by Sam Farran
I sat with these three guys while they ate, even though I remained half-dazed. I didn’t have much choice, the room being small, with nowhere to go and me in no shape to leave or to move even if I could have. Yet I remained in their circle, close to the pot of beans. I did this as a courtesy but also because I needed to know who these guys were and whether I could trust them.
Once the three of them had finished off the food, they started in with questions. But I waved a hand, pointing at my face, my head. I shook my head a little and croaked out half a word, meaning to tell them I couldn’t talk. Not well enough. Not quite yet.
They understood.
That was a good thing about the people you shared a cell with. Al-Qaeda or not, whether we shared the same creed, the same background, or not, we all faced the same difficulties and tended to unite against our tormentors.
They gave me space to say nothing, which was critical because I needed to learn about them.
The first one to speak sat cross-legged next to me in the semidarkness. He introduced himself as Ahmed. I believe that was actually his name, not just a nom de guerre. I don’t remember his last name. He was something of a normal guy and had been there for about six months, since even before the Houthi takeover. He had been captured by elements of President Hadi’s interim government for counterfeiting personal stamps of government officials—governors, notaries, ministers—and using them to forge government papers. That made him more of a white-collar criminal. He hailed from Sana’a and was perhaps about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, married with two kids. He didn’t linger there as my cell mate for long, maybe only for the first two weeks, before they moved him out of the prison. I never found out whether he was released or taken to a regular jail.
When the first man stopped speaking, the second began. He called himself Omar and was younger, perhaps only nineteen years old. He had leaned his slim body back, legs outstretched on his thin foam sleeping mat, so that his back rested against the concrete wall. That’s how we sat most of the time, back against the proverbial wall, each of us taking up our own space or perhaps using one of the corners to sit at a different angle. The room’s small size meant that we didn’t need to speak up. Even whispering we could hear each other.
Omar was a nice kid from a Houthi family that claimed descent from the Prophet, making him one of that special class of people called Sayed. However, in true rebellious teenage spirit, Omar didn’t like his Houthi roots, so he had started several years earlier researching what he called the “true religion” or “true path”—the at-tariq as-sahh. Through that research, he openly proclaimed that he had come to know and follow al-Qaeda—a bold and dangerous statement to make there, in a prison where we assumed we were being held by Houthis or by parts of the government that sympathized with the Houthis.
Omar told us about how he had left his home in the Houthi “capital” of Saadah and journeyed down to the al-Qaeda stronghold of Abyan, spending two months there being treated very well and receiving honors from the townsfolk and the al-Qaeda leaders, basically being brainwashed, spending money, and eating good food. They had decided to give him a role as a medic, though immediately I found myself wondering why al-Qaeda wouldn’t have used him as propaganda: what a story—a Houthi Sayed son deciding to leave his tribe’s cause and join al-Qaeda! After those first two months of indoctrination, he did a month of paramilitary training—very tough he said: military-style shooting, drilling, working on tactics. At one time later he even diagrammed some of those tactics in the air, explaining with broad hand motions how he had been trained to go after various targets, mostly telling me about regular al-Qaeda methods like coming in and shooting up a place or throwing a bomb, then sending a second wave to get the gathering innocent onlookers or the emergency vehicles.
He did all this and then, after three months, was sent back to his family in Saadah, back to the Houthi center of power. All along he had lied to his family, telling them that he was working in Sana’a. But somehow his father caught wind of Omar’s untruths and began trying to talk sense into the boy. The father proved at least mildly successful. When Omar came back to Sana’a to meet with his al-Qaeda contacts, he was no longer so sure of himself. He didn’t want to disobey his father, but he was still convinced that al-Qaeda was the correct path, so he found himself in a personal struggle.
That struggle hadn’t stopped for him. Even in the cell he remained convinced that al-Qaeda was in the right. He even told me, in the cell, that once I got out, I should research it and know for myself. Unlike Ahmed, who was moved out of the cell pretty quickly, Omar spent about two months in the same cell as me, and he tried on several occasions during those months to convince me. Also, interestingly, one reason Omar not only stayed committed to al-Qaeda but became even more committed to its doctrine was the torture and treatment he received while in jail. Every beating by the NSB or the CTU, which were now working for the Houthis, just reinforced his belief and alienated him further from his father’s righteous admonitions.
Omar had arrived in the CTU prison shortly before me but had spent the previous four months of the Houthi invasion of Sana’a under house arrest, held in the basement of 1st Armor Division and Salafi-aligned Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar’s compound in Hadda, which the Houthis had turned into a makeshift jail after they forced Ali Muhsin out and started to use his huge compound as a headquarters.
Just like Ahmed and Omar, the third of my cell mates had the almost skeletal body type of most Yemeni men—at least of those not rich enough to gorge themselves on bint as-sahin and Western-style food. This third man introduced himself as Haitham, which made me almost chuckle through my bruised delirium, as Haitham is my given name. Everyone just calls me Sam since the th sound is often pronounced as an s in dialect.
Even there, in the prison, people knew me as Mr. Sam. My cell mates only found out my name midway through my incarceration when a guard came looking, confusedly, for “Haitham Farran.”
