by Theo Padnos
In those moments, as I lounged with the commanders, I pretended, as everyone did, that Jebhat al-Nusra was much too kind to murder an American journalist prisoner, but later, in the evening, when I was by myself in the villa, my old terror before my captors took hold of me. It seemed to me that no time at all had passed, that I was back in my cell in the eye hospital basement, and that on the other side of the cell door, a little band of men, some in baseball caps, some in robes, was working out the most enjoyable way to kill me. I listened for their footsteps. When the wind caused a door in a distant room to slam, a jolt of terror went down my spine.
For ISIS, it seemed to me, the James Foley video had been a stroke of genius. It brought ISIS to the front page of every newspaper in the world. For a few moments, at least, it held humankind under a kind of a spell. As the world gasped, the ISIS assassin gave a lecture. “You, the Americans, are liars.” “Today, we are slaughtering you.” “This knife will become your nightmare.” And so on. I had heard the Arabic version of that lecture a thousand times. Of course my captors will kill me, I thought, since they have always dreamed of entrancing the world. Now they knew just how to get the job done: by showing an American journalist on his knees in an orange suit, a knife at his throat. My captors had the motive. They had the weapons and the opportunity. When, I wondered, would they get to work?
In the villa bedroom, I fretted along these lines for several hours. Then I reflected: So my fate lay in the hands of a band of terrorists. The band might have been preparing to kill me. It might also have been planning to spare me. Perhaps my death had been decreed long ago. Perhaps not. I had been here before.
In the past, especially in my first weeks, in the eye hospital basement, my terror had incapacitated me. I had gaped at my captors like a victim in a slasher movie. My lot, I thought, was to be stupefied, to shriek, and then to die. Yet the longer I sat on the bedspread in the villa bedroom, the more that terror-struck person in the hospital basement seemed like a stranger to me. I understood his predicament well enough. I sympathized. But I was no longer he.
Now, twenty-two months on, it felt to me as though I could see through the Islamic statelet in which I had been living. All the middle managers fancied themselves mighty warlords. Each had a pickup truck, a Glock in a shoulder holster, and a line of talk about freeing the Muslims of the world from injustice. I felt that while the outside world viewed these men as a threat to global stability, I knew them to be too dim to fix their own pickup trucks. Medicine was beyond them. So was organizing an elementary school.
I felt that I knew the details of their gimcrackery well enough to show how the operation worked. They fawned over their sacred spaces. They murdered the people who lived there. Their caliphate was an elaborate real estate scam. Their MO was to blow things up, to stride around in the guise of lawgivers for as long as the illusion held, to summon, via the world’s social networks, all those dim or needy enough to submit to their law, and finally, when local conditions got too hot, to slip out of town in the night. Like all scam artists, their highest purpose was to keep their con rolling.
Though I was as terrified by my captors as I had ever been, I was less taken in. Their power was in their guns and their knives. They did not incarnate a principle in the nature of Syria, as I had supposed during moments of terror, or when I was stood in the desert, in awe, before their mighty columns of pickup trucks. I had bumbled into a colony of brutes. They were to be feared no more—and no less—than other brutes.
During the course of my voyage through the desert with Jebhat al-Nusra, the sheaf of papers on which I had scribbled out my Vermont story sat stuffed in the depths of my cargo pants pockets. I would not have dared to set pen to paper in front of the Jebhat al-Nusra army. Anyway, in the desert, I did not have a pen.
In the villa bedroom, however, I did. Now, as the image of the American journalist on his knees in the desert played before my eyes, my thoughts returned to my story. The men who killed Gypsy, it seemed to me, had done it because they were too lazy and too brutish to understand that their torture could crush the life out of a person. I had been thinking of my departed cell neighbor, the mokhtar of Marat, Sheikh Hussein, when I wrote about Gypsy’s death. I had in mind beatings to which I submitted and Jebhat al-Nusra’s general habit of pushing their torture victims outward, to the very edge of life. The Foley killing, in contrast, had been an expression of state policy. It had been designed to mesmerize the world. For his part, James Foley had been a mere prop. His killer had shaken Foley’s head as if the killer felt that he was shaking a doll’s head. It seemed to me that in drawing the portrait of my evil society, I had yet to reckon with this variety of cold-bloodedness. Yet was it not all around me? I had lived every moment of the previous twenty months within it, it seemed to me, and somehow, in my portrait of my society, I overlooked it. How inadequate to its purpose my tale is, I told myself, and how badly I have underestimated my captors.
