by Theo Padnos
“What did you want to see?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I stammered.
The albino declined to remove my handcuffs. He lifted me from the floor by tugging on my shirt, then propped me against the base of a wall. He untied my blindfold, then held a bowl of lettuce to my lips. “Eat,” he said. He pushed a scrap of bread into my mouth. He poured a teacup’s worth of water down my throat. The feeding finished, he lifted me to my feet. The zip ties at my ankles were too tight for me to walk. A pair of men at my elbows inched me into the back of the cell. The albino ordered me to stand with my toes pressed against the rear wall of the cell. I was to remain in this position until further orders. “If you sit, there is a punishment,” his voice said. If I were to sleep, the voice said, the punishment would be worse. I was not to speak. “We have pliers for your fingernails. We have electricity. Do you understand?” I did not reply. The door closed.
At first, as the light drained from my closet, I imagined that my captors were spying on me, perhaps through a keyhole. I was being tested, I thought. Passing their test would show my respect for their rules. As soon as they understood that I was capable of respect, they would ease up. I focused on the task at hand.
During my first half hour at the wall, I refused to allow the thought of sitting to enter my head. I can handle endurance tests, I thought. After a half hour, my thighs were getting sore. I pressed my forehead into the wall. After an hour, the wall was swaying in front of me. In order to ward off the swaying, I tried to step in place. I crouched, then stood. This caused the wall to turn in front of my eyes like a pinwheel.
I wish I could say that I stood at my wall for hours. In fact, I gave in after about ninety minutes. I sank to the floor. I stretched my legs. Because I couldn’t reach the lice in my hair—and because they seemed to be feasting on my scalp—I tried to crush them by lolling my head on the vinyl floor. Eventually, after an hour or so of this, I curled my knees into my chest. I slept.
During the following three days, I scarcely moved from this position. In the mornings, at around eleven, a pair of guards who slept and ate on a carpet immediately in front of the door of my cell would let themselves in. One of them would place a round of bread, a small cucumber, and a half-liter bottle of water on the floor. He would remove the handcuffs, then stand back. His colleague, observing the proceedings from the doorway, would hold his finger on the trigger of his Kalashnikov. The two of them would watch me eat for a moment, then withdraw.
After I had finished eating, I was meant to knock on the door. When it opened, I’d blindfold myself. A guard would enter the cell, take hold of my elbow, then bring me to my feet. I would shuffle into the light. The zip ties required me to take baby steps. On the far side of a twenty-foot stretch of vinyl flooring, inside a bathroom, I was allowed to remove my blindfold. I would baby-step into a stall, squat, wash myself, then drink from the hose with which I had washed myself. When I had emerged from the stall, I would reapply my blindfold. I would again be handcuffed. I would shuffle back to the cell, then sink to the floor. I would curl myself into a ball. In the evening, a half round of bread and another cucumber were brought to me. A similar toilet exercise followed.
In Syrian Arabic, a person in a position of power expresses contempt for an underling by appending the suffix “oolak” to the last word of a sentence. One hears the tic in the mouths of army officers and prison guards in TV dramas. An English equivalent might be “You stupid fuck” or “Okay, shit-for-brains?”
After ten months in prison, I had come to understand that guards who addressed me in this manner couldn’t be negotiated with. They shouted at me but never spoke. When they had something important to say, they began the discussion by slapping the side of my head or seizing a tuft of hair. “Shut up—ooLAK!” they would say. In the presence of such guards, I kept my eyes on the ground. I did not speak.
It took me just a few hours in this cell to deduce that a certain guard, Abdullah, was in charge of the others and that among these extremists in Islam, he was known as an extremist. The first words I remember him speaking to me were “Stand—ooLAK.” He had come to bring me to the bathroom. The handcuffs and the zip ties prevented me from rising to my feet. I wobbled on the floor. “Stand, Animal—ooLAK!” he screamed. On that morning, I wobbled and rocked at his feet. He stared at me through the scarf he never failed to wrap around his face before opening the door of my cell. Eventually, a smile spread through his eyes. “You really cannot stand on your own?” he said at last.
