by Theo Padnos
“In truth, he understood Arabic, didn’t he?” the commander asked.
“Probably, he did,” I said. The commander glowered. He wanted to know if Matt had been a CIA agent after all. I shrugged my shoulders. “Perhaps?”
“Was his conversion to Islam also a lie?” the commander asked.
Again, I shrugged my shoulders. “Who can say?” I pretended to ponder the matter. “When he was alone with me,” I offered, “he did not pray. Neither did he fast. You can judge his sincerity before God for yourself.”
That night, my answers seemed to satisfy this commander. When I had ruined his reputation to the best of my ability, the commander harrumphed. All Americans were liars, he said, and I was as much of a liar as any. I held my tongue.
Thus, before this commander left, he allowed his adjutants to kick me in the ribs, and to slap my head. He screamed a few parting words of abuse. But he did not threaten to wring further, truer confessions out of me. Instead, he turned on his heels. All of my visitors filed out of the room. The last to leave slammed the door, as usual.
In the silence after their departure, I marveled at my good fortune. I had been anticipating a firing squad. I’d assumed, at the very least, that there would be torture. In fact, there had been a bloody nose, followed by a round of egregious lying.
The matter couldn’t possibly have ended there, I supposed. Still, things had gotten off to an auspicious beginning. Later that evening, a prison worker appeared at the window out of which Matt had escaped bearing a welding torch. As I crouched in a corner, he affixed a sturdier, immovable set of bars to the window. A few moments after this worker had completed this task, he appeared at the door of my cell. He deposited a plate of rice on the floor, then slipped away. I ate. I listened to the back-and-forth of the neighborhood firefights for a while, inspected the welder’s new bars, then gathered the throw pillows on which I slept into a corner. Within seconds, I was asleep.
* * *
The following morning, the jail staff moved me into a fetid cell, next door to the one from which Matt escaped, in one corner of which there stood a little lake of sewage. I languished here for two days, and then, one evening, for no apparent reason, I was returned to my former cell. Now the cushions were gone. Whereas before, meals in this cell consisted of melon, plates of rice, bread, and tea, they consisted now of a single round of bread and a single egg.
There came an afternoon, shortly after my return to this cell, on which one of the commanders I remembered from the eye hospital stood by as a pair of assistants subjected me to sustained flogging. They used their galvanized steel cables. One of the men supplemented the cable lashes with the application of a car battery. In the evening after this beating, a spell of dizziness caused me to collapse as I stood over the toilet in my cell. I summoned a jailer. A polite, well-meaning teenager appeared at the door. “May I have a pain reliever?” I asked. He disappeared, then returned, oddly enough, with a tablet of Panadol. I swallowed it, then slept.
* * *
The next morning, running my hand over the bruises and lacerations I had sustained during the cable beating, it seemed to me that I hadn’t been injured in any serious way, that I felt about as I would have had I been in a high-speed bike crash.
After a bike crash, one’s body aches. One’s head rings. Sometimes, there are superficial wounds. One isn’t quite oneself for a few days. I will rest up, I told myself. I resolved to focus totally on a proper recovery, as injured athletes do. I had sustained a series of painful blows to the head. I decided to keep my head still, and to sleep as much as possible during the coming days.
During this recovery period, the prison staff fed me a round of flatbread and a handful of olives per day. Once a day, a Jebhat al-Nusra fighter came to my cell with a branch that appeared to have been lopped from a nearby tree. It was much too heavy and too busy with twigs to use as a proper flail. This fighter waved his branch at me. He slapped my head and shoulders. Of course, he screamed. But after a few days of this, he seemed to lose interest. Neither he nor any of the other domestic workers in this prison ever breathed a word to me about Matt. They hadn’t wondered at his presence. They expressed no interest in his absence. Within a day or so of his escape, it felt to me as though he had never been there at all.
That year, Ramadan came to an end on August 7. On the morning of the seventh, upstairs, in the Jebhat al-Nusra inner sanctums, there were feasts. I could hear the pots clanking. I smelled the mutton stewing. For me, in the afternoon, there was a new cellmate—Hamoud.
I warmed instantly to Hamoud, a Palestinian-Syrian who had spent most of his adult life in prison. He was in his mid-thirties. Some twenty years earlier, his uncle, he told me, had killed his brother. He had therefore killed the uncle. The Syrian government had sentenced him to life in prison.
