Magazine
My Captivity
Theo Padnos, American Journalist, on Being Kidnapped, Tortured and Released in Syria
In the early morning hours of July 3, one of the two top commanders of Al Qaeda in Syria
summoned me from my jail cell. For nearly two years, he had kept me
locked in a series of prisons. That night, I was driven from a converted
schoolroom outside the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, where I was being
held, to an intersection of desert paths five minutes away. When I
arrived, the commander got out of his Land Cruiser. Standing in the
darkness amid a circle of men draped in Kalashnikovs, he smiled. “Do you
know who I am?” he asked.
“Certainly,”
I said. I knew him because he visited me in my cell once, about eight
months earlier, and lectured me about the West’s crimes against Islam.
Mostly, however, I knew him by reputation. As a high commander of the
Nusra Front, the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda, he controlled the group’s
cash and determined which buildings were blown up and which checkpoints
attacked. He also decided which prisoners were executed and which were
released.
He
wanted to make sure I knew his name. I did, and I repeated it for him:
Abu Mariya al-Qahtani. “You are our Man of Learning,” I added, using the
term — sheikhna — that his soldiers used to refer to him.
“Good,” he said. “You know that ISIS has us surrounded?”
I did not know this.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Not to worry. They won’t get me. They won’t get you. Everywhere I go, you go. Understand?” I nodded.
We
drove to a residential compound next to an oil field near the
Euphrates. For the rest of the night, I watched as some 200 foot
soldiers and 25 or so religious authorities and hangers-on from the
Afghan jihad prepared for their journey.
There
were bags of Syrian pounds to stuff into the cabs of Toyota Hiluxes,
boxes of stolen M.R.E.s to load onto the truck beds and suitcases and
water coolers to fit in beside them. And there was the weaponry:
mortars, rockets, machine guns, feed bags filled with grenades and
bullets, stacks of suicide belts.
By
4 in the morning, the packing was done. At dawn, the commander drove to
the head of the column of Hiluxes and fired his handgun into the air.
Within seconds we were gone, flying over the sand. There are roads in
this part of Syria. We didn’t use them.
I was now 20 months
into my life as a prisoner of the Nusra Front: the abrupt departures,
the suicide belts, the mercurial behavior of the Man of Learning, the
desert convoys, the way I might be shot or spared at any moment — this
was my world. I was almost used to it.
In
October 2012, however, when I was first kidnapped, I used to sit in my
cell — a former consulting room in the Children’s Hospital in Aleppo —
in a state of unremitting terror. In those first days, my captors
laughed as they beat me. Sometimes they pushed me to the floor, seized
hold of a pant leg or the scruff of my jacket and dragged me down the
hospital corridor. If someone seemed to take an interest in the scene, I
would scream: “Sa’adni!” (“Help me!”) The onlookers would
smirk. Sometimes they called out a mocking reply in English: “Ooo, helb
me! Ooo, my God, helb me!”
Because
there was no bathroom in my cell, I had to knock on the heavy wooden
door when I needed the toilet. Often, the guards wouldn’t come for
hours. When they did, they would bang on the door themselves. “Shut up,
you animal!” they would say.
The
cruelty of my captors frightened me, but my bitterest moments in those
early weeks came when I thought about who was most responsible for my
kidnapping: me.
I
believed I knew my way around the Arab world. In 2004, when the United
States was mired in the war in Iraq, I decided to embark on a private
experiment. I moved from Vermont to Sana, the Yemeni capital, to study
Arabic and Islam. I was good with languages — I had a Ph.D. in
comparative literature — and I was eager to understand a world where the
West often seemed to lose its way. I began my studies in a neighborhood
mosque, then enrolled in a religious school popular among those who
dream of a “back to the days of the prophet” version of Islam. Later, I
moved to Syria to study at a religious academy in Damascus. I began to
write a book about my time in Yemen — about the mosques and the reading
circles that formed after prayer and the dangerous religious feeling
that sometimes grew around them.
At
the beginning of the Syrian civil war, I wrote a few articles from
Damascus, then returned to Vermont in the summer of 2012. Just as the
Islamists were beginning to assert their authority in Syria, I began
pitching articles to editors in London and New York about the religious
issues underlying the conflict. By now, I could recite many important
Quranic verses from memory, and I was fluent enough in Arabic to pass
for a native. But these qualifications mattered little. The editors
didn’t know me; few bothered to reply. Perhaps, I thought, if I wrote
from Syria itself, or from a Turkish town on the border, I’d have better
luck. On Oct. 2, 2012, I arrived in Antakya, Turkey, where I rented a
modest room that I shared with a young Tunisian. I tried pitching the
editors again. Still nothing. I began to despair of publishing anything
and cast about for something else to do. Should I try teaching French? I
wondered. Coaching tennis?
I
spent my afternoons in Antakya walking up a mountain on the outskirts
of the city and looking across into Syria. By this time, despite its
aggressive bombing campaign against the opposition and the civilian
population, President Bashar al-Assad’s military government was losing
ground. The international community condemned Assad for his actions
against civilians, but none that joined in the censure, including the
United States, intervened militarily. On TV, Islamic preachers railed
against the Syrian government: Those who helped it would have their
flesh cut into bits, then fed to the dogs. The government, for its part,
warned that in areas of the country under opposition control, fanatical
Islamists, possibly in the pay of the Israelis, were sneaking in from
Iraq and Libya. The main opposition group, the Free Syrian Army, founded
by former Assad generals and considered moderate by many in the West,
had taken over the two most important border crossings north of Aleppo.
