of prisoners to rise from the floor as if in a trance. The prisoners would assemble themselves in front of the patch of window not obscured by the plywood. For ten minutes, the prisoners would murmur into the air, reach their fingertips through the bars, and watch as the sky emptied itself onto the willow in our little villa garden.
“In the Land of Sham, we are everything that comes from the rain.” So went one of the lines in a pop song I used to hear, before the war, in the taxis and cafés in Damascus. Another number, by the same group, Kelna Sawa, foresaw a great civilization-ending cataclysm. It would come in the form of a flood:
Everything will drown, everyone will flee.
The people who lived there, lived with fear in their hearts.
In the songwriters’ pre-war understanding of things, the great inundation to come was going to bring renewal and truth. It would itself be a kind of a deliverance:
But when the typhoon comes—
but when the truth comes—
when all have gone away,
life will go back to the way it was.
And so Noah will announce it: He has an ark….
Every time a storm wracked the villa gardens, I would rise with the other prisoner-spectators, drift toward the window, crane my neck at the rain, and agree that the powers of the natural world in Syria didn’t speak through any pop rock band in Damascus but rather through the men with big bellies out here on the Aleppo plains. The torturing of the prisoners, the Tasers, and the wild hair of the young fighters, these were echoes of the force that dwelled outside the cell windows, in the grasses, the sheets of rain, and in the flailing of the willow boughs.
The more I watched these storms, the more certain I became that the power couldn’t be negotiated with any more than one can negotiate with the moonlight. It was indeed in the raindrops and the groves of olive trees in which I had fallen into the hands of Jebhat al-Nusra. It was in the names of the places—Taftanaz, Saraqib, Binnish, Anadan—from which the commanders came. Naturally, it was in the people from those places. The officers’ mistake, I felt, was to have left the mountains along the coast where their powers dwelled, and the other prisoners’ mistake was to have gone wandering in territory ruled over by forces we couldn’t fathom, couldn’t appease, and couldn’t see.
At the time, I was having trou
ble sleeping on account of the lice in my clothes. They seemed to attack in squadrons, but not at any specific point on my body. Under attack, my skin, especially along the backs of my legs, would tingle. The tingling would escalate into a burning sensation. I would scratch at my legs. Surely, this made matters worse. Seeing me scratch, the other prisoners would scold me. But they themselves scratched at their lice as much as I did. We tried to massage the lice away. We walked our fingertips through the hair at the back of our necks. But the lice were much too small to be found by fingertips, and massages didn’t help. So we slept in half-hour segments. We woke, hunted down the lice in the darkness for a while, gave up, then drifted off for another half hour.
Of course, we were hungry. The hunger made me afraid. I felt our captors were capable of starving us to death. Their depravity made me angry, but I didn’t have anyone to be angry at. “We’re following orders,” the captors told us. Whoever was giving the orders was much too important to concern himself with our needs. “Make do,” the guards would tell us, “then shut your mouths.”
Over time, their recalcitrance, I found, sapped my will. I knew that pleading with them wouldn’t help. Nothing could help. I have been caught in a storm at sea, I told myself. I ought to have known about such storms. I didn’t see this one. Anyway, now the wind had me. Perhaps it will let me go, I thought. Perhaps not. But there was no point in wondering about its psychology, since it had no psychology. I had stumbled into a natural phenomenon with which science had yet to reckon. And this made sense because scientists, it seemed to me, were smart enough not to go wandering through the hallways of the al Qaeda prisons. Someday ages hence, I thought, after I’m gone, someone will make sense of the prisons in Syria as Primo Levi made sense of his concentration camp in Poland.
