A Disappearance in Damascus

by Deborah Campbell

  Another of the guards, the youngest of all, refused to beat a thin old man who was obviously ill. Instead he slipped the old man food and allowed him to take showers in the heat of summer. When the warden found out, he beat the guard in front of the old man. From the slit beneath the door of her cell, Ahlam could hear blow follow blow.

  —

  After midnight, Leila talked to the men in the neighbouring cell through the heating pipe along the back wall, asking how their day was or what they’d had for lunch. There were thirty men in a cell the same size as theirs. They had to sleep in shifts, legs to head, the others standing until they changed places.

  It was a mystery what was happening in the far cell on the other side of the men’s. This was known as the “al-Qaeda cell,” for the fifteen or so men who had been arrested as part of a crackdown designed to please the Americans. Ahlam already knew that Syria was cooperating with the US to prove they were coming down on al-Qaeda, though the cooperation went much further than she knew. Among the fifty-four countries involved with a top-secret CIA program that kidnapped and “extraordinarily rendered” terrorist suspects to be tortured abroad after 9/11, Syria, along with Jordan and Egypt, was one of the most common destinations.35

  The prisoners in the al-Qaeda cell had been there for a long time—a year and a half according to the guards, who had strict orders not to go near them. But in all that time, the guards had heard no evidence against them.

  The only time Ahlam saw anyone from the al-Qaeda cell was when those prisoners went on a hunger strike. One of them lost consciousness and a doctor was summoned. She heard him being carried into the corridor outside the cells. She pressed her eye to the small hole by the slat where the welding had chipped away. She could just make out a man who appeared to be in his fifties, and heard him talking weakly to the doctor in the hallway. “I have four children,” the man was saying. “I fled Iraq to give them a secure life. I was targeted down there, I had to flee my house, and now they have arrested me because I have money. Is that a crime?” He began to cry. “Nobody knows where I am, not my children, not my wife, nobody.”

  It reminded Ahlam of what Abu Yusuf had said the last time he spoke to her. “You can stay here for years,” were his final words, “and nobody will know where you are.”

  —

  Before prison, Ahlam had dreamed of having forty-eight hours in a day: time to rest, to eat, to finish the tasks she had set herself. Now time stretched out as it had not done before. Never, with the exception of her kidnapping in Iraq, had she had nothing to do but wait. Her back ached from sleeping on the cement floor. The thin blankets were infested with bed bugs. She pleaded with the guards for medication to help her sleep through the pain but it made her dizzy so she stopped taking it. She tried to remember how to do yoga. Stretching up and over, up and over, breathing from the stomach. The other women laughed, all except Leila, who joined her. Leila practised yoga. She was always active, pacing back and forth for hours, or nervously toying with the stud in her tongue.

  One day a wealthy woman arrived wearing tight capri pants and a low-cut blouse. Brought to the cell, still asking after the gold jewellery that had been confiscated upon her arrest, she demanded to know where to find the air-conditioning unit. Ahlam pointed to the fan high up in the wall, where the faint hints of daylight came through. “That is our air conditioner,” she said.

  The rich, Ahlam deduced, usually landed in jail because they had offended someone in government or refused to pay off a high official. They were allowed special privileges: to walk around the hallways, to smoke as they pleased, to have their own food delivered to their cells. One of the male prisoners, the guards told her, had been caught with $70,000 in cash at Damascus airport. After he arrived, life became better for everyone.

  At night the wealthy prisoner ordered takeout and ate at a table in the corridor with the guards: fried chicken with fries, pizza, good bread with meat or zaatar. He always gave his leftovers to the women. He also bought the women soap, shampoo, sanitary products to replace the strips of old cloth the guards had given them, which they had been forced to wash and reuse. He provided cigarettes for the guards to dispense. The male prisoners never got the leftovers but were given tomatoes and onions to supplement their prison meals and enough cigarettes that they were able to share one among four of them twice a day.