One
day as I walked up the hill outside Antakya, an idea for an essay came
to me. Anyone who has lived in Syria knows how bitter the divides are
between the pious and the secular, the Assad loyalists and the
dissidents, the well connected and those who struggle to get by. It
would be impossible to plot these divisions on a map, because they often
run through families, even individuals. Nevertheless, by the autumn of
2012, a traveler might have oriented himself by them: Most who lived
east of the mountain chain that runs from the city of Homs toward the
Turkish border were Sunni opponents of the government; most who lived in
the mountains or to the west were Alawite supporters of Assad.
As
I walked, I envisioned myself traveling along these fault lines. I
would stop into villages and interview people, telling the story of a
nation with many identities, dissatisfied with them all, in trouble,
wanting help. In the background would be a narrator in a similar
situation.
My
experience in Arab countries ought to have given me pause. After I
published my Yemen book, I changed my name from Theo Padnos to Peter
Theo Curtis, worried that the book might make reporting from the Middle
East difficult. I knew how Westerners were often viewed. But I had done
all my studying under the eye of military governments, in places where
the secret police listened to every word uttered in every mosque. I had
never set foot in a region where only a militant Islam held sway. Things
are different in such places. Almost immediately, I fell into a trap.
One
afternoon in Antakya, I met three young Syrians. They seemed a bit
shifty, but not, as far as I could tell, more militantly Islamic than
anyone else. “Our job is to bring stuff from here to the Free Syrian
Army,” they told me. They offered to take me with them. Thinking I’d be
back in a few days, I told no one, not even my Tunisian roommate, where I
was going.
It seemed to me that I had been walking calmly through an olive grove with Syrian friends, that a rent in the earth had opened, that I had fallen into the darkness and woken in a netherworld, the kind found in myths or nightmares.
We
slipped through a barbed-wire fence in the middle of an olive grove. I
looked back toward Turkey. So far, so good. My Syrian friends led me to
an abandoned house that I could use as a kind of field office. The next
morning, I helped the young men straighten up the place, cleaning the
floors and arranging pillows in an orderly row on a rubber mattress.
They sat me down in front of a video camera and asked me to interview
one of them, Abu Osama. When we were done, the cameraman smiled, walked
across the room and kicked me in the face. His friends held me down. Abu
Osama stomped on my chest, then called out for handcuffs. Someone else
bound my feet. The cameraman aimed a pistol at my head.
“We’re
from Al Tanzeem Al Qaeda,” Abu Osama said, grinning. “You didn’t know?”
He told me I would be killed within the week if my family didn’t
provide the cash equivalent of a quarter kilogram of gold — which the
kidnappers thought was about $400,000 but was actually closer to $10,000
— the sum to which he was entitled, he said, by the laws of Islam.
Despite
the video and the ransom demands, these kidnappers were amateurs. That
night, I slipped out of the handcuffs that attached me to one of the
sleeping men. In the soft sunlight of the Syrian dawn, I sprinted past
walls covered in graffiti, through a cemetery and over a median strip,
then stopped a passing minibus. “Take me to the Free Syrian Army right
away,” I said. “This is an emergency.”
When
I arrived at the F.S.A. headquarters, I appealed to the officers in the
most desperate terms. They argued a bit among themselves, then took me
to an Islamic court, where a judge questioned me and remanded me to a
cell that had been converted from a Turkish toilet. There were prisoners
in the cells on either side of me. I poked my head through a food
hatch. A 10-year-old boy did the same. “What did you do?” I said. He
withdrew, and a middle-aged man, his father, I presumed, poked his head
out. “What did you do?” I repeated.
A helpless grin appeared on his face. “We’re Shia,” he said.
“I see,” I said.
Ten
minutes later, the F.S.A. officers returned, accompanied by my
kidnappers, and I was trundled into a car and taken to an F.S.A. safe
house. There I was placed in a hole in the ground. Was I six feet below
the surface? Only three? I didn’t know. Officers threw dirt on me,
laughing and shouting insults. Someone jumped down and landed on my
chest. Someone else beat me with the butt of his Kalashnikov. One
officer insisted that I reply to his questions by yelling out, “I am
filth, sir!”
A
few days later, the F.S.A. transferred me to a group of Islamists, and I
had my first lesson in how to distinguish Islamist fighters from the
Free Syrian Army: The fundamentalists think of themselves as the
vanguard of an emergent Islamic state. They torture you more slowly,
with purpose-specific instruments. You never address them as “sir,”
because this reminds everyone of the state’s secular military. When the
Islamists torture you, they prefer to be addressed by a title that
implies religious learning. For the younger fighters, “ya sheikhi!” (“o, my sheikh!”); for the older ones, “emir.”
The F.S.A., it turned out,
had given me to the Nusra Front, or Jebhat al Nusra, which was using
the Children’s Hospital in Aleppo as a headquarters and a prison. During
my first days there, I couldn’t believe that what was happening to me
was actually happening to me. My mind kept replaying the hours just
before and after the young men I met in Turkey attacked me. It seemed to
me that I had been walking calmly through an olive grove with Syrian
friends, that a rent in the earth had opened, that I had fallen into the
darkness and woken in a netherworld, the kind found in myths or
nightmares. I knew there was a kind of logic to this place, and I could
tell that my captors wanted me to learn it. But what exactly they wished
to teach me, and why they couldn’t say it straight out but preferred to
speak through their special language of pain, I couldn’t understand.