In the regime prisons, he said, he had been permitted visitors, a hot water heater for tea and coffee, and a television. There had been exercise yards. There were smuggled cell phones. At the prison commissary, there had been pots of hummus.
I asked him how many stars, on a scale of one to five, with five being the highest rating, he would give to the Aleppo Central Prison. It had been a five-star facility, in his opinion. What about the prison in Palmyra? He felt that that prison rated only three. There had been inadequate ventilation and crowding. That evening, we cursed our Jebhat al-Nusra jailers for the crumminess of their prisons. We sighed over the luxuries afforded to the normal run of prisoners in Syria.
During the conversation that flowed, with occasional silences, through most of that night, Hamoud told me the story of his arrest by Jebhat al-Nusra. Earlier that summer, he said, the Syrian government had mysteriously commuted his sentence. A free man, he returned to the village outside of Aleppo in which he grew up. Sadly, he said, the Free Syrian Army squadron that had taken over his village suspected him of being an agent in the service of the Syrian intelligence apparatus, sent out to spy on the Free Syrian Army. This squadron arrested him. It held him in its own jail for three weeks, during which time it tortured him nearly every day. At the end of the three weeks, the Free Syrian Army turned him over to Jebhat al-Nusra.
As Hamoud told me of his tribulations, I couldn’t help but feel that his appearance in my cell had been miracle enough for me. In the wake of Matt’s escape, alone in the cell, I had been certain that Jebhat al-Nusra was planning a wicked, unbearable torture for me. But what? I fretted. I dreaded. I stared at the locked door. What evil thing was coming my way?
And then Hamoud had slipped through the door. Hamoud, a lifelong prisoner, knew how to be alone with his thoughts, and when to allow me to be alone with mine. He knew the geography of Aleppo much better than I did. Where were we, exactly? By drawing lines across the carpet with his fingertip, he made mysterious, labyrinthine, beautiful maps for me.
When he and I had spent several days together, I felt comfortable enough in his presence to sing to myself. To my surprise, he liked this. I’ve never known a soul to like my singing. Hamoud found something in it to appreciate. One evening, when I had been depressed during the day and so hadn’t sung at all, he spoke up, into the silence. “You didn’t sing today,” he said. “Why not?” That evening, I sang a song for him whose melody he could remember, whose title he could recall only faintly. “Susanna?” he asked. “Yes, Susanna?” I smiled at him. I sang:
“Well, it rained all night the day I left,
The weather, it was dry,
The sun so hot, I froze to death,
Susanna, don’t you cry.”
As I was warbling for Hamoud, he was teaching me. What words should be uttered to a Jebhat al-Nusra warrior when you have finished your dinner and are hoping for a spot of tea? When you’ve been caught peering at their movements through a keyhole? When you’d like news about the progress of the war? Hamoud understood the language of the jihad. It came to him automatically, as if from a bottomless well of idioms. For instance, he knew that Jebhat al-Nusra fighters like to feel th
at somewhere in their prisoners’ sinning hearts, the prisoners admire the jailers. We, the prisoners, were meant to love the warriors for their preparedness to die, for their devotion to God, and for their frank, childlike affection for the Syrian people. The warriors want to feel that while they are risking life and limb wandering the Aleppo streets, their prisoners are downstairs in the basement cells, rooting them on. “May God bring you victories, O Lord,” he would tell the jailers who brought us our evening meal. When they quizzed him about his own commitment to Islam, he threw himself at their feet. “Teach me, my sheikhs, for I want to learn!” he would say. No, he didn’t know how many prostrations were to be offered at the dawn prayer. Was it two? Four? “I have no idea. For the love of God, teach me!” he would exclaim.
Hamoud’s arrival in my cell happened to coincide with Jebhat al-Nusra’s restoration of my normal food ration. Again, they brought melon in the evening. After dinner, when Hamoud asked for tea, tea was brought. Sometimes, in the midst of a lazy afternoon, an urge for a chat with a jailer struck him. He summoned a jailer. Chitchat occurred.