I pulled out my pen and paper. I crossed out an earlier chapter. I set about correcting my oversight right away.
* * *
This turned out to be an auspicious time for writing. It was August in southern Syria. An unchanging, drowsy torpor had settled over the landscape. The sky was gray in the mornings, bluish gray in the afternoons, and turned through a range of pastel pinks in the evenings. All day long, a steady breeze rolled down from the Golan Heights. It lifted the lacy curtains in my bedroom window. It ruffled my T-shirt and, when I didn’t think to weight them down, sent the pages of my Vermont story scattering across the floor.
At the time, the war, for Jebhat al-Nusra, was somebody else’s business. It happened that a detachment of Free Syrian Army troops had arrayed its artillery in an olive grove a few kilometers to the east of the Deraa suburb, as Saida, in which Jebhat al-Nusra had settled itself. The Syrian Arab Army had arrayed itself along the Amman-Damascus highway, a few kilometers to our west. Now and then, the Syrian government would send artillery barrages over our heads, into the olive groves. The sound of the artillery whooshing over the roofs of the villas would rouse the commanders from their couches. They would wander to their villa rooftops, then stand around like spectators at an aeronautics show. As the sky filled with missiles, they would point their cell phone cameras at the sun. They would call out to the commanders on neighboring rooftops, wait for the sound of explosions to echo across the landscape, whistle at one another for a little while, and when the excitement had passed, after fifteen minutes or so, would wander downstairs, to the comfort of their sitting rooms.
At the time, the division of Jebhat al-Nusra of which I was a prisoner imagined itself to be a kind of high directorate of the international jihad. The division’s leader, Abu Maria al-Qahtani, famous in Syria for having been an intimate of the al Qaeda in Iraq leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and a lieutenant of the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, wished to build a new al Qaeda from the ground up. Naturally, he would be in charge. In order to accomplish his goals, he required more acolytes, more money, and more military equipment. That August, having too little of all of these things, he resolved to enlist the support of the important terrorist leaders in Jordan and southern Syria. Would they care to join him, he said in speeches he and an assistant recorded on video, in his villa in as Saida for a kind of rolling symposium on the purpose of terrorism in the twenty-first century? When these sheikhs turned up in our villa, vigorous discussion ensued. Was Bashar al-Assad to be ignored or dislodged? What use was the al Qaeda name? Should the men of ISIS be held to account for their crimes or should they be thought of as brother Muslims who’d gone astray? Qahtani was keen to punish the French government for its attempts to suppress the spread of al Qaeda in Mali. Accordingly, there was talk of opening a Jebhat al-Nusra chapter in Paris. But the idea presented difficulties. Qahtani didn’t seem to know anyone in Paris. And should Jebhat al-Nusra allow worries over Mali to diffuse its fighting power? Such were the questions Qahtani addressed in his villa summits. As he spoke, the flat-screen
TV at the head of the room played images from the war the Israeli air force had lately initiated over Gaza. After the speeches, there were ablutions, then a collective prayer.
Nobody was asking my opinion, of course, but al Qaeda’s enterprises of great pitch and moment seemed to me to suffer under the endlessness of Abu Maria’s speeches. Perhaps the torpor of the afternoons also worked to drain the energy from these meetings. Perhaps the rank and file were too aware that the nation of Qatar was about to drop a prodigious cash bomb on this part of Jebhat al-Nusra. Already some of the middle managers had discovered that a flashy white sneaker, evidently not available in the Deir Ezzor suqs, was to be found at an interesting price in the Deraa suqs. Among these men, there were new cases for their cell phones, new perfume, and talk of new pickup trucks. Kitted out in their “noolook,” to borrow a phrase that has worked its way into Arabic, they drowsed during their afternoon meetings. From about three thirty in the afternoon to just before the evening prayers, Abu Maria pontificated about the future of the international jihad. Should the mujahideen move on to Jerusalem? Paris? In the future, when ISIS had been defeated, would it be possible to consider an ISIS fighter who had killed a Muslim a Muslim? Some of the voices in Abu Maria’s divan said yes. Others said no.