When the emirs came to my cell, they often stood in a semicircle over my
mattress, muttered among themselves, dropped a candy wrapper or a used
tissue on the floor, spit and then left without saying a word.
One
afternoon during the first week of my imprisonment, a group of younger
fighters gathered in my cell. I was in handcuffs and lying with my face
to the wall, as an interrogator had instructed. During the beating that
followed, one fighter, apparently disturbed by the violence, asked,
“Have there been orders to do this to the prisoner?” No one answered.
The
leader — I’m not sure who it was, I couldn’t see — carried a heavy
stick and a cattle prod. As I lay there, he hit me across the back of
the head, then strolled around the room reciting prayers. When I heard
his footsteps, I raised my hands to protect my head. In a deadened
voice, he would say, “Bring your hands down.” I would remove my hands.
He would thwack me across the back of the head. Instinctively, my hands
would return to my head. He would shock me with the cattle prod. The
electricity jerked my body about. My hands would end up on my chest. He
would hit me again.
Al Qaeda plays with its prisoners’ sleep because it wants to have a controlling presence in every second of their lives, even in the unconscious seconds — perhaps especially in those.
I’m
not sure how long this beating lasted — perhaps an hour, perhaps only
20 minutes. Toward the end, I heard the leader approach and braced
myself for another blow. It didn’t come. Instead, he knelt close to me
and whispered in my ear: “I hate Americans. All of them. I hate you
all.”
After
this, I lost track of time. I dreamed that the fighters were rolling my
body in a winding sheet and lashing my ankles together with golden
straw. In the days after this dream, I thought, I have seen the winding
sheet, so I must be quite far along in the killing process. But every
time I asked myself if I was alive or dead, the answer came back, You
are most certainly alive. I thought, The custom must be to wrap the
corpses in the winding sheets before they are entirely dead. How
peculiar. I didn’t know.
For
several days, I lingered in this state. A pile of sandbags blocked the
sun from the room’s only window. The electric light worked
intermittently — a few hours here, a few hours there, then darkness.
There were many mornings on which I woke unsure if it was day or night. I
knew there was a point to my treatment, but I struggled to see what it
was. Eventually, the logic became plain: Al Qaeda plays with its
prisoners’ sleep because it wants to have a controlling presence in
every second of their lives, even in the unconscious seconds — perhaps
especially in those.
After a month or so,
I realized that my captors did not mean to kill me, at least not right
away. There was, however, no hint that the nightmare I was living in
would end soon. When they spoke of my emerging from jail, it was as a
crippled old man. When they brought me food — usually olives and a sweet
sesame paste called halvah on a hospital tray — they threw it
on the floor. “Eat, you swine,” they would say. Then they would slam the
door. They slammed it with such force that after a month the door
handle fell off.
The
chief of the Children’s Hospital jail was a Turkish-speaking Kurd. He
sometimes allowed a group of Turkish jihadis to lounge in the hallway
outside my cell. Their job, as far as I could tell, was to call the dawn
prayer and harass prisoners as the guards escorted them to the
bathroom. Every morning, as I was led in a blindfold and cuffs to the
toilet, they spat at me and slapped me across the head and shoulders.
One
day, one of these Turks took a running start from the end of the
corridor and landed a karate kick against my rib cage. Both of us ended
up on the ground.
“I think they broke my rib,” I complained to a guard. “For no reason. I was blindfolded. This is not O.K.”
He reflected on this for a moment, then shrugged. “Yes, it is,” he said. “It’s fine.”
Something
in this guard’s manner made me think I might be able to negotiate with
him. He was in the habit of hitting me with a piece of PVC pipe every
time he entered my cell. It stung, but it didn’t really injure me. “When
you hear the sound of the key in the lock, you put your face to the
wall,” he would say. I did as he asked. He hit me anyway.
One
day, before he hit me, I made a point of expressing to him just how
completely my face was pressed to the wall. “You’re going to hit me
anyway?” I asked. “What are you doing, sheikh? Why?”
I peeked at him. He grinned. “I want to train your soul,” he said.
O.K.,
I thought. I must make him believe that my soul is receiving its
training. After that, when he entered the cell, I would yell: “Sheikh!
My face is to the wall!” Then I waited, peeked and inquired if he
thought I was learning.
“A little bit, perhaps,” he would reply.
Soon he stopped hitting me. One evening, on delivering my tray of halvah
and olives, he smiled at me. A few days later, after dinner, he brought
me apples (it was late November in Aleppo) and tea. When he left, I
thought, Apples, tea and no beating — progress.
But
this guard was on duty only once every four days. Some of the other
guards insisted on the face-to-the-wall routine. Some did not. None
brought me tea or apples.
During much of the fall
and winter of 2012, I felt I had fallen into the hands of a band of
sadists. “You’re C.I.A. — they’re going to barbecue your skin,” the
guards would whisper. Did this mean death by fire? During an
interrogation session, the Kurd, who liked to be called Sheikh Kawa,
nodded at a prisoner whose wrists were cuffed to a pipe just beneath the
ceiling. His feet bicycled through the air. “You must let me down, for
the sake of God! For the sake of Muhammad and God!” he screamed.