  The old guard, Sadiq, had already given Ahlam a contraband toothbrush, though, ever cautious, he worried that any such item might be used for a suicide. One day, Ahlam saw blood on the clothes and hands of the guards. An elderly doctor who had been held in solitary confinement for three months had slashed his wrists with a shard of glass from his spectacles. As punishment for not preventing the man’s death, the guards were forced to stay in the prison for ten days without leave.

  The wealthy prisoner, when he heard that the women had no change of clothes, bought them three robes in different sizes that they could put on while they hung their laundry to dry from the shelf. Ahlam had not worn new garments since her son died, but she began wearing one of the robes at the urging of the Salafi woman whose husband was imprisoned in Guantánamo. “It’s been two years,” the woman told her kindly. “It is time to stop mourning.”

  Whenever chicken was served from the rich man’s leftovers, a cat and her kitten came to the opening high in the cell, where the fan was, and Ahlam threw them scraps. The fan roared and clattered, keeping everyone awake at night. When the guards gave them a plastic broom to clean the cell, she or Leila began jamming the broomstick into the blades of the fan in order to sleep.

  One night they broke the motor. The next day the fan was removed and taken away for repair. On that day, a small miracle happened.

  Ahlam and Leila were sitting on the floor of the cell as usual when a silver-winged butterfly flew in through the opening where the fan had been. Seeing it, they began shouting, ecstatic to see something of the world outside. They were alive, they were not dead. They were living creatures. The youngest guard, the one who had taken a beating in place of the old man, ran over to see the commotion, sliding open the slat. He laughed to see the two of them up and jumping around, excited as children by the winged visitor.

  “It’s a sign!” he shouted. “It’s a sign!”

  As the summer gave way to fall, they waited for the sign to be fulfilled.

  —

  One night Ahlam dreamed of her son. A group of children wanted him to come outside and play with them. In the yard was a lovely garden with green trees, the children dressed all in white, but she refused to let her son join them. He would be with her always: she would not let him leave.

  Sadiq slid open the slat on her cell and saw the tears on her face. “I have a child,” he said. “I have a girl.” Adding, “We are not the ones who put you in jail.”

  Taking pity on her, he promised to try to find out the charges against her.

  He returned a few days later, holding her prison file. There were several charges against her, he said, and read them out: spying, involvement in human smuggling, and taking money for refugees and giving it to Iraqi militias to buy weapons.

  “You are a good and respectable woman,” Sadiq told her. “I can’t believe this. But someone made this report against you. It is here in the file.” He read out the name.

  Chapter 25

  FAILURE

  I WAS LEAVING, AND all my efforts to help Ahlam had come to nothing.

  I went over to the taxis bound for Jordan, clustered in a dirt lot next to the Damascus bus station. It was exactly a year since I had met Ahlam. Back then I had wondered how, in the randomness of fortune, I’d found the ideal person to take me to the other side.

  I had come here to tell the story of those who lived out the war’s inescapable logic; those who had to pay the price that had been set by those who planned their fates and would never be called to account—who might right now be writing policy prescriptions for a well-funded think tank or delivering a keynote address.36 The article I had writ
ten had received some attention, created a ripple. But in the end it had accomplished nothing because it could not roll back time. Had I expected that? Had I harboured, even in my moments of doubt, a grandiose belief in the power of story to alter destiny? I had wanted to understand how the invasion had started a civil war that was dividing the region. There were many who refused those divisions, but the person I knew who most embodied that dignified refusal had vanished.

  If I could roll back time, if I could rewind the film of Ahlam’s life, editing out the war, she would still be living with her family in their large house on the bank of the Tigris, all of them alive, whole, together, happy or heartbroken in ordinary ways. And here I was, returning to my old life—perhaps in an altered form, perhaps diminished—but her old life had been swallowed long ago.

  The sense of powerlessness was humbling. It is how most of the world lives.

  I slid into a taxi, joined by three Jordanian businessmen in suits, and we pulled out of the parking lot, towards Amman.

