by Puk Damsgård
‘Don’t sleep!’ came the order.
Daniel straightened up, but found it hard to stay awake, because everything was dark behind the blindfold. For a while, he managed to sit up whenever he heard steps behind him. But he must have keeled over at some point, as he was abruptly awoken by an excruciating pain in his back, as if he had been whipped with a cable.
It wasn’t until he had heard several calls to prayer the next day that someone untied his aching body from the radiator and led him into another room. Once the blindfold was removed, he saw comfortable armchairs and a wooden desk. Behind the table sat a masked man, who turned out to be his interrogator. Daniel was ordered to sit on the floor and answer questions that he had already answered several times.
‘Who are you?’
‘I am Daniel Rye.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘Denmark.’
‘Who drove you here?’
‘Friends,’ answered Daniel.
The voice behind the mask sounded very young; Daniel guessed they had put a twenty-year-old in charge of the interrogation because he could speak some English. The interrogator announced that he didn’t believe Daniel.
‘We know who you are. We know you’re lying,’ he stated, and Daniel was taken back to the radiator in the foyer.
After another night of sitting cross-legged with no water or food, he was taken back to the interrogator.
‘Tell us the truth. We know what it is, but we want you to say it!’ he shouted.
Daniel repeated the same information.
‘I’m only here to portray the civilian suffering caused by the war,’ he said, faintly registering some kind of rummaging going on behind him.
Before he had a chance to realize what was happening, more hands forced him down on to his back and a car tyre was pressed down over his bent legs, so his knees were sticking up through the tyre. A stick was then placed behind the backs of his knees, locking his legs in place. He was turned over on to his front, which exposed the bare soles of his feet.
He gasped for breath.
A searing pain surged through him as the guards began relentlessly hitting his feet with some sort of cable or pipe. Daniel screamed and a man pressed a stun gun against his ribs and shoulder. He screamed again. He couldn’t hold it in.
‘Who are you?’ one shouted.
‘I’m Daniel Rye Ottosen,’ he stammered, and was thrashed again.
‘You’re lying! You’re lying!’ shouted the interrogator. ‘Tell me who you really are!’
Daniel cried and screamed.
‘Man up and stop crying!’ one of them shouted.
Every time they lashed him, he screamed. If he didn’t scream out loud for fear of provoking more lashes, he screamed inside, losing all sense of time.
When will it stop? What do they want? How long will this go on? Just as long as they don’t break my bones or anything. As long as they don’t cause any permanent damage.
At some point, the whipping and the pain ceased. Someone removed the car tyre, dragged him out to the radiator in the foyer and handcuffed him to it once more. A few hours passed. Then they started all over again.
It was on the third or fourth round that everything started to become a blur. The only thing he was aware of was that he was back in the interrogation room again.
‘You’re a gymnast?’ asked the interrogator.
‘Yes,’ answered Daniel.
‘Right, well, what can you do then?’ he continued.
Daniel replied that he could show them some exercises if the handcuffs were removed.
‘We can’t do that,’ said the interrogator, who sat behind the table with a couple of other men.
‘Can you handcuff me in front of my body then?’
The interrogator agreed and his hands were handcuffed in front of him.
Daniel hadn’t moved very much in recent days apart from writhing from pain. His body ached; his feet were swollen from the beatings; he was thirsty, hungry, tired and completely beside himself. He took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling, straightening his posture and trying to feel his body.
And then he was off. He jumped as high as he could in the air and as he tucked his knees towards his stomach he flipped backward. His eyes scanned the stone floor to gain his bearings before he landed firmly on both feet. Pain surged through his body, but he had managed to perform a standing back flip and had stuck the landing – accomplished for the first time in his life with his hands cuffed.
The guards’ initial reaction almost made him laugh.
‘That’s a pretty stupid thing to do,’ one commented.
