Saleh, the aide to Nusra leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, was dismayed by the jihadi infighting and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s inability to stop it. “I tell you, if Sheikh Osama was still alive, the problems in Syria wouldn’t have happened,” Saleh said. “Sheikh Osama had a presence, his word was final. It was not like the word of Ayman al-Zawahiri.” Jolani’s new recruitment drive and his focus on “quantity not quality, the opposite of what we used to do,” also disturbed Saleh. It was diluting the ideological rigor of the group. After Abu Khalid al-Suri’s assassination, Nusra leader Jolani hid in Damascus. Saleh didn’t follow him there. Instead, he went home to the east. “The number-one war in Syria is ideological,” he said, “and Daesh is strongest ideologically. I’m not talking about whether their ideology is right or wrong, but they’re convinced of it. Killing Daesh isn’t easy.” He recalled a meeting he’d attended between a Nusra emir and an ISIS emir in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor. The three Syrians were all friends and had known each other for years. The ISIS emir turned to his friend in Nusra: “If it comes to it,” he told him, “I will kill you, and then I will cry for you.”
ON JUNE 10, 2014, ISIS seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and barreled south toward a Baghdad it would not reach. On June 29, the first day of Ramadan, the group proclaimed a caliphate across the vast swaths of contiguous territory it controlled in Syria and Iraq. It changed its name to Islamic State (IS) and declared its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph, saying it was incumbent upon all Muslims to pledge allegiance to him. Raqqa City was the de facto seat of this so-called caliphate, although it was never formally announced as such. The city had played that role before. In the eighth century, the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid moved his residence from Baghdad, then the cultural capital of the Islamic world, to Raqqa. The caliph’s reign was a time of learning and culture, of scientific and mathematic innovation, and irreverent court poetry about wine and forbidden love. The Abbasid Caliphate founded the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, a multicultural, multireligious intellectual powerhouse that, among other things, translated classic Greek texts and transmitted them back to a Europe emerging from the Dark Ages. Islamic State’s idea of a caliphate was very different.
SULEIMAN
Suleiman had left Damascus Central Prison in Adra, with its clean, well-lit corridors, stalls, and regular access to bathrooms. He was back in the darkness of a mukhabarat cell. He’d been in so many cells since September 9, 2013—the day he thought he was free. He’d left Adra that morning in a windowless “meat-fridge truck” like the one that had brought him there, headed to Damascus’s Counterterrorism Court to finally see a judge. He stood handcuffed in his black-and-white-striped prison uniform as the investigating magistrate read out his indictments—membership in a terrorist organization, promoting terrorist acts and financing them, and spreading fitna (discord) among Syrians. The financing charge alone carried between fifteen and twenty years of hard labor. It was the first time Suleiman learned of the charges against him.
Suleiman’s father had hired his son a lawyer, a suited man who didn’t utter a word during the short proceedings and wasn’t allowed to confer with his client. The magistrate’s questions to Suleiman were clear and simple: What are your ties to the tansiqiya in Rastan? What is your relationship to Abdel-Razzak Tlass? How many demonstrations did you participate in? Suleiman denied everything—he hadn’t protested, didn’t know his relative, the defector Abdel-Razzak Tlass, and wasn’t part of any tansiqiya. On the advice of inmates in Adra, he repudiated his earlier testimony. He fingerprinted the notary’s record of his answers and was ordered out of the court. It was over within minutes.
“What does it mean, sidi?” Suleiman asked as he was dragged away. “What happens now?” The charges, he was told, were dropped. “Based on Air Force Intelligence investigation number 1626 . . . . and the accused’s questioning on September 9, 2013 by the Counterterrorism Court’s second investigating magistrate, the accused will be released,” the court’s paperwork read. “He is not wanted by any other branch.” Suleiman didn’t know that his father had bought the verdict for 500,000 Syrian pounds, about $4,000 at the time, and that the lawyer’s job was to bribe the judge.
Suleiman returned to Adra physically weightless, mentally unshackled. His cousin Samer Tlass had already been transferred, but nobody knew where. Suleiman signed his release form in the prison’s administration office and counted down the minutes until the next morning, when he was delivered to the Criminal Security Branch in Bab Musalla, Damascus.