“Who is Haitham Farran?” he asked. And I had to raise my hand and admit it was my name.
Of these first cell mates, the only last name I remember is Haitham’s: Zaytari.
Haitham had been there the longest and had the most stories, so I kind of befriended him more. He was ever so slightly older than the others, somewhere around twenty-four or twenty-five years of age. So that made me the old man, by far. In fact, out of all the prisoners in the compound, I think I was easily the oldest. They even used to call me that, Old Man, when not calling me Mr. Sam.
Haitham had been there for one and a half, maybe almost two years by the time I joined him in that cell. Like Omar he had signed up to become an al-Qaeda medic. Unlike Omar, he had followed through. He was real al-Qaeda. When he joined, he had already begun training as a medical student in Sana’a. He too then claimed to have found “the right path.” He lived on Hayl Street near the old Sana’a University, a pretty good demonstration of how al-Qaeda recruited from and maintained personnel everywhere, even among those who would be less likely to lead ambushes and more likely to help tend the sick and wounded.
Overall, I think I got lucky, with two al-Qaeda medics.
The hardcore al-Qaeda guys, including one whom the United States had designated a high-value target, occupied the cell next above us—more about them in a while.
Haitham had been captured by the CTU and then put on trial. But he never got a chance to appear in court or defend himself (not that I agreed he should have been afforded such a chance). Instead he received an in absentia judgment rewarding him with eight years in prison for being an al-Qaeda member.
Of course later we all asked him about those two years, trying to understand what might be in store for us. That ended up being one of our most discussed topics. And Haitham always seemed to have a story ready. When he described the conditions before the Houthis took over running the jail, we were surprised to find out it was much worse—horrible solitary confinement of only one person in each cell, never leaving, shitting in the corner
bowl, showering there, eating, sleeping, meditating, having no family contact, no phone calls, not even speaking to anyone or even to themselves. God help whoever broke the rules. The Houthis were forced to put more people in each cell because of all the arrests they were making. But still, I found it a little hard to believe—even in the face of testimony from one who had lived through it and didn’t have much reason to lie—that a base with so much US involvement, and a prison funded with US money, wouldn’t adhere more closely to Western standards.
Maybe that was the goal. Maybe by making a jail in Yemen, we’d sneakily set up a system that wasn’t accountable to US morality. But, if so, it disgusted me. One reason I love America and have fought for it for so long is that we are usually better than that. I certainly didn’t try to defend America—not to that audience—but that fact lodged itself in my mind, much like the debacles of Abu Ghraib or of water boarding at Guantánamo. Somewhere our government had set aside the torch of liberty that we had carried so long and so well. I hoped it was only temporary and that abuses like these, on the margins of what is fair and right and legal, would no longer be supportable for our culture, even if we were only turning a blind eye, rather than actively pushing doctrines and practices antithetical to Lady Liberty. (This also brings to mind a particular irony I noted in the cell I occupied in Yemen: waiting for food to arrive each day, I couldn’t help but read a sticker plastered on the back of the cell door that explained all of our rights as prisoners, in both Arabic and English. How weird to have the Houthis give a nod toward righteousness in that way!)
Poor Haitham—the al-Qaeda medic—hadn’t seen or heard from his family in over two years. Even when he was convicted in absentia, the family wasn’t allowed to speak, raise their voice at his trial, or do anything to defend him, and he wasn’t there to defend himself.
Haitham explained that it had been over a year since he had seen the sun or stepped outside to get some exercise.
And he shared the name that all the prisoners had for that place, that prison: “The Grave.”
CHAPTER 13
INTO A TERRIBLE RHYTHM
FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS I slept, and ate, and slept some more. Always in the background, the threat that they might come and get me for my next session hung like a storm cloud, though one I couldn’t see from within the dim room or from my barely moving fetal position.
I couldn’t get up to walk. My ears still rang, keeping me dizzy, lightheaded, disoriented. For those two days the only time I stood involved my stumbling, staggering walk behind the half wall to the back corner to use the toilet. Each time one of the three men who now existed as my best friends, my only companions, helped me out, lending an arm, coaxing me, encouraging me. I wasn’t bruised, at least not that I could see, because most of the hitting the interrogators had done focused on my head. I couldn’t see my head. And it hadn’t been punching, the sort of treatment that would leave bruises, only those disorienting slaps to the ears, messing with my eardrums and my equilibrium.
My cell mates warned me, during those first two days when I laid there, doing nothing but sleeping and listening, that the time spent anticipating our interrogators’ arrival tended to be the worst, with the rest just boredom on top of boredom. The interrogator’s approach, though, that, they said, always caught a person’s attention, always made the heart race: “When you start hearing the clanking, the unlocking of the doors, that’s when your adrenaline surges, your fingers tense up, the blood comes to the face. Someone is being picked to be taken to interrogation and torture. You know it, and you can’t help it at all. You can’t run away if it is you. If it is someone else, you can’t assist or defend. You’re just stuck.”
A few days later, when the scraping sound of metal against metal emanated from our door once again, unlocking from the outside and letting someone in, all four of us just looked at each other, wondering, Who is going to be taken?