Abu Maria wanted me to be present at some of these meetings. Before certain audiences, he wanted me to introduce myself, if the topic should come up, which it never did, as my alter ego, Abu Mustafa al-Irlandi, the martyr-to-be from Dublin. Other audiences seemed aware that I was a journalist, and that I was soon to be ransomed away. I suspect that for these colleague terrorists, who happened to be from Jordan and Iraq, my presence in Abu Maria’s divan proved that he was about to be a very rich man.
When I wasn’t trying to follow the gist of Abu Maria’s speeches, I was in my villa bedroom, spreading fictional terror across a fictional countryside. In order to tell the truth about ISIS and Jebhat al-Nusra, I had to confront the inhabitants of my imaginary town in Vermont with a shock to the system. I wanted the feeling of something new, unknowable, and malevolent abroad in the land. The malevolence seeped into people’s minds. It snatched bodies. It attacked places and people the town loved. Though this menace didn’t want to build anything of its own—though it identified itself, in poems it posted in prominent public places, only as “we”—it could not accept the idea of the community’s emotions attaching themselves to something other than itself. In order to bring the reality of everyday existence under such a psychology to life in my story, I did as my captors did: I caused random people to suffer ghastly deaths. When I was done, I allowed a few days to pass, enough time for the dread to work its way into people’s dreams, then my story found something new to destroy. I destroyed that.
In the days following James Foley’s murder, Abu Kenan, the man in charge of tea in my villa, brought ever more specific news about the nature of the deal under which I was to be freed to my bedroom. It was his job to serve tea to Abu Maria’s inner circle. As important phone calls were made and received over tea, the tearoom, it seemed to me, was the place in which news broke. About two days after the Foley killing, Abu Kenan’s news was that I was to be freed in the evening, in Jordan. But which evening? Where in Jordan? He didn’t know. A few days later, the site of my freeing switched to a UN camp on the Israeli-Syria border. The ransom was to be $20 million. The following morning, as Abu Kenan poured tea in my bedroom, he whispered that the ransom had become €11 million. It had, he said, already been delivered.
A day later, Abu Maria appeared in the morning, in the TV divan in which he conducted his meetings. I was sipping tea on a couch. Abu Maria strode into the center of the room in his boots. He did not greet Abu Kenan. He did not greet me. He nodded in my direction. “Get your things,” he announced. “Today, we are sending you to your mother.”
Beyond the villa patio, at the edge of an olive grove, a line of three pickup trucks stood waiting. I climbed into the jump seat in the second truck. As we rolled down as Sadia’s central boulevard, Abu Maria, who drove the pickup at the head of our column, barked orders over his two-way radio. He demanded that the convoy stop in front of a street-side shanty. On the sidewalk in front of the shanty, a rack of football jerseys fluttered in the breeze. A pair of teenagers who had been sitting in plastic chairs next to the football jerseys rose, took a step forward, then stopped themselves. They gaped at Jebhat al-Nusra’s clean, white, late-model pickups. They eyed the guards in the pickup passenger seats. These men were dressed as if for a battle. They wore their bullet belts over their shoulders and strapped around their waists.
A lieutenant disembarked from our truck. He strolled to Abu Maria’s window. The two of them began a discussion. A part of me thought it possible that Abu Maria was instructing the lieutenant in how exactly my execution was to be carried out. A plot twist of that nature would have been in line with what I knew of Abu Maria’s character. He liked to keep people guessing. He loved surprises. It turned out that the purpose of our stop was to provision me with a new tracksuit. As the lieutenant handed me my new clothing, he smiled. He uttered a formal, polite phrase. They wouldn’t be speaking to me this way if they meant to shoot me, I thought. They would only be giving me new clothes if they felt that I would soon be appearing, alive and well, on the news. Abu Maria had often hinted to me that, should I be released, he would appreciate it if I spoke well of Jebhat al-Nusra. Apparently, for my first appearance before the TV cameras, he also wanted me to look well.
