The ISIS Hostage

by Puk Damsgård

  Daniel was trying to teach James to stand on his head. To no avail.

  ‘Ouch, my neck,’ winced James and sat back down.

  Each morning from 8 to 10 Daniel did gymnastics with his fellow prisoners. On Mondays it was beginners or the older prisoners, on Wednesdays the youngsters, and on Fridays it was open to all. The number of participants varied, but most of them were keen to stay in shape.

  James began his lessons on a Monday and when Daniel tried to cajole him to join in the following Friday, he shrank back into a corner.

  ‘I think I’ll skip it today,’ said James.

  ‘Come on now, be a man,’ laughed Daniel.

  ‘OK, I’ll give it a go.’

  When Daniel held his gymnastics lessons, the others provided their blankets, laying them folded on the floor, so that they could turn somersaults on their skinny backs without it sounding like a bunch of bones sliding over the concrete.

  After a large chunk of bread and four olives, James came forwards and the others sat along the wall, cheering wildly.

  ‘OK – I’m ready,’ he said, encouraged by his fellow prisoners.

  Daniel was euphoric. He was used to seeing himself as the weak idiot in the corner – the one who hated himself because he had been ‘fucking kidnapped’ and starved into an emaciated prisoner, who couldn’t think of anything else than food and shitting in a bucket. Now he was contributing to the community with somersaults and balance exercises in ways that would strengthen their bodies and minds, and the other hostages applauded when someone mastered a move. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, Steven taught yoga. Sundays they kept free.

  It was pitch black in the cell in the evenings, because the electricity cut out. They lay freezing and huddled together under their blankets. One day James asked Daniel if he would teach him how to do massage. He knew that Daniel had learned some techniques from his gymnastics, when he and his teammates eased each other’s sore muscles.

  Under cover of darkness at night, so the guards wouldn’t see, they began the lessons. Daniel told James about the body’s various fixed points, about how he should use the thumb or the elbow and how to do a scalp massage.

  ‘You’re too careful. I can’t feel it,’ said Daniel when James practised on him, but he still enjoyed the rare sense of being touched; for once, it wasn’t a beating from a whip or a cane.

  Even though James couldn’t quite figure out how to do a massage, his gentle hands allowed Daniel to relax in a way he hadn’t done since he had first been captured. They often talked quietly together during these times. James spoke about his experiences as a journalist in Afghanistan and his kidnapping in Libya, when he was imprisoned for forty days by Muammar Gaddafi’s forces during the Libyan Civil War in 2011.

  They also talked about women. James said that he had always felt clumsy with the opposite sex.

  ‘Women,’ Daniel said as he massaged James’s muscles, ‘they also like a good strong massage.’

  James broke out in infectious laughter.

  Can You See the Moon, Daniel?

  During the day, when light reached the cell, the hostages tried to find creative ways of passing the time. Daniel got an idea from a white cardboard box which had contained dates and which the guards had left in a corner of the cell.

  ‘Are you interested in making a game of Risk?’ he asked.

  The others thought it sounded like fun and Daniel began collecting material for the game. The side of the cardboard box measured approximately 16 by 24 inches, and on this they drew the world map from the Risk game, purely from memory.

  When Daniel ate olives, he spat the pits into a metal tub, filled a bucket with water and scrubbed them clean. He then used a nail to scrape the fruit flesh off the pits and laid them out to dry on the wall that separated the room from the toilet. The others also gave him their date and olive pits, which he cleaned and categorized. The stones could be dark, light, large or small. A small olive pit symbolized a soldier, a large olive pit a horse, while a date pit symbolized a cannon with ten soldiers.

  Daniel had saved a small yoghurt tub, which he used to construct a die. He pricked a circle in the bottom with a nail, then divided the circle into six equal parts and gave each section a number from one to six. When an olive stone was thrown into the tub, it landed on the number of dots that the player should move his piece.

  They made mission cards and tore paper into strips to use as pieces. When everything was completed, Risk became a popular alternative to chess, the only game in the cell until then. Daniel had become a complete chess nerd and found a mental escape from his captivity by immersing himself in looking for gaps in his opponent’s defence. There were a lot of them on James’s half of the board, on the rare occasions when Daniel persuaded him to play.

  The new game also helped him forget where he was, and between four and six of them would often play together. Daniel feared that the guards would mistake the Risk board for an escape plan, so they would sit in his corner with their backs to the door and play at conquering countries and territories around the world, ready to cover the pieces with a blanket if the guards should come in.