“No,” I explained. He helped me to my feet.
When he and I had come to know each other a bit, after I had eaten several meals in his presence and he’d taken me back and forth to the bathroom several times, I asked him why my hands had to be cuffed at my back. “Inside the cell, Abdullah,” I said. “Why?”
I happened to be sitting then against the base of a wall. He put his boot to my shoulder. His foot pushed me to the floor. Holding his boot over my forehead, he invited me to repeat my question: “Say it again—ooLAK?”
During my third day in this cell, I decided that its heat, the thirst it induced, and especially Abdullah’s refusal to release my hands from behind my back, a constraint that allowed the lice in my hair to attack as they pleased, were too much for me. The lice gorged themselves. My ability to hunt the lice, it seemed to me, had been my only measure of control. Now it was gone. I needed help. To whom could I turn?
I supposed that after ten months in detention, my case had worked its way through the middle managers in Jebhat al-Nusra, and through the analogous layers in the American bureaucracy. Had the Jebhat al-Nusra leader, whose name I did not know, wished to help me, he would have done so by now, I assumed. My thoughts turned to the American leader.
Probably, Barack Obama, I imagined, would have intervened if he could have. I was much too surrounded by Kalashnikovs and grenades for a black helicopter rescue to be of any use, but my captors, I felt, would have been happy to work out a deal with Obama over the phone. They would have asked for a ransom, or a prisoner swap, or an arms shipment, or all of these things. Such concessions, I knew, wouldn’t exactly have been in harmony with US government policy. Yet Jebhat al-Nusra’s treatment of me, I felt, was a greater injustice than the breach of a policy. The unfairness of it all pained me nearly as much as the heat did. It seemed to me that when swashbuckling reporters and Blackwater mercenary contractors and the like were kidnapped, they were always ransomed away. People of that sort courted danger, I told myself, were well paid, and so couldn’t be thought of as blameless—no matter how pitiful their hostage videos were. Whereas I meant to avoid danger. I hadn’t made a dime. It seemed to me that if Barack Obama could be made to understand that in rescuing me he wouldn’t be rescuing the normal run of Middle East hostage but rather an idealist with a penchant for exploring the world—a person a bit like himself, really—he would be willing to relax his scruples about the importance of living up to the letter of every law.
If a discussion were to occur, I thought, it would be important for him to understand just how much we had in common. I would want to address that matter up front. The best way to do it, I thought, would be to tell him straightaway that his story of an outsider who drifts about after college, is haunted by an inscrutable father, stays true to himself, reads a lot, and finally comes into his own was my story, too. His Dreams from My Father, I would tell him, had held the mirror up to my own nature. Once he understood how genuine my admiration for him was, I would let him know that while the two of us were fellow travelers in a spiritual sense, in the material world, I happened to be in a spot of trouble at the moment.
If the matter were put to the president in this way, I thought, he was bound to act. He would help me out of a love of doing good works, I thought, and because he was the sort of person who could not not help me.
At one point during the afternoon of this third day, inside my heat-addled brain, I really did try to put in a call to the White House. I did it via
mental telepathy. For a moment, it seemed to me that I could see the president huddled over his desk. He was quite lost in his work. I was reluctant to interrupt. Perhaps, I told myself, the matter could be brought to his attention in the customary manner, through appropriate channels.
I know now that when matters of this sort were brought to Obama’s attention through official channels, he did not do much. The case I think of most often is that of the American ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller. I know now that a little more than a year after I was transferred out of this compound for oil workers, ISIS, which, by then, controlled all the oil fields in eastern Syria, transferred Kayla into this compound. It’s not clear how much President Obama understood then about the program of organized rape to which ISIS was subjecting Kayla at the time. Perhaps reports from a pair of Iraqi sex slaves who had once shared a cell with Kayla reached him. Probably, he knew of ISIS’s habit of subjecting all women under their control to varieties of sexual slavery. Certainly, he understood what Kayla’s parents, Marsha and Carl Mueller, understood when, in the fall of 2014, ISIS began sending emails to them. Those emails said that in exchange for a ransom of about $5 million, ISIS was willing to let Kayla go. It seems that the White House decided nothing could be done for Kayla. The sexual attacks would have continued. Kayla was killed under disputed circumstances—not necessarily in a bombing, as ISIS claimed—in February of 2015.