One day, before he hit me, I made a point of expressing to him just how completely my face was pressed to the wall. ‘You’re going to hit me anyway?’ I asked. ‘What are you doing, sheikh? Why?’ I peeked at him. He grinned. ‘I want to train your soul,’ he said.
“This is our music!” Kawa yelled at me. “Do you hear it?”
That
night, Kawa tortured me and told me that if I didn’t confess to being a
C.I.A. operative, he would kill me. I confessed to stop the pain. “If a
single letter of what you’ve told us tonight is untrue,” Kawa said as
he led me away, “we will put a bullet in your head.”
Kawa
tortured me again, but as December turned into January, I began to
think that some higher Qaeda authority wanted me to live. If I lived, I
could say good things — about the Nusra Front and Islam. I was then, and
remain now, more than willing to say good things about Islam.
When
religious authorities or higher-ranking Nusra Front members — anyone
with bodyguards — came by my cell, I sometimes recited verses from the
Quran. These were verses that I loved, and the visitors seemed pleased.
But the net result of these recitations was . . . nothing. Eventually,
one of the more educated guards explained to me that as a Christian and
an American, I was his enemy. Islam compelled him to hate me.
“Does it really?” I asked.
Yes,
he said. America had killed at least one million Muslims in Iraq.
Anyway, the Quran forbade amicable relations: “O you who believe!” this
guard would recite. “Do not take the Jews and the Christians for
friends. They are friends one to another. And whoso among you takes them
for friends is indeed one of them.”
I kept track of time
by marking off the passing days on a calendar I’d scratched into the
prison wall. It was January 2013 when the prison administration began
offering me the opportunity to convert to Islam. Every day, the guards
preached to me and recited the Quran. In Arabic, you don’t convert to
Islam, you “submit” to it. “Ya, Bitar” (“O, Peter”), the
fighters would say, “why haven’t you submitted yet?” For a while, I
thought that if I submitted, my life would improve, but I soon learned
that even conversion would not help me.
In
the third week of January, they put another American in my cell. He was
an aspiring photojournalist from New York named Matthew Schrier. (When
he arrived, I realized my makeshift calendar was 10 days behind.) At
first, Matt refused to learn a word of Arabic, hoping his ignorance
would make the interrogators less likely to think him a spy. Then, in
early March, the commanders placed a third person, a Moroccan jihadi
they suspected of spying, in our cell. The Moroccan spoke passable
English and was a ferocious proselytizer. He soon persuaded Matt to
submit to Islam.
Matt
asked for an English-language Quran. A guard gave it to him. A few days
later, Matt said the magic words — “I testify that there is no god but
God and that Muhammad is his prophet” — in front of witnesses. When word
got around that Matt had converted, the younger fighters would point at
him and say, “You, good!” Then they would point at me and say, “You,
bad!”
But
the conversion did not get Matt better food, and it certainly did not
get him home. Once, one of the more volatile guards slapped him as we
were being taken to the bathroom. “You, bad!” he said to Matt. “You lie
about religion.” The guard nodded at me. “You, you Christian,” he said.
“You, good.”
I
learned, eventually, to deflect the enthusiasm of the proselytizers.
“Allah has created me a Christian,” I would say. “It’s not my fault.”
They offered their counterarguments: “If you were to die as an
unbeliever today, Allah would refuse to admit you into heaven.” Once
each side had its say, we moved on to other things — the war in Syria,
or politics, or their favorite topic, Western girlfriends. These
sessions soon followed a typical pattern: My guards spent the first 10
minutes trying to get me to accept Islam. Then they gave up. Then they
asked if I could introduce them to single women from a Western country.
During the spring and early summer
of 2013, the Nusra Front moved Matt and me through a series of ad hoc
prisons. We were held in a villa on the outskirts of Aleppo, in a
shuttered grocery store, at a shipping warehouse and in the basement of a
Department of Motor Vehicles branch. We had a rough idea of where we
were, because the fighters who administered these jails sometimes
arrested people from the neighborhood and put them in the cells with us.
Toward
the end of July 2013, Matt and I devised a way to crawl out of a small
window in our cell. As we planned our escape, we agreed that Matt would
go first and, once in the open air, would help me wriggle though. On the
morning of July 29, the first part of the operation went off without a
hitch. But the second part did not go as planned. Matt managed to escape
and eventually made it home. I remained behind.
After
this, the Nusra Front was convinced that Matt and I were highly trained
C.I.A. operatives. A highly trained C.I.A. operative in the hands of Al
Qaeda is in deep trouble, the fighters explained. For much of the
ordeal that followed, I was blindfolded; my feet and hands were bound
for all of it. It lasted some 45 days. At the end of it, I found myself
six hours by car from Aleppo, somewhere near the eastern city of Deir
al-Zour.
In
this new prison, I dedicated myself to making friends with the fighters
who guarded me. As summer turned to fall, they began to give me
adequate food, joke with me and take me outside to sit, in handcuffs and
a blindfold, in the desert sun.
