by Theo Padnos
But this was an idle fantasy. I thought an understanding of their Islamic state possible in a theoretical sense, the way it’s possible, in theory, for peace to descend over Syria in an instant, in response to no particular surrender or collapse. I definitely didn’t believe that the arc of the universe would bend toward justice, didn’t believe in a book about Aleppo that would make sense of my nightmare, and did not believe, when I was being honest with myself, that I would come out alive. Deliverance of the kind I was dreaming of—walking away, without a scratch—was a fairy-tale ending. I couldn’t take it seriously. It would have required rescuers who didn’t exist, mercy Jebhat al-Nusra didn’t have, and safe passage to the Turkish border no one could or would arrange for me.
* * *
During the daytime, the prisoners passed their copies of the Koran around among themselves. Of course, they were careful never to allow a volume to touch the floor. Now and then, a sergeant or lieutenant tried to lead the convert, Matt/Nasser, through a verse or two. One afternoon during the period in which the rainstorms were sweeping through our portion of Syria, a pair of Jebhat al-Nusra commanders appeared in the doorway, demanded to know where the Korans were being kept, strode to the windowsill, tucked the books under their arms, then strode from the cell without a word.
The subtraction of these Korans provoked exactly zero commentary among the prisoners. We knew what Jebhat al-Nusra was trying to tell us: We were unbelievers. We weren’t entitled to the consolations of faith. Nor, as unbelievers, could we expect protection from harm. We had turned our backs on God. We were not his people. Why would he bother to help us?
Jebhat al-Nusra also would have been worried about the physical objects. The paddling of our fingers through the pages of their sacred books might somehow have worked an infection into the verses themselves. We might have cast spells. We might have opened the books only to mutter curses at God. Jebhat al-Nusra didn’t know what we might do. To keep on the safe side, it removed the books from our cell.
I’m sure everyone in our cell felt that in removing these books, Jebhat al-Nusra had done something no Islamic authority, no matter how extreme, could countenance. In taking these books away, it had become the frightened, intolerant police state. Now Jebhat al-Nusra was policing its citizens’ connection to God. It was jealous. It was afraid. But these were the charges the Jebhat al-Nusra commanders made against the Assad government. Now they were guilty of Assad’s offenses.
I’m pretty sure the subtraction of the books didn’t sadden anyone in our cell. If anything, the confiscation did for our cell what the regime’s attempts to police religious faith in the run-down, disregarded Aleppo districts had done for the faithful out there. It redoubled everyone’s commitment. It was a positive inducement to Koran love.
Anyway, one of the officers kept a secret, thumbnail-sized copy of the book in the breast pocket of his flak jacket. It hardly ever emerged. There was no need, since most of the officers had memorized the most important passages.
In this cell, we had no electricity. At night, the little piles of debris Jebhat al-Nusra had propped in front of our windows made the cell so dark that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Yet when the moon poked its way through the junk pile, it fell like a pale blue laser beam. It had the diameter of a lightsaber. You could have read a novel by this glow, not that we had any novels.
After the disappearance of the Korans, things changed in our cell. In the late evenings, after most of the prisoners had drifted off to sleep, a circle of officers took to gathering in a corner of the cell, under this beam of light. They collected around Abu Ayoub, the radar technician, who could recite for twenty minutes at a stretch without requiring a prompt. In earlier days, in their time of freedom, all of the men in this circle would have enforced the Syrian Arab Army’s ban on the collective prayer. Perhaps they had discriminated against the more obviously religious men under their command. In the Syrian Arab Army it is not unknown for the brass to humiliate religious-minded conscripts. If these officers had done this in the past, they were regretting it now.
Other things were changing. In the past, Abu Ayoub, who was half the age of the captains and colonels who gathered in his circle, would have bowed his head in their presence. He would hardly have spoken a word. Now Abu Ayoub was the leader. The brass hung on his words. As the moon passed over this little circle, Abu Ayoub would whisper to the others, “The Surah of Yasin?” or “The Surah An-Nissa?”