A week after his arrival, I made an audit of my losses and gains over the previous weeks. I had undergone a week of light to moderate Jebhat al-Nusra abuse. On the other side of the ledger, I had gained an admirable cellmate. I had lost a disagreeable one. By now, the disagreeable one, I imagined, would have informed the CIA special operations team in Langley of my exact location. He would have drawn out diagrams of the cell and informed the men in “The Company,” as he liked to refer to the CIA, of the routines that prevailed among my jailers.
I did not suppose then—or at any other moment—that the CIA might be willing to send its own people after me. In the wake of Matt’s escape, however, I did begin to daydream about a hands-off, low-risk means of bringing my ordeal to a peaceful close.
If the US government was sending arms to the Syrian rebels, as I supposed it was, was it not possible that one of the US-approved rebel groups would be willing to drag its largest guns to the prison’s front door, to knock, to smile, to utter a soto voce threat or two, and to let it be known that it wished to retrieve the American prisoner in the basement? “In exchange for Theo, we propose a gift basket of iPhones,” the leader of the America-friendly group might have said. “Deal?”
It seemed to me then that Jebhat al-Nusra didn’t quite know what it meant to do with me. The commander in as Shaer, I hoped, could well have been interested in thrashing out a deal. Probably, he would have rejected whatever initial offer happened his way. But he might, out of politeness, have ordered tea to be served. A theatrical exchange, filled with declarations of solidarity and invocations of the Prophet’s name, would have followed. Such is the script by which business in Aleppo has always advanced, I told myself.
Thus the results of my internal audit: I had seen Matt off. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I told myself. God had given me Hamoud. I now had a new deliverance fantasy to ponder as I napped on the basement carpet. I was certain that Matt would have told my mother that although my life was in jeopardy, I remained quite alive. This comforted me. All in all, I judged, the bungled escape had proved itself a boon. Had providence presented me with such a deal before the escape, I decided, I would have agreed to the terms with joy in my heart.
* * *
One afternoon in the middle of August, two weeks after Matt’s escape, a half-dozen Jebhat al-Nusra fighters stepped into my basement cell. “Where’s the American?” said one, grinning. Another took a step toward me. “Stand,” he said. He asked if I had belongings. “Get them,” he said. “Blindfold yourself.”
I turned a hurried glance to Hamoud.
“You’re going home?” he exclaimed, whispering. His eyes lit up. He kissed my check. Within seconds, the guards had handcuffed me, and blindfolded me. One of them took hold of a plastic bag in which I carried a spare T-shirt, a pair of underwear, and some chits of paper on which I had been scribbling. I was led up a flight of stairs, across a patio, then into the back seat of an SUV. A pair of guards sat on either side of me.
CHAPTER 8 A VOYAGE INTO DARKNESS
Many months later, the SUV driver, a former engineering student at the University of Damascus, it turned out, with whom I developed a kind of a friendship, told me that my whole body shook as I climbed into his truck. He said that I looked to him as though I had been shot through the heart, that my blood had left my face, and that my legs trembled so much he could feel them clattering against the back of his seat. Perhaps it was so.
Ten minutes after I climbed into his SUV, however, as the SUV rolled through a succession of cloverleaf highway ramps, the young man who’d been posted to my left withdrew a handful of corner-store candy from a plastic bag. Did I know I was going on a voyage? he asked. He passed his treats around among his friends. I listened to the friends smacking their lips. The guard on my right opened a bottle of spring water. “Thirsty?” he asked me. Since my hands were cuffed behind my back, he poured a splash of water down my throat.
Some minutes after this, the driver addressed me. When I needed to pee, I was to say so. When I was thirsty, I was to say so. “If you move at all,” he said, “even by a hair, we will put a bullet through your head.” By this point in my captivity, I knew the rest of the prisoner-transport script by heart. Bullets were cheap, the driver was to tell me. So he did. In killing me, Jebhat al-Nusra would lose the cost of a single bullet, he said. “Are you like the other Americans?” he asked.
“No.”
“You think you’re clever?”
“No,” I said.
Was I a liar? A fool? Did I mean to have a go at an escape?
I wasn’t an idiot, I assured the driver. “I know well enough where my interests lie,” I said. It was a line I had learned from Hamoud.
“Good,” said the driver. “Then you will shut your mouth?”