‘I can also stand on my hands,’ suggested Daniel, and he was allowed to show them another move to prove to the kidnappers that he wasn’t a CIA agent, but an elite gymnast from Hedegård. Standing tall, he bent forward and laid his hands down on the floor. He wanted to slowly bring his legs upwards into a handstand, but his palms were too close to each other because of the handcuffs, so the result wasn’t perfect.
The guards called him over to the table and placed a printed picture in front of him, which he had taken at the European Gymnastics Championships in Aarhus in 2012.
‘Who are they?’ asked the leader.
Daniel stared at the five men in the picture in their tight, white-, black-and-red gym suits. They were his teammates. He had taken the picture just before they took the floor at the final competition of the European Championships. They looked particularly determined: if they won this event, they would bring home the gold medal.
‘They are Niels, Stefan, Andreas, Lasse and Steven,’ said Daniel.
They beat him again. His answers didn’t seem to make any difference.
When they were finished, he was dragged back to the radiator, which had become the symbol for respite. His feet were cold, sore and swollen. It must have been about three days since he had had any water or food. Or gone to the toilet.
· * ·
‘Helloooo Daniel. Are you ready for me now?’ shouted a deep voice. Daniel didn’t recognize the voice that echoed in the foyer that evening, but he would soon know to whom it belonged. The torturer who used the nom de guerre Abu Hurraya, meaning ‘Father of Hurraya’, was known as the prison’s most brutal guard, reputedly taking genuine pleasure in torturing hostages.
‘You have beautiful hair. Why did you even come here in the first place? It was really stupid, you should never have come. Follow me,’ said Abu Hurraya in broken English as he stood in front of Daniel and fumbled with a key to the handcuffs.
Abu Hurraya was a tall, broad Syrian with long hair gathered in a ponytail. He lived on the first floor of the building, just above where Daniel was being kept. The other prison guards always knew where he was because of his distinctive voice, which they called ‘heavy’.
The torture would take place either in the office, where other guards had seen him put a stun gun to a prisoner’s body, or in special rooms, where a selection of chains and other instruments hung on the walls. Abu Hurraya was often summoned for beatings, which he performed dressed in ordinary trousers and a T-shirt. Unlike many of the other guards, he didn’t look like a fighter.
Abu Hurraya released Daniel from the radiator and walked behind him towards a room that Daniel hadn’t seen yet. As they entered, he noticed a man lying motionless in one of the corners. ‘You’ll look like that in twenty-four hours,’ commented Abu Hurraya.
He wrapped some foam around Daniel’s wrists and put the handcuffs on again.
‘Reach out your arms,’ said Abu Hurraya, stepping on to a chair. He pulled down some chains from a hook in the ceiling and looped them around the handcuffs. Daniel’s body was now completely extended. He was standing on flat feet, with his arms stretched up towards the ceiling. The foam lining the handcuffs fell off and he felt the sharp iron dig into his wrists.
‘See you tomorrow. You might be ready to talk by then,’ said Abu Hurraya with a cheery voice, before walking out, leaving Daniel almost dangling from the ceiling. The feeling in his hands and arms quickly disappeared; it was replaced by a constant tingling pain that penetrated his entire body.
When he had entered the room Daniel had faintly made out a window with a balcony and now he could hear people outside the window – Syrians, who might be on their way home from work, if they still had a job, or were perhaps out shopping for dinner. He was thirstier than he’d ever been and dreamed of gallons of water.
The sound of the calls to prayer permeated through the window during the evening hours and again around midnight. When Daniel heard some footsteps outside the door a few hours later, he called out the Arabic word for water, which Ayman had taught him: ‘Ma! Ma!’
A punishment was promptly issued. A man came in, whipped him a few times on his back and disappeared again. Daniel remained standing, stretched out from the ceiling to the floor, all night long.
He fell in and out of consciousness and discovered at some point that the man in the corner was gone. When sunlight hit him in the early morning hours, he heard the call to prayer once again, along with the voices of children – the sound of boys’ high-pitched voices teasing him and shouting English words through the door behind him.