“Yes, okay, good,” the colonels and captains would whisper in reply. When he was done with one chapter, he would name another. “All right, then. Perfect,” would come the reply. Abu Ayoub had what the brass wanted then: the Koran in his heart and his head. “Go ahead,” they whispered to him as he proposed new chapters. “We’re waiting.” Out of consideration for the rest of us, who were, in theory, trying to sleep, Abu Ayoub would recite in a barely audible voice, as if the words didn’t need to be spoken but could be hinted at by touching the tip of the tongue to the lips and by breathing. Sometimes, when the other officers knew the words to the verses Abu Ayoub was reciting, they whispered in synch with his whisperings. Sometimes I would wake up, listen a bit, and imagine that I was listening to the rustling of the trees in the villa garden. Sometimes I would wake up, look around, and see that a pair of officers was sitting under the moonbeam, in perfect silence. Perhaps they had recited all the verses they felt like reciting. Perhaps they just wanted to keep quiet. In their silence, one of the officers would hold the column of light with a single eye for a few seconds and then he would pass it on to his colleague.
Whenever I saw such scenes, I felt that the officers were trying to maintain connection with their lost power. Okay, their communication channel was a slender, useless moonbeam. So what? That moonbeam had found us in spite of Jebhat al-Nusra’s complicated scheme to seal us away from the world. Its softness, its reliability, and its steadiness made me think it a countervailing force, faraway but powerful in its own right. This pair of officers, I guessed, knew they could count on the moon. So they waited up for it, and when it appeared, they held on to it with their eyes for as long as they could.
At the time, I found this communication strategy of theirs reassuring. To me, it meant that the officers were cooking something up, that not all of nature was on Jebhat al-Nusra’s side, and that if things here got truly out of hand we might well be beamed away, as people on Star Trek were beamed away. In those moments, I was willing to believe in possibilities other people in our part of the world hadn’t thought of yet. Just because it hadn’t happened before didn’t mean it could not happen in the future. I wanted to explore the low-end possibilities. I wasn’t inclined to rule anything out.
* * *
Some time in early May, they moved us again—this time to a storefront prison in a much bombed-over Aleppo district called Al-Haydariya. This prison had once been a neighborhood grocery store. On the other side of the roll-down steel gate that served as the front wall of our cell, donkey carts drifted by. Children kicked soccer balls in the dust. Chinks in this gate allowed us a view of an elementary school–like building across the way and, in front of it, a line of pickup trucks whose antennae bore the al Qaeda flag. A shade-spreading eucalyptus tree hung over the trucks, and above the neighborhood, on the school rooftop, snipers kept watch.
Within the first twenty-four hours of our arrival, the army officers identified the snipers’ guns, which they admired for their newness and their accuracy, as American guns—or anyway, guns made after an American design. The officers called these rifles Americans, as opposed to the standard-issue personal weapons in the Syrian war, the Kalashnikovs, which they called Russians.
Under the protection of the Americans, a kind of peace reigned in this neighborhood. Now and then, missiles—or shells or rockets (anyway, projectiles)—flew overhead. We could hear them crash into faraway buildings. Gun battles broke out from time to time but didn’t seem to be occurring nearby. There were helicopters, sometimes, but
no barrel bombs.
In the early morning, when most in our cell were still asleep, we could hear the donkey cart man hawking his cucumbers. In the evenings, after the Maghreb prayer, the trucks filled with soldiers then went rolling away into the night. Shortly thereafter, a van or a pickup loaded up with platters of rice, bags of bread, and sometimes pots of okra and lentils would pull up to the curb in front of the grocery store. “The dinner comes,” the prisoner who was watching the street would say then. We could hear the deliverymen entering the grocery store by the main entrance, then laying out the platters on the floor in front of our cell door. When the door opened, men with guns slung over their shoulders would march heaping platters of rice and armloads of bread into the center of the cell. Often, the bread was still warm from the neighborhood oven.