The officer behind that desk told Suleiman he was not free. The judge had only dropped the charges filed by Air Force Intelligence, and despite what the court papers said, Suleiman was still wanted by other mukhabarat agencies, as well as the army for absconding from his compulsory military service. Since he’d graduated in 2007, he’d been paying a fee, essentially a bribe, to be exempted from wearing a uniform, but he stopped forking out the money in the revolution. The same military that killed his friends, the system that jailed and tortured him, expected him to fight for it. How short the distance between hope and hopelessness, Suleiman thought. He’d walked into the office thinking he was a free man. Now he was about to reenter the purgatory of the mukhabarat. He was alone with the officer. He dug his hand into his pocket and fished out all of his money, 50,000 Syrian pounds.
“Sidi,” he whispered, “I have 50,000. If there’s a possibility. . . .”
“Shut up or I’ll add bribery to your file!”
Handcuffed. Back in a van, sandwiched between men in uniform. Overnighted at the Political Security branch in Al-Fayha, Damascus, then transferred to the Political Security branch in Homs. Back to the interrogations, to blindfolds, to handcuffs. The same questions, but not the beatings he braced for, just the threat of them. He’d already confessed at the Air Force Intelligence branches, he told his interrogator. “Here, everything is different,” came the reply. “You have to make new confessions.”
So, he was surprised when, on September 17, he was handed back his 50,000 Syrian pounds, his watch, and other personal belongings in a large brown envelope and released from Political Security’s custody. He walked out of the branch unaccompanied, stood in the street, and allowed himself to hope, despite the wounds of experience, that this was real. He was in Homs, not far from where his parents were staying. What was the quickest route there? He imagined knocking on their door, pictured his father’s face, his mother’s reaction. He hadn’t yet moved when handcuffs snapped tightly across his wrists. “Sir, why are you doing this?” He was screaming now. “Can I ask you where are you taking me, sir?” The mukhabarat officer didn’t say a word. He just bundled Suleiman into an unmarked car that had pulled up to the curb.
Suleiman wasn’t blindfolded, so when the vehicle turned into a street behind the train station, he knew that he was headed to Military Security Branch 261. That’s it, I’m done, he thought. Does anyone ever enter prison in Syria and get out of it? He remembered walking into the hangar in the Air Force Intelligence branch in Mezzeh and seeing former cellmates he thought had been released. He was one of them now, a body cycled in perpetuity through a labyrinth of suffering. Once inside 261, he was stripped of his money, his watch, his belongings, his humanity, and then tossed into the filth of another black hole.
He was once again a shadow, his eyes adjusting to the other phantoms in the dark. He counted the days, marked them off on a wall with a piece of broken zipper his fingers found. After a month and a half, he begged a jailer to know why he’d been forgotten. When would they question him? The next evening, in the hours between midnight and dawn, Suleiman was summoned. He stood blindfolded in a room heavy with silence. Minutes passed, then the music of Naem al-Sheikh began to play, a Syrian singer ironically from Rastan. One song ended and another began. Suleiman felt others in the room. “Okay,” somebody said after a while, “give me what you have. What are you going to tell us before going to Heaven?”
The inmates warned each other about t
he worst interrogators, the most wretched rooms. The upstairs room at the end of the hallway was a hell ruled by Abu Khatem, “the Father of the Ring,” as he was nicknamed by the inmates, because his jewelry cut cheeks and broke teeth. Was Suleiman in the room at the end of the corridor? How long was the corridor? He had asked to be questioned, he reminded himself, thinking an interrogation might free him sooner. “I’ll say whatever you want me to say,” Suleiman said. “I confessed at the Air Force Intelligence and the Political Security. . . .” He was interrupted.
“No, no no. Here it’s different. We are different here. Anyhow, your case is going to take a long time, we need a long session with you.” The voice spoke to another in the room: “I want you to turn this guy into art. I want to see colors on his skin.”