‘Are you thirsty? Do you want some water? Are you hungry?’
Then they giggled and disappeared. Daniel was so thirsty and tired that he drifted off into a dream state: he was breaking into a 7-Eleven and drinking the entire contents of the store – milk, water, cola. He ran from shelf to shelf like a dehydrated thief, chugging drinks in a frenzy.
The stone patterns in the tiles underneath him began to blur and take on animal forms. The ground was teeming with vermin and he started to urinate. He felt the warm flow trickle down his leg. He shifted slightly to give his trousers a chance to dry; that way no one would notice, he thought. But that was ridiculous, because there was no one there. Only the creatures on the floor, his thirst and the urine. The light outside disappeared. He heard the call for prayer and the sound of children once again. He was almost pleased to be so thirsty, as it made him forget how painful and powerless it felt to stand there, like a taut bowstring.
He had been there for twenty-four hours when Abu Hurraya returned.
‘I’m thirsty,’ said Daniel.
‘Relax, you’ll get some water,’ Abu Hurraya told him.
Daniel’s brain danced around in a chaotic frenzy; he pictured himself being unshackled from the ceiling, his arms falling naturally down the sides of his body as he walked out of the room on strong, dignified legs.
Abu Hurraya stood on the chair and loosened the chain from the ceiling: Daniel crumpled to the floor like a rag. His body folded underneath him, a corpse washed away by the ocean, and he was swept weightlessly into a soft world of darkness.
· * ·
Over many decades in Syria, torture had developed into an absurd art form. Creative and effective methods were given names which were familiar to most Syrians, even those who hadn’t been exposed to the regime’s prisons. Many could define ‘The Tyre’ or ‘The German Chair’, ‘The Flying Carpet’ or ‘Shabeh’.
Daniel had endured one version of ‘The Tyre’. The other version consisted of pushing the car tyre down over the head and legs to make sure the prisoner was unable to move away from the blows.
‘Shabeh’ was another well-known classic: the victim has his hands cuffed behind his back so that the chain hanging from the ceiling forces the arms painfully upwards. The method Daniel was subjected to, his hands tied above his head, was in fact a milder version of ‘Shabeh’. The word has no real meaning, but some believe it comes from the word shabih or ghost.
Thousands of Syrians had been tortured by the regime and in military prisons. Torture was generally more the rule than the exception for inmates. Under President Hafez al-Assad’s leadership from 1971 to 2000, torture became systematic, and this continued under his son, Bashar al-Assad, who took over the presidency from his father. Torture was the regime’s trademark, which lived on in the newly dominant Islamist strongholds in northern Syria. Former prisoners who had been imprisoned by both the regime and the rebels described how the Islamists’ torture methods were an exact copy of the techniques used in Assad’s prisons.
In the government’s notorious Sednaya Prison, just north of Damascus, the inmates, often political prisoners, were subjected to torture and humiliation. According to many eyewitness accounts and reports, prisoners often died from being tortured.
So it was no coincidence that Daniel was subjected to the same torture methods that his torturers had endured themselves. For instance, Abu Hurraya reported to Abu Athir, who had been put in Sednaya Prison in 2007 on charges related to terrorism, but was freed under President Assad’s amnesty at the beginning of the revolution.
Abu Athir, a slim man in his early to mid-thirties with shoulder-length hair and a very thick, full beard, was known as one of Sednaya Prison’s hardliners. He was a radical Islamist who fell out with other jihadists and Islamists because his narrow and ultra-conservative dogma left no space for any other versions of Sunni Islam. Immediately after his release in the summer of 2011 he formed the rebel group the Sunni Lions in Aleppo and became a familiar face among Syria’s armed factions during the civil war. In August 2012 his brother was killed and Abu Athir took control of his brother’s brigade, the Mujahideen Shura Council.