This
was a homey prison. It consisted of four cells, each the size of a
narrow toilet stall, each equipped with a padlocked, home-welded steel
door with a food hatch. I couldn’t see the other prisoners. The merest
hint of conversation among us was punished with beatings. Nevertheless,
when the guards were playing with their guns or busy watching cartoons,
we sometimes whispered to one another. At times, I sang. The Nusra Front
believes, as many Muslims do, that Allah made song unlawful for
Muslims. Yet no one thinks this prohibition applies to Christians. So I
sang, sometimes loud enough for the guards to hear. Often it was
“Desperado”; there’s a popular Arabic version. Even the guards, I think,
liked that one.
By
May of this year, after 19 months in prison, I had almost come to terms
with Qaeda reality. I got along adequately with the jail
administration. I had enough food and water. It seemed to me that I
might someday be released or I might someday be shot, but that I had no
power to affect my fate. To keep my mind occupied, I decided to write a
story, set in Vermont, on the pages of a calendar I’d found in a house
where I had been imprisoned. It was about love, home and religious
enthusiasm.
I
didn’t know it at the time, but the Nusra Front was losing its war with
the Islamic State, the group often referred to as ISIS. From
conversations with guards and other prisoners, I gleaned that the two
organizations were about equal in strength and that under no
circumstances would the Islamic State be allowed to touch the oil
fields, the real prize in Syria’s east. But in mid-June, when I was
allowed to watch TV for the first time since my capture, I saw a map
covered in Islamic State logos. Soon, the Nusra Front stopped
construction on a prison it was building next to my cellblock. “Why?” I
asked a guard.
“You’ll see,” he said.
In early June, they took away all of the prisoners except me; I don’t know what happened to them.
June turned to July.
Suddenly I found myself standing at the edge of the desert with the Man
of Learning. He gave me a suit of jihadi clothing, told me to blend in
with his fighters and promised me that once we got to Dara’a, a city
near the eastern edge of the Golan Heights, he would send me back to my
family.
We traveled in the same car. He talked to me about the difficulties of being a mujahid,
or Fighter on the Straight Path of God. One afternoon early in our
voyage, he told me that the world misunderstood him. “It must be
difficult when the whole world wants to kill you,” I said. “Plus all the
problems now with ISIS. And Bashar al-Assad probably wants to kill you,
too.”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s true. But ISIS are the worst. They have made me very sad.”
He
sighed. His mood was resigned. Over the following days, he often tried
to cheer his lieutenants by recounting a funny story or embolden them by
heaping contempt on enemy commanders or imams. With me, he talked about
my future as a reporter: I would become a specialist on Al Qaeda. I
would be the first reporter to tell the world the truth about the jihad
in Syria. “Yes, of course,” I said.
After
our first conversation, he made sure that I was either in the pickup’s
cab with him or in the truck directly behind his. For the next 10 days,
our caravan snaked its way through the dunes. We dodged the patrols of
the Syrian Air Force, skirted the government’s outlying military bases,
sneaked past hostile Druze villages. And then one night, after traveling
several hundred miles, our train of pickups and Kia Rios arrived at a
ridgeline bunker about 20 miles east of Damascus. A detachment of Free
Syrian Army soldiers held the position. They welcomed us, but with no
special warmth.
Within
days, Syria’s air force had detected our presence. It bombed the
bunker. It killed a Nusra Front fighter, destroyed six vehicles and then
— for reasons I have yet to understand — left us in peace.
During
this time, in the early mornings before my guards woke up, I walked on
the ridgeline by myself. I would look for planes and think about what
would happen if I tried to escape. One morning, I ran into four Free
Syrian Army soldiers. How lucky, I thought. If I could get them to
promise not to hurt me, if I could persuade them to place me beyond the
range of the Nusra Front machine guns, I would be free.
Yet
how was I to communicate with the F.S.A.? At the outset of our journey,
the Man of Learning told me that I was never to talk to outsiders. That
morning, I decided to take a risk.
The F.S.A. soldiers were heating up their tea. “Hey!” I said to them. “What’s your news? Peace be upon you.” They returned my salaams. One asked where I was from.
“I’m
sorry,” I said. “I can’t talk to you.” They gave me a cup of tea, and
the five of us drank in silence. Then another soldier repeated the
question.
“From far away,” I replied. “How about you?” They were all from around Damascus.
“Have you come to Syria for the jihad?” someone asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m a civilian, a journalist.”
“How long have you been with Jebhat?” he asked.
“Almost two years,” I said.
The
four fighters stared at me. They mumbled among themselves, and then the
lieutenant in charge told me not to say anything else. He motioned to
me to follow him to a place where we could speak in private. When we
were out of his troops’ hearing, he fixed me with a serious stare.
“You are American?” he asked. Evidently a rumor had reached him.
I nodded.
“During these two years,” he said, “you have been able to speak to your family?”
“Not
a word,” I said. He kept staring into my eyes and narrowing his own, as
if he was reviewing some painful fact or memory. Did he suspect me of
lying? Was he angry at the Nusra Front? I couldn’t tell.
“I
studied Arabic for two years in Damascus,” I said. “I love the Syrian
people.” He nodded. “And no,” I continued, “no talking to my family for a
very long time.” He nodded again, then knit his hands together behind
his back.
“May God open the way for you,” he mumbled and walked away.
I
returned to the F.S.A. troops. One told me that his unit had recently
traveled to Jordan to receive training from American forces in fighting
groups like the Nusra Front.
“Really?” I said. “The Americans? I hope it was good training.”