* * *
Hindsight has helped me make sense of the US government’s hostage policy. I know now that it works this way: Under circumstances much more unbearable than mine, the US government will cling to its dogmas. It will refuse to take the terrorists’ phone calls. It will, however, allow the victim’s family to take them. During these calls, I know now, the terrorists will make demands of the US government. The families will turn to the State Department, the White House, the FBI, and whatever senators and congressmen will take their calls. “What now?” the families will say.
Some of the officials will speak in sorrowful tones. Others will be curt. All will say the same thing: “Dunno, really. Anyway, it’s not our problem.”
* * *
Sometime during the evening of my third day in this cell, after my Obama fantasies had come and gone, it occurred to me that a strain of recklessness in my character, a trait that had hobbled my progress in life long before I ever saw Syria, had led me into an unknown and wicked social phenomenon—their caliphate.
It seemed to me that the people around me had pledged their hearts to the caliphate, had every intention of dying whenever it was blown to bits, and that because of their enthusiasm for death, everyone in the region, including those who despised the very thought of Jebhat al-Nusra, would also be blown to bits. If, somehow, I was to survive the sauna-like cell, I thought, I would be consumed in the apocalypse Jebhat al-Nusra was planning for the entirety of eastern Syria. I reduced my predicament to a formula: A flaw in my nature, plus their fantasy of collective suicide, equaled my destiny.
Would not a change in my nature, I wondered, allow me to alter my destiny? It seemed to me that I was adaptable in this way, whereas the Jebhat al-Nusra warriors were not. They believed that the angels of God had written down exactly how they would die fifty thousand years ago, at the dawn of time. Their personal identities were likewise immutable. Their word for immutability was maktoub—written down. Perhaps their destinies really were maktoub, I told myself, but I was no Muslim, didn’t believe in their angels, and did believe in the virtue of adapting myself to the haps and hazards of life. I will adapt, I told myself, and thus change what has been written down for me.
I felt I ought to begin by making a few concessions. Earlier in life, before my encounter with al Qaeda, I had assumed, without ever thinking deeply into the matter, that I would arrange my life such that, every now and then, I would be able to return to Vermont. Vermont seemed lush and revivifying to me in my cell. During the hours in Aleppo in which I had been most frightened, I had clung to thoughts of a certain Vermont brook that, in real life, is nothing more than a chain of rock-strewn puddles, but seemed, in my cell, like a fountain at the end of the world. If I could only get there, I thought, its waters would wash away everything bad that had happened to me. They would restore what I had lost. In Aleppo, thoughts of this stream had buoyed my spirit. They had given me a reason to live.
Now, as I lay on Abdullah’s floor, I decided that if, somehow, a deliverance without a return to my stream at the end of the world could be arranged, I could get along quite well in the world without it. Perhaps, I told myself, the authorities in our Islamic state would decree that I must live in their river valley. I would be fine with that, I decided, because the thing I longed for was life. I wasn’t going to get all particular about a crummy brook in Vermont.
Several hours later, when the glimmers of daylight that leaked into my cell had gone out altogether—when I had been fed and was still hungry and very thirsty—I decided a further concession was in order. It had been an ambition of mine, even during my preteen years, and long before any thoughts of living as a reporter entered my brain, to turn myself into a writer. As a teenager, I loved Tom Wolfe. Later, I admired the New Yorker writer Ian Frazier, and Bill McKibben, the environmentalist. When I was in college and wondering what I ought to do with my life, I sometimes told myself: I’ll be like Ian and Bill. That night, it occurred to me that my ambition had been a bit overwrought to begin with, that certain things must remain out of reach, that a human being required food and water but certainly not writing, and that the wise thing to do, under the circumstances, was to jettison all nonessential items. If there was ever a nonessential item, I told myself, it was this idea of myself. I don’t want it in the least, I thought.