  The businessmen, all of whom were in that amorphous profession known as “import-export,” spent part of the four-hour journey talking about Saddam Hussein.

  A great man. Good for Iraq. Sorely missed.

  You would think they were discussing the Dalai Lama.

  “Don’t you agree?” They tried to draw me into their discussion but I refused to share their high opinion of the man. By almost any measure Iraq was worse off now than it had been before, but his brutality was not in doubt.

  On the long flight to New York, I thought about an earlier flight home, shortly after Saddam Hussein’s execution at the end of 2006. An African-American in a bomber jacket emblazoned with the words “Operation Iraqi Freedom” had the seat next to mine. A US Navy man during the first Gulf War, he was heading home to Florida on a break from Baghdad, where he worked for a private contractor as a systems engineer. He was from the Deep South, he told me. He was the only member of his family ever to own a house, and he hadn’t seen his home in months.

  Not only did he surprise me by being a harsh critic of the war, which he saw as a money-making venture for the likes of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld after a kind of mafia-style falling-out with their old friend Saddam, but he said something else that stayed with me.

  I said something often said about the war: “This will end badly.” He fixed me with an unblinking gaze, as if to compel me to remember, and answered: “This. Will. Never. End.”

  —

  I stopped in New York for ten days on the way back to Vancouver. It was a kind of debriefing, and a chance to coordinate with Marianne and Alessandro, who lived a few blocks from a friend’s apartment in Chelsea where I was staying. Walking down streets past art galleries, dog bakeries, and bistros serving twelve-dollar glasses of wine, I overheard anxious chatter about the economy, the stock market, complaints about bosses and bills; everywhere a cash register ringing.

  So this is what normal people do…I had forgotten. I bought an old hardcover copy of The Quiet American from a grey-bearded sidewalk vendor and read it late at night, its pages yellow and musty, its words more real to me than anything I heard on the street. I met with Marianne and Alessandro and other people who knew Ahlam to talk about new avenues, new plans of action.

  When I finally reached Vancouver, home, there was no one there to meet me. My luggage had been lost in transit. I was the last person standing at the baggage carousel, watching it go round and round.

  Chapter 26

  AHLAM’S STORY

  PART FOUR

  IN THE LATTER HALF of October 2008, the key turned in the lock of the cell. The door swung open to reveal the warden. “Get ready,” he said. “You’re going home.”

  Ahlam had nothing to get ready. She said goodbye to the other prisoners in her cell, though the only one she would really miss was Leila, whose transfer the month before to stand trial had been devastating. Leila, though half her age, had become a friend.

  She was led outside to a station wagon, where she saw her brother, already seated in the back. “Don’t be afraid,” Salaam whispered. “We are going home.” His clothing hung loosely on his frame. Like her, his wrists were chained, but the chains were long enough for Salaam to reach his wallet, which had been returned with his money still in it. As the gate opened and the car pulled out to the street, he cupped an American hundred-dollar bill in his hand and slipped it in hers. “We might get separated and you will need this.”

  They were taken to an immigration prison, Salaam to a men’s wing and Ahlam to a cell with two dozen women, most of them Africans. The four Ethiopian girls who had been with her in Douma recognized her immediately. “You are here,” said the girls, so surprised, in their housemaids’ English. “You are here.” They told her they were supposed to be deported but the Ethiopian government refused to pay their airfare. “Maybe you will be luckier than us.”

  The authorities had returned her phones when she left Douma and the first thing Ahlam did was ask to be allowed to make a call. “I want to know about my kids. I’ll pay you anything.” For twenty dollars, a guard let her out of the cell to use the phone. She called through the numbers but nobody was picking up. Finally she reached Ali, her former assistant. He seemed frightened at the sound of her voice. About her children, he said only, “They’ve been smuggled to Iraq.”

  She didn’t believe him. She no longer trusted anything anyone said. Her heart thundered in her chest as she wondered if her children were alive or dead.