So many blunt instruments hurting him that he couldn’t tell if one was a ring. When it was over, Suleiman was dragged back to the cell, only to be hauled to another interrogation hours later. A different voice. This one directed Suleiman toward a chair, told him to sit and take a rest, because he looked like a decent, educated young man. Suleiman was asked the same questions, gave the same answers. “If you don’t tell me everything, I’ll hang you from the corridor by your wrists, like the others,” the interrogator said. “I’ll say whatever you want me to say,” Suleiman replied. The thick plastic cables lacerated his red-raw skin. This interrogator had phone records, as well as transcripts. He asked Suleiman about his Facebook account and other things that Air Force Intelligence and Political Security hadn’t bothered with. Despite his pain, Suleiman was impressed by the man’s thoroughness. Forced to sign a confession he wasn’t allowed to read, he then was returned to the cell. Months passed. Wounds healed. Suleiman remembered how to fall asleep to the cries of men being savaged in other rooms. He remembered to try to position himself near the cell door, where, if he could just get his cheek to the floor, he could breathe air seeping in from the corridor that didn’t smell of sweat and excrement and blood.
In December 2013, Suleiman was transferred from Military Intelligence Branch 261 in Homs to the worst place he had ever been—235 in Damascus, the notorious Palestine Branch, alma mater of the Nusra emir Mohammad and his old cellmate Abu Othman and other Islamists. Its very name evoked fear. Suleiman was in one of its larger cells, four meters by seven meters, crammed with men. He counted 131. In there, he stopped being Suleiman Tlass Farzat, at least to his tormentors. He was Number 28 in a tomb for the living dead.
A squat toilet in a corner overflowed. Lice and other insects, felt but not seen in the dark, made their homes in ears and hair and beards and wounds. Body heat, suffocating even in winter, weighted the air. Squalor. Sickness. By the end of the first month, the prisoners were naked, their clothes used to clean themselves. Time slowed. Only corpses left the cell.
After two months, the interrogations began. Number 28 was called one day, along with two other men whose names were Ayad and Omar. There were no questions. The three were ordered to lie on the floor. Thick PVC pipes were produced. The pipes were green, akhdar in Arabic. Both prisoners and security agents nicknamed the weapon “al-akhdar al-Brahimi,” after Lakhdar al-Brahimi, who was the United Nations and Arab League special envoy to Syria. Al-akhdar did the talking—its blows so ferocious Suleiman was sure he had broken bones. Ayad lost his life that night, Omar his mind. He started hallucinating, talking to his wife and mother. Later, much later, when Omar could walk again, he spent his days searching for his son in the cell, picked fights with other prisoners he accused of hiding his boy. For weeks, Suleiman couldn’t stand. A doctor entered the cell once to ask the prisoners if anyone would donate money to buy medications for the group. Suleiman volunteered. He asked for anti-inflammatory medications, antidiarrhea tablets, antibiotics. He signed a receipt for 20,000 Syrian pounds and was surprised when the doctor kept his word and delivered the goods.
By April 2014, there were sixty men in the cell. Fewer than ten walked out alive. Suleiman focused on memorizing the names of the dead. Remember details, remember dates, remember who and what you are. He thought back to his first diary entries in Adra prison—“Optimism is our fuel!” That’s what he’d written. Now he had to believe it. Despair simply hastened death. He had seen it happen to others.
In early May, he was summoned again, this time alone. The same questions, the same answers, the same means of extracting them. “What did you lack, you people of Rastan?” the interrogator asked him. “Rastan was the second Qardaha. Why did you do this?”
Why? Suleiman thought. Because he was there, because he could be buried there and nobody would know, because thousands had been there before him, because the system was corrupt, a dictatorship ruled by a family business. That’s what he wanted to say. Instead, he parroted something about a foreign conspiracy and being duped by Syrians in exile. He signed and fingerprinted his confession and was returned to the cell.
Days later, he was called to the administration office to sign a release form. He was being transferred back to Damascus Central Prison in Adra—without his 30,000 Syrian pounds. An officer in Palestine Branch waved the money in front of Suleiman’s face and then returned it to his desk drawer.