Abu Athir’s power grew significantly when he met ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq later that year, and he became one of his most fervent and vocal followers in calling for an Islamic caliphate. Some months later, following a split between the two factions Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS, he helped to ensure that fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra joined Baghdadi’s ISIS, and made sure his own faction also endorsed ISIS.
In May 2013 Abu Athir became part of ISIS’s Shura Council, a powerful organ under Baghdadi’s control. Abu Athir was in charge of media relations and was responsible for the recruitment of foreign jihadis, while at the same time serving as the trusted and influential Emir of Aleppo.
· * ·
Daniel’s body slumped against the radiator, heavy and useless. Not even the cup of water and the roll of bread with falafel and tomato that he had been given could revive him after hanging from the ceiling for a full day and night. He had eaten only the tomato – his mouth felt too dry to swallow anything else. He drifted in and out of a restless sleep, dreaming of a kung-fu master who beat him and ran after him, until some guards woke him again, heaved him up by his arms, and dragged him across the floor and back into the interrogation room.
‘If you don’t tell us who you are, we’ll hang you up for three days with no food or water. Then we’ll behead you and send a video home to your parents!’ a voice boomed at him.
Daniel lacked the strength to react. Instead he heard his own inner voice as he allowed his body to be led into another room.
Fuck, you can do whatever you like to me; hit the soles of my feet, whip my back, just don’t hang me up without water again … I’ll die. I’ll rot … I’ll just fucking rot and wither away from this. I’d rather die.
The room resembled the one where he had previously been hung up, except that there was a rubbish bag full of Coke cans on the floor, a table and a broken wooden bed. A man held him up so he wouldn’t collapse, while the torturer grabbed a chain hanging from a hook on the ceiling. The torturer wrapped it around the handcuffs and padlocked it, locking the chain and handcuffs to the ceiling. Daniel was left standing once again with his arms stretched above his head. The torturer disappeared.
I can’t! I can’t! he screamed inside. I can’t stand here for three days and then die afterwards.
He looked around him. The table. It had been placed to make sure it was just out of his reach. His wrist. He could bite through
his wrist so he could escape.
Water. He was so thirsty that his brain was about to dry out and flashes of visions and images flickered past. It required nothing of the guards to leave him hanging there. What if they forgot about him?
He could neither sleep nor move to escape the constant pain. Every muscle in his body was being stretched to its breaking point. He was trapped in a never-ending hell, without a way out, without the slightest relief. Two, maybe three, hours passed before he regained control of his thoughts and once again focused on the table in the room.
If only he could move it closer to him. He grabbed the chain with his hands and held on tight as he swung his body in an arc above the floor. His big toe brushed the edge of the table, which made a clattering noise. Daniel paused momentarily, listening for footsteps in the hallway, then swung himself over and over again towards the table; each time it moved by a fraction. And each time he listened to see whether the noise attracted any attention. Finally, the table was close enough that he could pull it underneath him with his legs.
He stood on the table top. The most wonderful feeling flowed through his body as he sank his arms down from their outstretched position. The relief spread from his elbows to his shoulders. He stood there for a long time, enjoying this new sensation, until the thirst overcame him. Thoughts rushed through his head: To be free from this world, to decide for yourself when you want to leave it. That’s all I want.
He bit his wrist hard. It started bleeding and a stab of pain rushed through him. He couldn’t do this to himself. But imagine if he could just drink a little blood or escape. Or simply disappear.
He looked at the chain that hung from the hook on the ceiling above him. If it could be an instrument of torture, it could also be one of liberation. His hands reached for the cool metal and wrapped the chain around his neck, so it rested against his skin.
For a moment he frightened himself. He had lived a wonderful life, he thought to himself. Even if he hadn’t had any children. The fact that he hadn’t left his mark on the next generation suddenly meant much more to him than he’d ever expected. He recalled the day he had been kidnapped and thought about his Syria project. At least he hadn’t just sat at home in indifference and done nothing. He rested his arms and felt the chain around his neck as he stood still for a brief moment. The thirst had disappeared.