  In the immigration prison the prisoners had to pay for their own food, buying it from the guards, so whoever had money provided for the rest. Over the next three days, with Salaam’s money, Ahlam bought chicken, rice, cigarettes, sharing these around. She was convinced she was being sent back to Iraq. Salaam had been immediately deported, to her dismay. She asked a guard why she hadn’t been allowed to leave yet. “The buses were full,” he said. “We’re waiting on your turn.”

  The third day she was moved again, this time to a huge building where she was taken to a basement. Through the darkness she could make out men sitting on the floor, eating, and hear the sound of other men screaming. She was taken into a vast room the size of an aircraft hangar, and left with six other women who huddled together in complete darkness, except for a tiny window at the top of the wall where the yellow light was fading towards night. The woman next to her, from Aleppo, said she was here because her husband was accused of being al-Qaeda. “They have taken me to pressure my husband to surrender.” A girl of about twenty with short black hair ran wildly back and forth, hiding behind her mother at any loud noise. Her mother told Ahlam they had been caught sneaking from Lebanon into Syria. They had no passports, they could probably not even conceive of such documents or how one might obtain them. Poor, uneducated, the daughter mentally ill, they had only wanted to visit the shrine of Sayeda Zainab.

  They told her where she was: Military Intelligence Branch 235, the notorious torture prison otherwise known as Palestine Branch.

  A door opened, and the girl cowered behind her mother. But this time food appeared—one boiled potato and two tomatoes per inmate. The girl gobbled hers down and began shouting, “I want food! I want food!” Ahlam, who could not eat, gave her meal to the girl.

  That night she did not sleep. She sat stock-still in terror, convinced that she would never leave this place. Hours later the door opened. Her name was called.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Interrogation.” That terrifying word.

  She stood with great reluctance and followed the guard who would lead her to her fate.

  “Please sit down,” said the interrogator. A handsome man in his mid-twenties: pale skin, brown hair. “I’m sorry to give you this trouble,” he said. “You are my mother’s age.” He spoke to her calmly in the diction of an educated man. His questions were mainly regarding her husband’s business dealings, which had accumulated unpaid debts. He asked her nothing about the Americans, nothing about Iraq, nothing about the allegations in
her file. He finally sent her back to her cell in the basement, where she sat next to the mother of the simpleton. Through the window at the top of the wall she watched the break of dawn.

  The next day she was transferred back to Douma.

  “What are you doing here?” one of the guards asked in surprise.

  “This is my home,” she told him. “You want to kick me out of my home?” She was overjoyed to be out of the dreaded Palestine Branch.

  She was led back to her old cell. From the outside she pulled open the slat in the door and peeked inside. “What are you doing here?” the women asked, as surprised as the guards.

  “I missed you so much I came back!”

  For the next five days she returned to prison life. On the fifth day the warden came to tell her she was going home. Which could mean anything.

  “Expect me to come back to you,” she said to her cellmates as she took her leave, “so don’t be bad girls.”

  —

  Since leaving Damascus, through September and into October, I had been in touch with many different agencies and NGOs, particularly Reporters Without Borders. I wrote a case study, an overview of Ahlam’s work for media and human rights groups and the circumstances of her arrest that I was sending to anyone who might be able to help. Marianne had contacted the French foreign ministry, thinking the French government might be able to use their influence with the Syrians. Nothing seemed to be working. We began to talk about a public campaign, though we were still uncertain as to whether it would do more harm than good, as the UNHCR had warned.

  In late October, my phone rang in the middle of the night. I groped for it in the dark. When I heard the voice talking on the other end, I came wide awake. “You’re a friend of Ahlam?” the man asked. It was a researcher from Amnesty International, apologizing that he was unfamiliar with my time zone. Ahlam, he said, had been Amnesty’s fixertranslator on four reports in 2007 and 2008. As I sat in the pre-dawn darkness of my new apartment in Vancouver, boxes of unpacked books stacked against the walls, we discussed details around her arrest. He asked me to email him the case study I had written. We talked about the possibility of launching an international media campaign if all else failed.