The ISIS Hostage

by Puk Damsgård

  ‘Sometimes they torture in here,’ his fellow prisoner told him. Daniel shuddered at the thought of sitting in the room where the torture took place. Occasionally he and the other prisoners were taken to the toilets across the corridor while someone screamed for fifteen minutes inside the boiler room. Daniel was paralysed by the screams, while his fellow prisoners took the opportunity to wash their clothes in the sink or go to the toilet.

  Daniel didn’t dare spend too long urinating. If the guards had worked themselves up after beating a prisoner, it could mean a beating for him if he wasn’t finished in the toilet by the time they came back.

  There was often noise in the corridor, because the toilet and wash basins lay directly opposite the boiler room and prisoners were constantly being led in and out. Daniel discovered a small hole in the boiler room’s metal door and when he looked through it he felt the breeze that filtered through. His poor eyesight became noticeably better when he looked through the hole towards the door to the toilets. His eyes could suddenly focus like a camera through the small opening. He was soon using it as a way of passing the time, by keeping up with what was going on outside the room and seeing who walked by. And he knew he was unlikely to be discovered, since the guards would have to first unlock the door, giving him time to move away from it.

  One day he heard voices speaking English in the corridor. From his vantage point, he could see that there was a group of prisoners in a queue for the toilet.

  ‘what’s your name?’ shouted a guard. The answer came loud and clear.

  ‘my name is james foley.’

  The guard repeated his question to three other prisoners, and Daniel heard them answer: John Cantlie, David Haines and Federico Motka.

  He moved away from the door, dumbfounded. How many of us are there? he thought. He watched through the hole on a daily basis when there was noise in the toilets.

  In particular, he was surprised that James Foley was in the basement. The last news he could remember about the missing American was that he had been imprisoned by the regime in Damascus.

  It wasn’t long before he spotted two men he also hadn’t seen before. One of them was in desert boots, jeans and a white shirt. The other one wore a checked shirt and trousers, where the lower part can be zipped off. Daniel smiled when he saw that the man was wearing boat shoes. They had to be westerners too.

  Daniel began counting. There were the two Frenchmen, Didier François and Edouard Elias, whom he had shared a cell with, but had not seen for a while. There were the four men who had been asked to say their names by the toilets: James Foley, John Cantlie, Federico Motka and David Haines. And then the two men in boat shoes and desert boots, whose names he didn’t know. And then there was him.

  I’m obviously not the only idiot, he thought, and suddenly became optimistic. The more of them there were, the more focus there had to be on their release. He wept with relief.

  When he had been in the boiler room for five days he was led into the guard room, where Abu Ubaidah sat in jogging trousers at a table with a computer in front of him. Also on the table was the message that Daniel had tried to smuggle out with the Syrian prisoner.

  ‘Why would you do such a thing?’ Abu Ubaidah said quietly in English. ‘We’re treating you well, aren’t we?’

  Daniel explained that he hadn’t told them where he was and offered to translate the letter from Danish to English.

  ‘No. We’ve already had it translated,’ was the reply.

  A few days later he was taken into a dark room with a wooden door. Sitting there was the man in the white shirt and his partner with the boat shoes.

  Pierre Torres and Nicolas Hénin introduced themselves and gave Daniel a proper hug as a welcome. Pierre had longish dark hair, a broad white face and a wide, open smile.‘Welcome to our room,’ he said kindly, and Daniel felt overwhelmed by this warm reception.

  The two Frenchmen had each been kidnapped separately in Raqqa more than a month ago, on 22 June. Pierre was a marine biologist, but had become a freelance journalist after the Arab Spring. The movement had awakened his activism and he had been in Egypt, Libya and Syria several times.

  At the end of May he had gone to Raqqa, where he was living with a family. ISIS was gaining ground in the town, but not without resistance. There were daily demonstrations against Jabhat al-Nusra, whom people called the Islamists, but Pierre’s experience was that most of the combatants had already switched their allegiance to ISIS. Raqqa was full of hooded Islamists, but also democracy-hungry activists rebelling against the Islamist hegemony, which they didn’t want to replace the tyrannical regime. Pierre was fascinated by these ideological clashes.

  The day he was kidnapped he had had an upset stomach, but was nevertheless walking to the city centre to witness another demonstration against the Islamists. A few blocks from the governor’s building a small car drew up beside him. The men wore hoods, which didn’t concern Pierre very much because most of the fighters did. However, when they pointed their weapons at him, he was afraid that they belonged to one of the regime-backed militias. He resisted and tried to escape, but each time he pulled away they slammed his head on the roof of the car. Eventually he was thrown into the back seat with blood dripping from his forehead and driven to a house outside the city, south-east of Raqqa. There he met Nicolas Hénin, who had been taken the same day.

  After two weeks they were moved south to the children’s hospital in Aleppo, where Daniel was the first westerner they had met, although they were aware that there were others.

  They had communicated through a hole in the wall with Didier and Edouard, who were sitting in the next cell. They also knew that the aid workers David and Federico were there.

  Daniel immediately took to Pierre, who, as a marine biologist, could give him advice about nutrition and bacteria.