“Certainly, very,” he replied.
The fighters stared at me. I stared at them.
After a few moments, I asked, “About this business of fighting Jebhat al Nusra?”
“Oh, that,” one said. “We lied to the Americans about that.”
Back at the Nusra Front’s camp,
I spent most of my time lying on a blanket in the sand, surrounded by
five fighters. We snacked on M.R.E. junk food, tossed our candy wrappers
into the wind and waited for the Man of Learning to issue orders. The
fighters hardly paid attention to me. They had been away from home for a
week, an eternity for young Syrians, and were anxious to find out what
was happening back in Deir al-Zour. They wandered along the ridgeline,
searching for a cellphone signal. When they got one, we got news: We
learned that the Islamic State assumed control of the city in the days
after we abandoned it, staged a handful of Hilux-and-black-flag victory
parades and confiscated a car belonging to the father of one of the
Nusra Front fighters.
One
evening, a foot soldier named Abu Farouk came by our blanket with a
watermelon. The Islamic State, he said, had instituted a new law
throughout Deir al-Zour province: Upon entering a mosque, all males over
13 were to repent. Good Muslims, the group decreed, should have battled
the Nusra Front while it ruled the province. If the males of the
province repented, they might carry on as before. But if they refused or
if the Islamic State deemed their repentance insincere, they could be
killed. Nusra Front fighters were to be shot on sight.
I
was curious about the futures of the five people now responsible for
looking after me. What if they retired from military life, I asked, went
home and promised to obey the Islamic State in the future? Would the
group still wish to kill them?
“Of course,” they said.
“Really?” I asked. “But why?”
“Because we are Jebhat al Nusra,” they replied.
I
knew the answer to the next question but asked it anyway. “Your
practice of Islam is exactly the same as ISIS — you admire the same
scholars and interpret the Quran just as they do?”
“Yes,” they agreed. “All of this is true.”
“And it’s true,” I said, “that when you joined Al Qaeda, in the early goings of the revolution, ISIS did not exist?”
“Yes, this is so,” the fighters agreed.
“And now they’re hoping to kill you?” I asked.
They shrugged their shoulders. “Yes.”
“But
the situation is absurd,” I said. “You’re like a guy on the street
drinking a bottle of Pepsi. Along comes the Seven-Up salesman. ‘Wicked
man!’ says the Seven-Up salesman. ‘How dare you drink Pepsi? You must
die.’ Under the circumstances, it ought to be O.K. for you to reply:
‘I’m quite sorry, sir. But when I went into the store, there was only
one brand of soft drink available. Pepsi. That’s what I bought. Where’s
the problem?’ ” The foot soldiers, all in their 20s and early 30s, were
regular cola drinkers and were happy I had put the matter in everyday
commercial terms. Everyone laughed.
The
real issue between the Nusra Front and the Islamic State was that their
commanders, former friends from Iraq, were unable to agree on how to
share the revenue from the oil fields in eastern Syria that the Nusra
Front had conquered. On the one hand, I was pleased by this. It made the
men despise each other. Had their armies reconciled, I would have
become the prisoner of a reunited fundamentalist organization under the
command of the stronger of the leaders, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the
Islamic State. Even before the recent beheadings, I was unenthusiastic
about this prospect. On the other hand, the violence had taken a heavy
toll. For six months, I watched the number of young fighters responsible
for me dwindle. This one had taken a sniper’s bullet between the eyes.
That one had vanished in a checkpoint suicide bombing. Another had
stumbled into an Islamic State checkpoint and was shot on the spot. On
and on, from week to week, the blood flowed. I knew exactly why these
young men were dying: because the commanders said they must. In
addition, the fighters told me, both sides believe that 50,000 years
ago, Allah decreed that they should die in exactly this way, at exactly
this instant in history.
For
the moment, however, the Islamic State seemed to have the edge in the
recruitment battle. Many of the Nusra Front soldiers told me that over
the previous months, their siblings and cousins had been fighting for
the Islamic State. The pay was better. And the Islamic State, a stronger
army, had won victories across eastern Syria and Iraq. Once, during my
time in Deir al-Zour, the commanders put me in a cell with five
disfavored members of the Nusra Front. These prisoners were accused of
having defected or wishing to defect to the Islamic State. They denied
this, but when the guards were far away, they told me that any Nusra
Front fighter wishing to become an Islamic State fighter had only to
make a few phone calls. He would be required to whisper certain words
about the greatness of Baghdadi. In that instant, the fighter’s history
would be forgiven. The next day, he would meet his new commanding
officer in a mosque or a restaurant. He would be given a new name and a
new cellphone, and his life would begin again.
During
most of the summer, the siren song wasn’t especially loud, but by the
time we reached the outskirts of Damascus, it was becoming stronger. It
was clear, even to the foot soldiers, that our voyage was no “glorious
operation on the path of God.” Its purpose probably wasn’t to retake the
Golan Heights either, though rumors to this effect had circulated
through the caravan. It was nothing less than an abandonment of the oil
fields, the military bases, the prisons and everything else the Nusra
Front had worked to control for some two and a half years. We had made a
dash for our lives.
I knew a lot of the Nusra Front’s operational details. I knew many of the more important fighters. I knew what went on in their jails. What if the Man of Learning were to decide that I knew too much?