MAY 12, 2014. Suleiman was back in Adra, in a different space—room 7, wing 8. He borrowed money to buy an exercise book and called his parents as soon as he could. His mother brought him cash that he used to rent a bed. He began unspooling all that he remembered, recording the names of the dead. His first entry:
Tired of the Journey
12-5-2014
They Promised:
Today, ten months since I first entered Adra and after almost two years of imprisonment, I’m back again in Damascus Central Prison. I’m full of hope that I’ll be released soon inshallah, God willing, that I’ll see my family and especially my parents who I miss so much. I fear for them while I’m in prison. . . .
On May 23, the second anniversary of his arrest, Suleiman wrote that he had “no feeling of despair or remorse for anything. My hope for freedom and release is still bigger than the darkness that I’m still living in.” On June 2, he called the woman he had been on a date with on March 15, 2011. It was, he wrote, “an unforgettable call from a dear person,” one that left him feeling the happiest he’d been in more than two years.
A week later, on June 8, 2014, Suleiman was in the Counterterrorism Court in Damascus, in front of a different judge, one who’d also been paid 500,000 Syrian pounds to secure a favorable verdict. The investigating magistrate read out the same charges as those that were earlier dropped by the other judge. Suleiman pointed out that he’d been cleared in a previous court hearing. “If the other judge decided to release you, it doesn’t mean that I will,” the magistrate said. Suleiman again denied the charges, but this time, despite the bribe, he was told that, based on reports provided by Palestine Branch, the case against him would move forward. He faced at least fifteen years in jail. He returned to Adra and called his mother: “Forget me, Mama,” he told her. “I’m done. I won’t get out of here.” In his diary entry that day, he wrote, “The biggest shock came with the total crushing of the hope that has kept me going and alive until this moment. I don’t know what to say. I’m devastated.”
One entry the next day contained a poem:
Tired of the Journey
9-6-2014
Confessions of an Outsider
Toward the shore of the beginning
I’ll gather my things, secure my luggage
And leave
I’ll take the fear and terror with me,
I’ll take the humiliation, torture and oppression of more than two years
And I’ll leave
I have to kill myself and that newborn
The baby of misery, the son of agony
And I’ll leave
I’ll leave, but before that
I’ll give a rose to everyone who mistreated me
I’ll pardon all who hurt me.
On June 16, 2014, just before dinner, Suleiman’s n
ame was one of five called over Adra prison’s loudspeaker. He was included in a presidential amnesty, a general pardon for crimes committed before June 9, 2014, outlined in Legislative Decree No. 22 for 2014. The law was issued less than a week after President Bashar al-Assad was reelected—such as elections were in Syria—to another seven-year term. A month after the decree, a rights organization named the Violations Documentation Center in Syria (VDC) found that no more than a thousand inmates were released as part of the amnesty. Nobody—except the regime—really knew how many men and women were behind bars.
TALAL
The Alawite detainees had been moved again, this time to a ground-level apartment. Their new prison had a little terrace where the children could play, and the women could hang laundry. They had been in so many different places. There was their first jail—a dirty two-room house for 106 people, with one blocked toilet that overflowed. They stayed there for a few weeks before being moved to a clean villa with a large kitchen that had electricity via a generator. The empty chicken farm had been the worst, at least to Jawa, Talal’s youngest daughter, the eight-year-old. It crawled with bugs that scared her.
The doctor from the rebel field clinic in Salma, Rami Habib, and his nurses regularly checked on the women and children, supplying them with fresh vegetables, meat, rice, clothes, female sanitary products, and medical attention as required. The Alawite women were given utensils to cook for themselves and the children.
Their days melted into weeks and months in captivity, until May 7, 2014. The detainees were told that about half of them would be released as part of a broader prisoner exchange tied to a Homs ceasefire deal. There was a catch—detainees from the same family could not all be released. Somebody had to stay behind, the captors said, to pressure the family members in regime-held territories to force Assad to negotiate their release. The more families represented the better. Hanin and Jawa argued over which sister should stay, each wanted the other to leave. They didn’t have much time to decide.
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