  ‘You’re far too thin,’ he said to Daniel, who looked like a scarecrow. Daniel’s eyes stared out from deep, dark holes and Pierre felt he could see all the way into Daniel’s brain.

  ‘What happened to your wrist?’ asked Pierre, and Daniel felt the urge to cry over someone wanting to hear his story.

  The ceiling fan made such a noise that they couldn’t hear what was going on in the corridor. It was hard to tell if it was day or night, because the only light came from a naked light bulb. Unlike Daniel, Pierre and Nicolas spoke to the guards quite a lot. The Frenchmen hadn’t been exposed to as much violence as Daniel and therefore dared to express their needs. For example, they asked the guard (whom they called ‘Abu Gold Watch’ between themselves, because of his big gold watch) if they could have toothbrushes. Even though the answer was no, Daniel was surprised that they had asked. Most of the time, he tried to make himself invisible to the guards, who nevertheless singled him out by asking him to perform such actions as banging himself on the head with a shoe a hundred times.

  Pierre advised Daniel not to play along with the guards’ humiliations.

  ‘You have to be more boring and pretend you don’t understand anything.’

  ‘I can’t just start ignoring them from one day to the next,’ said Daniel.

  He realized that Pierre was trying to make him stronger and thus less subject to the whims of the guards. One day, when he wanted to teach Pierre the proper technique to do a push-up and couldn’t even lift his body off the floor, he knew he had to regain his strength to survive.

  He started training. Before lunch he strengthened his torso and before dinner he exercised his legs. Pierre took part in the exercises and at night they lay side by side on their blankets and talked.

  Their daily training was interrupted briefly by a guard who wanted to photograph Daniel.

  ‘Could you two exchange clothing for a moment?’ asked the guard, pointing at Daniel’s military clothing and Pierre’s white shirt, wand can you do something about your hair?’

  Daniel pulled Pierre’s shirt over his h
ead. It was too big for his narrow shoulders, but looked nicer than the military jacket, which gave the impression he was a combatant.

  He was taken out to the corridor and had his photograph taken. There were no questions and no label, so he was unsure whether the photo would be used as proof of life. Nevertheless, he tried to send a message home – a smile. He hoped that the smile would reassure his family in Hedegård if they ever got to see the photograph.

  Daniel and Pierre had just managed to work out an exercise routine when they were moved to a larger cell under the children’s hospital, where there were four more western hostages: Didier and Edouard, and David and Federico. There were now a total of seven westerners in the same cell. It was the first time that Daniel had met the two aid workers.

  David was British, while Federico was Italian. They had come to Syria together as aid workers to find suitable places to establish refugee camps for the rapidly growing number of internally displaced refugees. In the spring of 2013 they had been attacked by masked men on a road in northern Syria and they hadn’t stood a chance.

  David was thin and had such a full beard that he reminded Daniel of a caveman. Federico was young and taciturn. They told him that they were receiving much better treatment than they had before. Neither of them went into further detail about what had happened to them.

  Finally, after more than two months in captivity, Daniel no longer stuck out as the blond westerner among the Syrian prisoners; at last he had some people to talk to who understood him. Together they could try to make the best of the terrible situation they were in. But after a few days, Daniel saw that any solidarity had been replaced by an internal hierarchy, just as it had been when he sat in the cell with the Syrian prisoners. In the cell, the seven hostages arranged their sleeping areas along the walls. Daniel was given a place closest to the door and right by the buckets where they shat. He knew he belonged to the lower half of the hierarchy, otherwise he wouldn’t be forced to sleep by the toilet buckets, which was regarded as an almost radioactive area in the cell. Moreover, it was unpleasant to be close to the door and the unpredictable guards who barged in several times a day. At least Pierre lay next to him, which made Daniel feel safe.

  The ranking was also defined with the help of the kidnappers. The guards ordered the cell to appoint an ‘emir’, who would speak on behalf of everybody. The title went to the Frenchman Didier, because he was the oldest among them. One of his tasks was to decide what the prisoners should try to get the prison guards to deliver.

  ‘We should ask for more food,’ suggested someone.

  ‘No, what about soap? We must show that we care about our hygiene,’ said another.

  ‘Toothbrushes!’ shouted a third.

  Daniel said that he didn’t need anything.

  ‘I’m just happy not to be hanging from the ceiling,’ he remarked. ‘For me, it’s important to regain my strength and get some exercise.’

  The heat in the room was oppressive. Even though there was a fan, the air felt so still that some of Daniel’s co-prisoners complained that it would be dangerous for them all if he began exercising and sweating too much in such an enclosed space.

  He disagreed, but worked out a plan. When the morning sun hit the fan, it cast an orange beam of light on the wall just above him. Then he got up and did strength and balance exercises on his blanket, while watching the beam move from the wall above him and down across the floor. When it hit Nicolas’s feet, Daniel would have to finish his gymnastics, because the others would begin waking up. The complaining stopped.

  Outside the cell, there was more and more fighting. They could hear the deafening sound of bombs and firing near the children’s hospital. The war was moving closer, but Daniel didn’t care. He devoted all his energy thinking about mealtimes, when he would suddenly see sides of himself he didn’t much like.