I listened to the wind for a little while. I slouched against the seat back. I nodded my head forward, as if I were falling asleep, then lolled it backward, so that my neck rested on the back of the seat. In this position, peering out at the roadway from underneath the blindfold’s bottommost flap, I could see the highway nearly as well as the driver could. I watched the sun glinting off the roadside signs. An hour or so into our voyage, it was striking the oncoming drivers in the face. It cast a pretty, coppery radiance across the single-story houses, more like cement storage units than dwellings, that lined the roadway.
Evidently, we were driving away from the sunset, into the east. Shortly after sundown, when we had been underway for about two hours, we came to a sign indicating the city of Raqqa to be a few miles to the north. Straight ahead, said the sign, was Iraq. I prayed that the driver would turn left, toward Raqqa. Nobody, as far as I was aware, was dropping barrel bombs on this provincial outpost. The snippets of rumor I had heard to date told me that, having expelled all representatives of Syrian government authority, the citizenry of Raqqa was carrying on with everyday life. It was neither on the government side nor on the rebel side. It meant to survive the war, I understood, by watching it from the sidelines. If I was to be transferred to this tranquil city, I thought, I might live for a few months in a pacific city-state. In due time, the common sense that prevailed among the citizens here would see me released. I would skip across the Turkish border. I would fall to my feet. I would kiss the ground.
Our driver scarcely glanced at the turnoff for Raqqa. “DEIR EZZOR IRAQ,” said an unmissable sign hanging over the highway. A set of directional arrows pointed forward, into the east. My heart sank.
I suspect now that the true cradle of the war in Syria wasn’t Deraa, where the famous graffiti “The People Want the Fall of the Regime” first appeared on a schoolyard wall, but rather the Euphrates River Valley, especially the eastern portions of it, downstream from Raqqa, where Syria’s oil and gas fields lie. Here, the country is poor, though the oil derricks that lie scattered across the desert floor attest to abundant wealth beneath the surface of the earth. Somehow, ever
since the construction of a pipeline in the mid-eighties, this wealth has piped itself into the pockets of a tiny circle of presidential intimates. Naturally, it has flowed into the coffers of Shell and Total, the European conglomerates most responsible for building up Syria’s oil industry.
For what it’s worth, during my ten months of residence in this eastern half of Syria, I made a point of inquiring into the origins of the war as often as possible. I spoke with anyone willing to speak to me. I suspect I quizzed dozens if not hundreds of Deiris, as people from this region are known (after the provincial capital, Deir Ezzor). I was curious. I had time on my hands. I was among interesting, sometimes knowledgeable people. Why not inquire? As it happened, I did not encounter a single person in the eastern half of Syria who believed that peaceful demonstrators in Deraa—or mosque goers in the restive suburb of Duma or citizens anywhere else in the west—were the true fomenters of a rebellion in Syria.
The true fomenters, in the opinion of my prison interviewees, were the men of the jihad. The ISIS commanders and foot soldiers with whom I was sometimes imprisoned believed that their leaders, directing matters from planning rooms in Anbar Province in Iraq, dispatched fighters into Syria in late 2010, long before any child in Deraa scrawled his graffiti on a schoolyard wall. Their objective was to kill the Alawite potentates who, in their opinion, had used their talents in sorcery to wrest the land—and its seas of oil—from its native sons. Now the Alawites, it was thought, operated Deir Ezzor as a sort of slave colony. The native Deiris were the slaves. The Alawites, especially those in the intelligence services, were the slave drivers. The men of the jihad meant to repossess the oil, to plunder the colonists’ arsenals, and to put these into the hands of the region’s hundreds of thousands of unemployed young men. It was these young men, imbued with the piety of the desert, who carried the banner of the jihad into the well-behaved, demonstrate-but-no-violence suburbs of western Syria. My Jebhat al-Nusra jailers were inclined to believe in a similar origin story for the Syrian war, though in their telling, the planning rooms were not in Iraq but in villages along the banks of the Euphrates, south of Deir Ezzor, next to Syria’s biggest oil fields. Fifteen years earlier, these villagers, the Jebhat al-Nusra fighters maintained, had slipped across the Iraqi border to assist in the jihad against the Americans. Now, they said, they—and their teenage sons and younger brothers—were bringing the jihad home.