Toward morning, when the several guards who slept before my cell’s door were snoring away—when I was frightened and delirious with thirst—it occurred to me that my earlier concessions had gotten me nowhere. The guards would have laughed at them if they had known of them. In any case, in a physical sense, my condition was deteriorating.
I had a final thing to give away. It wasn’t a thing, exactly, but a person. I didn’t want to let her go. It seemed to me that she knew of my ordeal in Syria, had been with me through every moment of it, quite understood what I was going through and that when I was finally released, I wouldn’t have to explain a thing to her because she would know. This person was my mother. It seemed to me that if I were to relinquish her, I would be allowing the thing that mattered most to me to slip away from the world. That night, as I lay with my hands at the small of my back, I curled my legs into my chest. I clutched my mother to myself. I refused to let her go.
I clutched for fifteen minutes or so. Eventually, of course, I let her go, too. I felt I had to do it. I felt that they had given me no choice, that they were insatiable, and that they had forced this concession from me out of sheer wickedness.
When I had given her up, I thought for a few moments about the future I would earn for myself by giving up my reunion with my mother. If I were free but without my mother, my ordeal in Syria would be a secret thing, I imagined, devastating for me but unknown—a darkness in my past. I would never speak of it—not even to myself.
I can live with that, I told myself. I felt I didn’t require understanding. I wanted to come away alive.
Nowadays, I know that in those hours, as I was making my concessions to fate, back home in America, the Atlantic publisher, David Bradley, who had become aware of a spate of disappearances in Syria, was refusing to accept what, by then, had become the conventional wisdom concerning Americans in the custody of terrorist groups in the Middle East: Nothing could be done.
By mid-August of 2013, I know now, five American families were staring into the void. Austin Tice, a freelance reporter, had disappeared somewhere near Damascus a year earlier. James Foley had vanished in Binnish, in Idlib Province, in November of 2012. The freelancer Steven Sotloff had been taken at a checkpoint in early August of 2013, and the aid worker Kayla Mueller had vanis
hed in the company of her Syrian boyfriend, outside a hospital in Aleppo, also in early August of 2013. Another aid worker, Peter Kassig, was to disappear at an ISIS checkpoint in Idlib Province in October of 2013.
I know now these kidnappings confounded the authorities at home more than normal kidnappings do. The captors made shifting, uninterpretable, or unrealistic demands or—as in my case—locked their prisoners away without saying a word. Discussing matters among themselves, the families quickly agreed that they did not want to risk a rescue by commando raid, not that anyone was offering to perform such an operation.
The families understood that the kidnappers would eventually want concessions, especially from the US government, in the form of money, guns, or, possibly, a prisoner swap. The families understood that US law prohibited making concessions to terrorists.
I know now that my mother’s initial reaction to this blockage was to shop government offices in Washington, DC, for answers she could bear. The State Department officials, it turned out, were, according to her, the most intolerable since they had a tendency to lecture. The US could not permit itself to give things to terrorist groups, they explained, because gifts would encourage terrorism. The FBI, she discovered, was keen to advise her in the theory of how to engage a kidnapper in a discussion but couldn’t help her in practice since the things the terrorist wanted—concessions from the US government—were the things the law prohibited the advisors from offering. Samantha Power, then the US ambassador to the UN, proved helpful in that she introduced my mother to her (Power’s) Qatari counterpart, Ambassador Alya Al Thani, whose government might have had ties to Jebhat al-Nusra, but unhelpful in that Power’s project of kitting out the Syrian rebels with weaponry was turning into a bonanza for Jebhat al-Nusra and ISIS. Provisioned with our high-tech missiles, the terrorists stiffened their negotiation postures. They built more prisons. They sold some of their weaponry. Flush with cash, they made further, more unrealistic demands. Some of them broke off conversation altogether. Others made ghastlier, more unspeakable threats.