  They were given too little to eat and he felt a constant gnawing hunger that was driving him mad. If the guards forgot to come with food, his whole body filled with anxiety. Lately, some French-speaking fighters had been in charge of taking care of the prisoners and they had not been generous types. They sometimes withheld meals, so Daniel ate like a dog, hoarding and grabbing things from the other rations when the food was finally brought in. Heated arguments arose about who was stealing food from whom, and Daniel invented a technique whereby he swallowed the food almost instantly to hide how much he was eating, and defended himself by saying that he was too thin. He greedily licked his metal plate for the smallest crumb, while others became surly, withdrawing from the disagreements and refusing to eat. Several of them pointed to Daniel as the villain.

  The only peace around mealtimes came when seven chunks of bread and seven boiled eggs were handed out.

  The prisoners in the cell had been given a pen to share and rules were soon agreed as to when it might be used and for what. Daniel was given permission to use it to design a chess game, which he sat in a corner to make. He broke small pieces off the penicillin package that he had brought with him from cell to cell. He used the pen to draw the king, queen and pawns, but when he wanted fill in the black pieces, some argued that it was an unnecessary waste of ink.

  The chess set was his new pastime and at night Daniel and Pierre lay close to each other on their blankets and played, while having whispering conversations about their lives and families.

  Pierre spoke about his elderly Spanish father, who had lived through the Spanish Civil War. His parents’ house was an hour’s train journey from Paris in an abandoned factory that had been Pierre’s childhood home, surrounded by fruit trees and the roar of the river that flowed past at the end of the garden. Pierre had left home several years earlier, but Tonton the donkey still lived in the garden, and Olaf the dog also ran around among the free-range geese that often peeked into the living room through the garden door.

  Daniel didn’t know what he would do if Pierre disappeared. Their talks kept the fear and the madness at bay.

  · * ·

  On 4 August Kjeld was sitting in his lorry when he received an email from Arthur with an image file attached. He waited until he went home to Susanne before downloading the file.

  Arthur had written in the email that it was a new photo of Daniel. Kjeld and Susanne agreed that this time they didn’t need the crisis psychologist to be present. They felt able to see the image alone and besides they wanted to save on the cost of the psychologist, who would surely be needed when Daniel came home.

  When the photograph appeared on the computer screen in their study, they went completely quiet. A wild man in a white shirt was staring directly at them through round, sunken eyes. He had a beard and hair that stuck out all around his head.

  Susanne and Kjeld wept, while staring at the picture. Their son looked so abject, as Susanne described it, and he had some ugly marks around his neck. They could no longer be ignored; the marks were even clearer than in the first picture they had received.

  ‘Do you think they’ve tried to strangle him?’ asked Suzanne. Kjeld didn’t dare answer.

  It was only when they had been looking at the photo for quite a while that they noticed the smile. Daniel was trying to send a message that he would be all right, thought Susanne.

  When Daniel’s elder sister Anita saw the photo, she thought he looked exactly like their father when he had been ill with cancer, with his prominent cheekbones and hollow eyes. She said that the marks around his neck could be a fungal growth, which you could get if you were malnourished.

  ‘I’ll take that her word for it,’ Susanne wrote in her diary. There was so incredibly little for the family to hold on to.

  Two photos in more than two months, when they had neither heard Daniel’s voice nor had any idea what was going to happen to him. At the same time there was the forced silence. Daniel’s disappearance was a secret outside the family’s inner circle.

  Susanne had told only three trusted co
lleagues at Legoland, otherwise she couldn’t stand talking about it. It was hard enough already. While visitors rode the carousels at the theme park, she stood in the staffroom and received calls from Arthur and the authorities, who had questions or new reports about her kidnapped son. Sometimes she wept; other times she felt hopeful.

  ‘Tell lies which are as close to reality as possible,’ Arthur had advised them when Kjeld and Susanne recounted how they were getting lost in the web of lies they told to everyone else about Daniel’s whereabouts.

  They had cancelled going to a party, because they couldn’t handle lying to their friends. They excused themselves by saying they had the flu. When the host asked them some weeks later about their illness, they had no idea for a moment what she was talking about. Kjeld and Susanne were living a double life.

  · * ·

  On the same day as they received the photograph of Daniel in Hedegård, he and the other six prisoners were joined in their cell by another hostage.

  ‘We have a friend for you,’ announced a guard.

  The American journalist Steven Sotloff lay down in the only place there was room – the middle of the floor. He said that he had been captured shortly after crossing the border from Turkey and that the many checkpoints on the roads in the area were no longer controlled by the original Syrian rebels. Now ISIS fighters were standing there.

  There were now eight westerners in the same cell. Somewhere else in the basement under the children’s hospital were James Foley and John Cantlie. Daniel had seen them, but would not meet them until several days later. It finally happened when the prisoners were going to the toilet.

  As always, they were ordered to go in single file down the corridor, blindfolded. Daniel never knew if anyone was standing there ready to give him a slap. They didn’t take their blindfolds off until the door to the toilets was closed and locked behind them.