The militants who controlled this prison wanted us to know that they had no official connection to Jebhat al-Nusra. “You are here on trust,” the prison manager told us during the welcome-to-my-prison lecture he made on our first evening with him. By “trust,” we understood, he meant that his faction, which, according to the T-shirts his men wore, was called the Islamic Dawn, had agreed to look after us as banks look after deposits. A Jebhat al-Nusra official or a group of officials, none of whom he named, had lodged us away in the manager’s vault. Whenever the depositors wished to make a withdrawal, that’s when the withdrawal would happen. What would become of us then the manager was in no position to know.
In the meantime, Abu Hajr, as the manager wished to be called, had a solemn obligation to uphold—the maintenance of the trust. He could tell us nothing about the depositors’ state of mind, identity, or intentions. He himself knew next to nothing. “For you, everything we do, we do in the face of God,” he announced. We understood by this that he intended to provide for us as the Koran requires prisoners to be provided for (in the Surah al-Insan, it requires that prisoners be fed, by the way, but doesn’t go into details). We were to know that his relationship with the depositors was legal and aboveboard, that he was a cog in a system, and that the system was licit in the eyes of God.
This prison belonged to the neighborhood as the other prisons we had been in to date did not. There were six resident prisoners in our grocery store jail. All of them had grown up in Al-Haydariya. All of them had been arrested on suspicion of collaborating with the government. From one of them, a bricklayer called Abed, I learned that the neighborhood pharmacy was around the corner, that earlier in the week his mom and dad had been allowed to bring him some medication from this pharmacy, and that though he had lived in Al-Haydariya his whole life, he meant to leave it as soon as he had the money. In his mind, Al-Haydariya was the most unlovely, unloved portion of Aleppo. “We are poor,” he said, holding his palms to the sky and grinning in mock hopelessness. He mentioned the lack of groceries in the grocery store. The cucumber cart man, he said, was what Al-Haydariya had instead of a neighborhood grocery store. “Probably he is also broke,” Abed guessed.
So Al-Haydariya was poor. It did, however, have a business district. On our first night here, the prison manager sent out for thirty-odd falafel sandwiches. The following day, an electrician came to install a ceiling fan. He was not at all surprised (or successfully concealed it) on discovering that the grocery store now contained some twenty-five prisoners, in addition to the six neighborhood regime collaborators. The electrician was polite but distant with us, as any electrician would have been under the circumstances.
The local merchants, it seemed, had cordial relations with the prison authorities. On one of our first mornings in this prison, the cistern out of which we drew our drinking water ran low. Abu Hajr summoned a water tank truck. In order to allow the hose to reach our water tank, the storefront gate had to be unlocked, then rolled up from the floor at a height of about a foot. Abed leapt into action. He seized one end of the hose, then climbed up to the shelf, above the grocery store toilet, on which the cistern sat. From up there, he exchanged pleasantries with the water tank man through the roll-up steel gate, as the water poured into the cistern. Toward the end of this operation, the bricklayer asked the water tank man if enough water remained in the truck to allow the prisoners an impromptu shower. Abu Hajr had no objections. “Have at it then,” said the waterman. The twenty-five-odd prisoners plus the six resident jailbirds stripped to their underwear. We rolled back our blankets from the floor. During the following ten minutes, a bemused but well-meaning waterman ducked into the cell, then stood by as Abu Hajr aimed a fire-hose torrent at the cell wall. The prisoners danced underneath the splashes like little children.
We became a neighborhood attraction. Had he been in the mood, Abu Hajr could have made a tidy profit by charging our visitors an admission fee. One morning, about a week after our arrival, a crowd of elementary school–age children came to stare at us. At midday that day a delegation of clerics dropped by, and later in the afternoon a passerby happened in off the street, apparently in order to harangue us about the unspeakable agonies God was preparing for us in hell. In the midst of his speech, this visitor lost his temper. He began to kick the prisoners nearest him in the ribs. Abu Hajr had to escort him from the cell.
Not all the neighborhood denizens admired the men of the Islamic Dawn. One afternoon, a flock of about a dozen demonstrators, upset, apparently, by some policy or habit that had developed under the Islamic Dawn’s administration, collected around the alley that led to the grocery store’s principal entrance. For ten minutes or so, they chanted in favor of a rival faction. There was much whistling and banging of kitchen utensils. Eventually, they had to be shooed away.