As our line of pickup trucks rolled south, a guard with whom I had become friendly during the preceding weeks removed his cell phone from a pocket. Raising it to eye level and pointing the camera lens at me, he began an interview. “You are going home,” he said, grinning. “What do you think?” I grinned back at him. He wanted me to say good-bye to the villagers of Asheyl. Over the preceding ten months, it seemed to me, I had come to know every last one of them. I salaamed a dozen abus. The guard, Muthana, prompted me to make comical remarks about a ten-year-old child, a certain Abu Jasem, the son of one of the commanders, who had often pointed his child-sized Kalashnikov at my head. When I used the villa bathroom, Abu Jasem liked to bang the butt of his Kalashnikov against the toilet door. “Hurry, you donkey!” he would call out. He had been a brat, it seemed to me, but he wasn’t evil. I wanted him to laugh if he should watch Muthana’s video. I wanted to leave all the Asheylis with good memories, and so as Abu Muthana fed me the names of the important villagers, I smiled into the camera. I made warm, funny remarks, as if they were my uncles, as if I were setting out for a distant land, as if my parting, for all of us, were a sweet sorrow.
Looking back now, I don’t think my good-bye video was altogether a lie. I was aware that I was leaving their dream. During the previous weeks, it had not been an unpleasant place. The war had been close enough to supply occasional thrills but distant enough to be no business of ours. As the rockets sailed overhead, there had been ample food, sun-filled divans, and much talk about the brave, enchanting jihad to come. As the terrorists dreamed their dream, in my bedroom, eyeing my growing stack of manuscript pages, I dreamed mine.
It took us much of the morning and some of the afternoon to drive the thirty-odd kilometers from as Saida to the Israeli border. We followed a labyrinth of goat tracks. We crossed the blacktop roads now and then but never drove on them. During the late morning, a line of observation towers on the Jordanian side of the border appeared in the windows on the left-hand side of our truck. Shortly before the midafternoon prayer, the trucks rolled through a string of farming villages in the Syrian Golan. Walls made of disorderly piles of limestone blocks lined the roadways. Here and there, purple wildflowers poked from the clefts in the rocks, as in the Yorkshire highlands. In one of the villages, a cluster of shade-tree mechanics worried over a motorcycle that had expired by the side of the road. A few meters farther on, an elderly woman picked her way through the grass at the side of the road. The hem of her abaya trailed in the mud. She lowered her face as we
passed.
Muthana was still playing with his mobile phone. He watched a moment of my video, then smiled at me. Whenever I liked, he said gently, I could come back. My return would be conditioned on a conversion to Islam. If I were to convert, Muthana said, I would be welcomed with open arms, as a brother. I could work for the jihad as a journalist.
I didn’t like the idea of working for the jihad, but in those moments, a part of me regretted leaving my terrorist friends. I had learned so much about the jihad, Islam, life, and death in their company. Had I stayed, I might have learned so much more. I would certainly have gone deeper into my writing. Another part of me felt that during the previous two years, I had become a victim of the war in Syria, that my true kin were the shade-tree mechanics and the old woman hobbling by the roadway, and that if I were to rush away to America, I would be breaking faith with them. I didn’t want to think about the suffering that lay in store for them. Would it not be right to stick it out with the victims of the war, come what may?
Toward sundown that evening, after Abu Maria had delivered me into the care of a garrison of UN troops at a camp on the Syria-Israel border, the UN troops brought me to a gate, on the western side of their camp, that opened into the Israeli Golan. On the other side of this gate, a pair of SUVs, dispatched from the US embassy in Tel Aviv, waited for me.
The sight of American officials in golf shirts brought me up short. Right away, it was obvious to me that they were Americans. But that they should be here, in leisure wear, in the midst of a war zone, when Jebhat al-Nusra was everywhere around us, didn’t seem altogether plausible. Was I dreaming? I wanted to touch the officials. Only when I felt the solidity of their flesh in my hands, I thought, would I know that they would not dissolve, as mirages do, when I stepped toward them.