That
night as we finished Abu Farouk’s watermelon and were gazing up at the
stars, I listened to the fighters musing about their futures. “Hey, Abu
Petra,” they asked me, “what is Sweden like?” If they were to present
themselves as Syrian dissidents to the authorities, what would happen
next? Was I familiar with the procedures in Sweden for seeking political
asylum? And what about Berlin, supposing they found their way to
Germany? How long would it take for them to learn German?
I
listened to their woolgathering for a while, and then some artillery
rumbled in the distance. A silence settled over the group. As the
fighters around me breathed their first sleep-breaths, I couldn’t help
feeling that soon a commander would look at them and nod in the
direction of incoming fire, and they would toss away their lives as
casually as they tossed their M.R.E. trash into the wind. I worried,
too, about this: What if the Man of Learning were to nod at me? I knew a
lot of the Nusra Front’s operational details. I knew many of the more
important fighters. I knew what went on in their jails. What if the Man
of Learning were to decide that I knew too much? What if someone were to
send him an email informing him that Abu Petra was actually Theo, and
that Theo had studied in Yemeni mosques and written about the
experience, like a secret observer? What would I do then?
In
mid-July, the Nusra Front caravan finally arrived at a villa in Saida, a
suburb of Dara’a. Every day, the Man of Learning told me he would send
me home soon. “It will happen next Tuesday,” he told me. Tuesday came
and went. The fiction I now maintained with the Man of Learning was that
I was a journalist again, that he would explain himself to the West in
an on-camera interview and send me back with the video on a flash drive.
At night, when he returned from his daily travels, I would smile and
say, “When, sheikh, is it going to happen?” He would grin. “Soon, soon,”
he would say.
One
morning in August, when the fighters guarding me were asleep, I took a
bag of trash into a courtyard as I normally did. As I slipped out, a
fighter, his voice thick with sleep, murmured, “When you come back in,
close the door.” I did, and waited for him to lose consciousness. A
half-hour later, having stuffed the Vermont manuscript deep into my
jihadi trousers, I tiptoed out.
By
this point, I knew better than to seek refuge among the “moderates” of
the Free Syrian Army. I asked a passing motorcyclist to take me to a
hospital. At the hospital, a dour-looking man greeted me. “I am a
journalist,” I said. “From Ireland. Please, you must help me. I love the
Syrian people.”
“Don’t
worry,” he said. “I am the F.S.A.” He admitted me to an inner room. “No
one comes in here without my leave,” he said. “You can relax. You are
safe.” I asked if I could contact my family. “Of course,” he said. The
easiest way, he said, was for me to send an email. But the man with the
computer’s password was away. It would take just a few minutes for him
to get to the hospital. Did I need tea? Medical attention?
The
F.S.A. soldier stepped out. Ten minutes later, he returned, beckoning
me with the index finger of his right hand. He seemed to do it in slow
motion, as a jailer might summon an innocent prisoner to his execution.
In
the front hallway of the hospital stood a group of about 15 Nusra Front
fighters, Kalashnikovs dangling from their right hands. No one spoke. A
few seconds passed, and then someone said in a barely audible voice,
“Come, American.”
They
drove me back to the villa. They hit me a bit in the car, and then, on
arriving in the living room where the guards had been dozing an hour
before, they flung me onto the carpet. The Man of Learning sat
cross-legged on a sofa. “Who has handcuffs?” he asked. Someone cuffed my
hands. The Man of Learning grinned. “You are a Nazarene liar and a
sneak, Bitar,” he said. “This afternoon, I will execute you by my own
hand.”
I spent much
of the following weeks locked inside a bedroom in the villa. The Man of
Learning did not allow the guards to seek their revenge; he fired them
and appointed more competent but kinder guards. As I waited for
something to happen, I sat by a window and worked on my Vermont novel.
Every once in a while, I watched Assad’s airplanes bomb our
neighborhood. My mind kept circling back, as it still does, to the
endlessness of the violence in the country.
Earlier,
in March, the Nusra Front commanders in Deir al-Zour put a pair of
Islamic State commanders in the cells on either side of mine. Because
their religious learning was beyond question, the jail administrators
allowed us to speak, provided it was about Islam. During this period, I
occasionally brought up the “You killed my men, I must kill yours” logic
in which the Muslims of the region seemed trapped. My cell neighbors
were well placed to have an opinion. Abu Dhar, on my left, previously of
Al Qaeda in Iraq, subsequently of the Nusra Front, lately of the
Islamic State, had been a weapons trafficker. Abu Amran, on my right,
had the same credentials and bragged of having been responsible for
explosions that killed dozens — perhaps hundreds — of Syrians and
Iraqis.
“But
surely,” I said, “this violence is not good for Islam.” They
temporized. In their view, the fight between Baghdadi and the Man of
Learning amounted to mere childishness. Abu Dhar and Abu Amran were
almost too embarrassed to speak of it. Yet the explosions and sniper
killings that both groups espoused were justifiable — even wise. Assad
was bound to slink away into the undergrowth. The battle against his
forces was just a skirmish in the great global combat to come, in which
the believers would prevail against the unbelievers.
“After we conquer Jerusalem, we will conquer Rome,” Abu Amran told me.
“No one is trying to conquer you,” I said. “Why do you want to conquer everybody?”