I found the men of the Islamic Dawn to be courteous, almost to the point of chivalry. They were conscientious guarantors of the trust. Never once did the men from this faction hit us. They hardly insulted us. They advised—but did not order—us to pray. They advised us to keep the cell tidy. When voices rose in our cell such that they might have been heard in the street, the guards advised us to lower our voices. They flogged the six resident prisoners with abandon, for no apparent reason, at random times. They dealt with us as if we were a delicate kind of merchandise, prone to spoilage and bruising.
One afternoon, a wall of sacks containing powdered cement had to be moved from within the cell to an alcove in the corridor outside the cell. Under the supervision of a line of Islamic Dawn guards, a handful of prisoners began picking up sacks. I picked up a sack. Abu Hajr hurried forward. He held up his hand. He made a gracious smile. “Afterward, when you go home,” he explained, “you’ll say that we employed you as slave labor.” He asked me to return to my spot on the floor.
So the men of the Islamic Dawn were polite. And they weren’t officially part of Jebhat al-Nusra. But the clerics who visited us threatened us exactly as the Jebhat al-Nusra clerics threatened us. They spoke to us in the same tones of trembling outrage. They hinted darkly at what was to become of us, as the other clerics hinted. All of our visitors foresaw a looming combat in which the forces of belief on planet Earth would confront those who insult God or discount him or cannot find it within themselves to believe in him at all. This combat was going to cause civilization as we knew it to crumble to the earth. All the clerics understood that an apocalypse now meant that afterward, in the great global Islamic utopia to come, Muslims would rule over Jerusalem, Rome, and Andalusia.
One of our first visitors, a father-of-the-family type, in his early forties, wanted us to know that he held no brief for any armed group at all, nor was he a learned man. He was merely a laborer. He happened to own several buildings in the neighborhood. He had built them himself, he said, and had worked within them. His buildings had lately been barrel-bombed away.
He wanted us to know that he wasn’t at all unhappy about the situation. He rather felt that the calamity in whose midst we were living had been sent by God. “It is an education for all of us,” he said.
Syrians in general, in his opinion, were discovering that buildings—and possessions and baubles of all kind
s—were temporary, whereas the words “there is no god but God” would last forever. He himself had discovered that he loved these words more than anything, more than life itself, more even than his wife and his children. “Over there,” he said to the officers, nodding toward a frontier in his imagination, “you kill people for saying the words ‘there is no god but God.’ ” Over here, on his side of the national divide, he wanted us to know, the citizens were happy to see every building and tree go up in smoke, and to go up in smoke themselves, provided they were allowed to cherish the words “there is no god but God.”
Another lecturer who came to us early in our stay in this prison directed his remarks exclusively to Matt and me. The burden of his speech was that whenever Matt and I were sent home we were to tell the Jews in America that they needn’t send their armies into Syria, for Syria had a population that was yet worse than the Jews. They were called Alawites. Had the Jews ever tried to erase the Muslims from the map of Syria? No, but Bashar al-Assad had set his armies to accomplish this very task. Keeping his eyes on me but nodding at the corner of the room in which his enemies, some of whom were still wearing the flak jackets in which they had been captured, were sitting, he sank his fingers into his beard. “We are staying,” he said. “We are ridding ourselves of them.”
In our earlier prisons, it had been possible to imagine that an underground cult had taken over a building, converted it for use as a prison, then set about arresting unlucky passersby. In this prison, the visitors were too numerous and their dreams harmonized too much with the prophecies that had been communicated to us during the previous six months to imagine that a cult leader had brainwashed a band of malcontents and misfits. New understandings, our visitors told us, were settling over the society around us. At last, the time had come to do away with the Alawites, once and for all. The coming of this resolve, they said, had been in the works for ages. For generations, indeed, for centuries, the Syrian people had been too naïve and too frightened to face up to the evil that had crept across the nation. Now this period of slumber was over. The Syrian people, said one divine after the next in Al-Haydariya, were waking up.