Me.
For the next couple months, every time, the answer stayed the same: me.
They came for me.
▪ ▪ ▪
THREE DAYS HAD PASSED, maybe four, before they came for me again.
I heard those noises.
I heard the footsteps in the hallway, without the creaking wheels of the food cart. I heard the hard-soled shoes clattering. I heard them stop at our door. All four of us heard that. And we heard that ominous groan of metal on metal when the key turned and the door unlocked.
My mind started racing. Right away it turned to my family: What do they know? Are they aware of my situation? Has someone contacted them? Has anyone noticed my disappearance?
I thought of my mother, brother, and sister in the United States.
I thought of my aunts and uncles and cousins and nephews.
I thought of my ex-wives, of my children and grandchildren, of course. What did they know? What could they know?
The NSB interrogators had told me that no one knew anything, that no one was coming for me, that no one cared.
I knew that last part to be untrue. I had a wide circle of friends and family who loved me. My certainty of that could not be so easily shaken. But the interrogator’s suggestions that no one knew and no one could come for me resonated with an element of truth.
As the door unlocked and I lay there on the ground, preparing myself to go back in for another round of questioning, my mind filled with these thoughts. I turned over all the scenarios, all the possibilities that I had already thought through, and reminded myself of the conclusions I had drawn.
For one, reassuringly, I had formed a good habit of talking to my daughter Amira every day. When I didn’t answer for two days in a row, I imagined—no, I knew—that she would start worrying. What she would do with that worry, I wasn’t so sure about. She’d been connected with my friend Assaf in Lebanon, through her own rescue during the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, and she had at least a passing acquaintance with a few of my military and embassy friends. So perhaps she’d call one of them and ask for advice. The quicker she did that, and the quicker she contacted someone official from the US government or even from British American Tobacco, the better. They were the ones who would sound the real alarms and start the diplomatic processes working—what limited diplomatic processes existed between the West and the Houthis—to find me and work on my release.
Likewise for British American Tobacco: they would miss me. How quickly, I couldn’t be sure—though I had scheduled calls with them, both with leadership and with my peers and employees. My missing a certain number of those would start to raise eyebrows and signal that something had gone wrong.
A third avenue existed through two of my female acquaintances from Yemen.
The first was Yasmine. In the first few years of working for me at Universal, she had completed her MBA and risen from clerk to my go-to person and office manager. She brought so much energy and such a high degree of awareness to everything she did that it comes as no surprise that she was the first to realize I had gone missing. In fact, the day after my bagging, she went to the British American Tobacco company villa to see why I hadn’t shown up at the office and quickly realized from the shape of the ransacked villa what had happened. She asked my villa guards what had happened, and they explained it as well, confirming her suspicions. After that she started right away communicating with my family back home and serving as a link for the US government in their pursuit of me.
Likewise, and perhaps even more vigorously, Abeer got involved in a big way too. Abeer and I had been friends since I had been an attaché, back when she first saw me in my uniform and asked for an introduction. Back then it was just a long-term friendship, staying in touch, having coffee now and again, though we grew closer and closer as I divorced Zainab and spent more of my time in Yemen. When I left Yemen after the Houthis took over, leaving Abeer was one of the harder things I did. And coming back to conduct my literal and figurative house cleaning, I also felt some urgency to see her again, to figure things out, to determine whether our rela
tionship was such that she would be willing to leave with me and start a life abroad. While British American Tobacco paid me to come back, my love of Yemen and this new love I was developing for Abeer were really the things that drew me to return. (Abeer and I eventually married, and we live together in Tebnine now.)
These were my bulwarks against the idea that, as the NSB interrogators had said, I was all alone, with no one trying to locate me, no one caring about me, no one giving a shit. I thought about them, imagined them sounding the alarm, and began to quietly fantasize about what rescue might look like: teams of SEALs bursting through the prison doors, secret communications smuggled in on the food cart, that sort of thing.
▪ ▪ ▪
NONE OF THAT HAPPENED though, none of the spy-like rescue scenarios. I thought about them, but that didn’t make them real. The only real thing, the only thing that mattered and caught my attention, was the sound of my prison door clanking open, the sound of the guards coming for me. That interrupted me from what pleasant thoughts I could muster: daydreams and long soliloquys in the quiet of the jail cell, thinking about reuniting with Abeer, thinking about whether Yasmine’s career was still on an upward trajectory, reminiscing about home, my many different iterations of home, not just Dearborn but also Lebanon and even Yemen. Yemen had become part of my concept of home, though in a different day and age and circumstance.
All that dissolved from my mind’s eye as the door to the cell rattled. I lay there, heart racing. All of our hearts raced. Together we began to say a prayer, the opening sura of one of the verses of the Quran, Surat al-Buqara.
Allah does not burden any soul beyond its capacity. To its credit is what it earns, and against it is what it commits. Our Lord, do not condemn us if we forget or make a mistake. Our Lord, do not burden us as You have burdened those before us. Our Lord, do not burden us with more than we have strength to bear; and pardon us, and forgive us, and have mercy on us. You are our Lord and Master, so help us against the disbelieving people.