The
conquerors had come to Syria in the past, Abu Amran answered. “They are
sure to come again.” He spoke of the oil fields over which the West
slavered, the archaeological treasures and the rise of Islam, which the
world’s governments — all of them unbelievers, especially the Middle
Eastern ones — could not abide.
“If
Obama bombs the believers here, we will bomb you there,” Abu Amran told
me. We have our Tomahawk missiles too, they said, referring to human
beings. Over the last 22 months, I had stopped being surprised when
Nusra Front commanders introduced their 8-year-old sons to me by saying,
“He will be a suicide martyr someday, by the will of God.” The children
participated in the torture sessions. Around the prisons, they wore
large pouches with red wires sticking out of them — apparently suicide
belts — and sang their “destroy the Jews, death to America” anthems in
the hallways. It would be a mistake to assume that only Syrians are
educating their children in this manner. The Nusra Front higher-ups were
inviting Westerners to the jihad in Syria not so much because they
needed more foot soldiers — they didn’t — but because they want to teach
the Westerners to take the struggle into every neighborhood and subway
station back home. They want these Westerners to train their 8-year-olds
to do the same. Over time, they said, the jihadists would carve
mini-Islamic emirates out of the Western countries, as the Islamic State
had done in Syria and Iraq. There, Western Muslims would at last live
with dignity, under a true Quranic dispensation.
During
my discussions with senior Nusra Front fighters, I would force them to
confront the infinity of violence that this dream implied. “O.K.,
perhaps you have a point,” they would say. “Anyway, we only want to
dispense with Bashar. We must build our caliphate here first. Provided
the West doesn’t kill us, we won’t kill you.”
“Will your caliphate have schools?” I would ask. “Hospitals? Roads?”
“Yes,
of course.” But not one of them seemed interested in repairing the mile
after mile of destroyed cityscape encountered during any voyage in
Syria. Not one seemed interested in recruiting teachers and doctors — or
at least the kinds of teachers and doctors whose reading ventured
beyond the Quran. They wanted bigger, more spectacular explosions. They
wanted fleets of Humvees. Humvees don’t need roads.
One day in August,
a guard told me about a picnic he recently had with his family in the
Golan Heights. “The U.N. soldiers,” he said, “were close enough to reach
out and touch.” During the following days, small groups of Nusra Front
fighters, most of whom I recognized from my time in Deir al-Zour,
carried away items from a pile of munitions — artillery shells, sacks of
bullets, launching tubes for rocket-propelled grenades — that had been
left on a concrete slab. In the evenings, I was sometimes invited to
lounge near the weapons with visiting emirs. The United Nations’ role in
the Golan Heights was occasionally discussed in predictable terms: The
U.N. was an instrument by which world powers oppressed the Muslims of
Syria. It was a tool of the Jews. I yawned during these discussions. Why
must they always recite Qaeda company policy at me? I thought.
Not
long after, a half-dozen top-level Nusra Front members arrived for a
meeting. Most had the James Foley execution video on their cellphones.
Did you see it? they asked me, laughing and waving their phones. Did I
want to see it again? They were in a buoyant mood. “Hey, Bitar, you
American!” they called to me. “You see what ISIS does to people? What if
it happens to you? Would you like that?”
A
few days later, on the afternoon of Aug. 24, the Man of Learning made
an unexpected visit. “Get your things,” he told me. “We’re going to send
you to your mama now.” I had long ago said goodbye to my mother in
private nighttime telepathic conversations. I didn’t believe — I didn’t
allow myself to believe — that I would see her again.
In
my bedroom-cell, an attendant who had been kind to me helped me get
ready. I stuffed my Vermont novel into my clothing and got into a Hilux
with several fighters. A few miles from the villa, the Man of Learning
directed my driver to stop. Buy Bitar a new tracksuit and a pair of
shoes, he said. This seemed like a good sign. Would he be buying me new
clothes if he meant to kill me? Later, as the Golan Heights rose up
before the Hilux’s windshield, a fighter named Abu Muthana asked me to
say goodbye to Nusra Front fighters in a video he’d record on his
cellphone. I did so without bitterness. Abu Muthana’s friend Mohammed
had made jokes about his inability to find a wife during the jihad. Abu
Jebel had brought me extra dates during the winter.
We
stopped under a bank of trees near the Syrian town of Quneitra. To my
surprise, two heavy white trucks with the letters “U.N.” marked in black
on their sides stood idling in the shade. “Get out,” the driver said to
me. “Take your things.”
The
Man of Learning asked me to approach the truck he was driving. “Hey
Bitar,” he said. “Don’t say bad things about us in the press.”
“I’ll just say what’s true,” I said.
“Very good,” he said. “That is fine.”
At
the U.N. base in the demilitarized zone between Israel and Syria, an
Indian doctor had me sit on a table. He asked the attendants to leave
the room. He had me remove my trousers. With the gentlest, most silent,
most breathtaking courtesy, he examined my body. That broke my heart. A
representative of the United States government greeted me on the far
side of the Israeli border. In the back seat of an immaculate dark-blue
S.U.V., she put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s O.K. to cry,” she said.
I
later learned that the Qataris helped engineer my release, as they have
for others kidnapped in the region. But in those first moments, it felt
to me that I had escaped from Al Qaeda by an incalculable miracle. I
allowed myself to think, at last, that everything was going to be all
right. Several days later, I received word that the Nusra Front had
attacked the U.N. base where I had been so gently examined.
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