  An independent judge would be appointed for each new round, although debates would quickly arise about how independent he was when he had to adjudicate how far a player could move if the olive pit lay on the dividing line between two numbers. The players would form alliances, which led to cynical power struggles and predictable intrigues. They took defeat so personally and seriously that they would fall out over it.

  ‘I quit!’ one of them would say suddenly. ‘I don’t want to play any more.’

  ‘Come on now, it’s just a game,’ someone would say. It was as if it had become impossible to play for fun, because the fear of death, the longing and the pain, was all being channelled into a board game made of cardboard and olive pits.

  Daniel stopped playing and thought back to his first shocking days in captivity, when he had imagined that it would be a matter of hours, days or weeks before he would be free again. Back then, it never crossed his mind to think in terms of months, and now six months had already gone by. Perhaps he would have to add ‘number of years’ to his internal accounting of his time as a hostage.

  Around noon one day in November there was heavy hammering on the door and concerns greater than how many dots were in the tub arrived in the shape of the three British guards. Daniel was kneeling with his face against the wall, but he recognized their accent from the day when the Brit’s unpleasant visit had turned Federico’s and David’s faces deathly pale.

  Daniel stiffened, while the Brits went around the room selecting individual hostages, who were given a few blows on the torso. He could hear that they were being tough on Steven, accusing him of writing articles that were untrue. They also circled David for a long time.

  One of the guards asked them, one by one, to say what they knew about Dawlah al-Islamiyah, the Arabic name for ISIS.

  Daniel deliberately kept his answer very short.

  ‘Your goal is to create an Islamic state where you implement sharia law,’ he said.

  The three Brits talked about the policies of western countries against Muslims and about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  ‘Why are you sitting here? Because you support your stupid governments,’ said one of them.

  ‘Is there anyone who knows what democracy means?’ continued the lesson. ‘It comes from Latin. Demos means “people”, kratos means “power”. And who are the people? The people, that’s you. So you are the sinners.’

  After that day the hostages began to see the three hooded British guards more frequently. They nicknamed them the Beatles. That way, they could talk about John, Ringo and George, without the guards detecting that the prisoners were speaking about them.

  The Beatles were always dressed in black hoods, desert boots and black or military green clothing, but severa
l of the hostages in the cell noted that their hands were dark-skinned. They guessed that they came from Pakistan and had perhaps met each other in a mosque in London.

  George was the most violent and unpredictable of the three and sometimes he held his nose while he walked around the cell, talking or telling bad jokes. According to David and Federico – and also James, who had encountered George earlier in his captivity – he had gone from being quiet to aggressive and domineering. Ringo, on the other hand, seemed to be reserved, while John was articulate.

  Daniel hardly dared to listen when they were in the cell, so he often couldn’t tell them apart. But it was immaterial – as a trio, they were frightening. Whether they came in together or separately, the forewarning was always a strong, bitter-sweet scent of male perfume that wafted into the room while they stood outside the door, waiting for the hostages to turn to face the wall before they entered. Sometimes Daniel thought he could smell when they were coming, but it usually turned out to be a false alarm. Every time the prisoners sensed a whiff of perfume, there was panic.

  · * ·

  Towards the end of 2013, while Daniel and his fellow prisoners in Aleppo had fallen under the control of British jihadists, James Foley’s family in the United States were approached by the father of a returned Syrian combatant. At the beginning of November Dimitri, Jejoen Bontinck’s father, called James’s brother Michael with the message that his son had apparently met James in a prison in Aleppo.

  The family had been getting calls for several months from various people, each one more well-informed and well-intentioned than the next. Common to all of them was that they claimed to know where James was being held, without it ever leading to anything new. Even so, Michael thought that Dimitri’s story was worth passing on to Arthur, who had been looking for James for about a year without success. Arthur listened to the long message that Jejoen’s father had recorded. Dimitri spoke stridently, quickly and incoherently, but Arthur decided to contact him anyway to find out what it was really about.

  Dimitri said his son had become radicalized and had gone to Syria to fight.

  ‘I’ve been in Syria looking for him,’ he continued, at which Arthur couldn’t suppress a little smile. When Dimitri’s son finally returned home, after more than six months, he had been imprisoned by the Belgian authorities on suspicion of committing terrorist acts in Syria and of being a member of ISIS, in the days when he wasn’t under house arrest. Jejoen’s testimony added to the public prosecutor’s case against forty-seven members of Sharia4Belgium, including himself. According to Dimitri, Jejoen had told him that he had been held in the same cell as James for several weeks in the basement of a children’s hospital in Aleppo.

  When Arthur hung up, he sat back with a strange gut feeling. During the past few months he had spoken with hundreds of people who said they knew James’s whereabouts. Their only motive had been money. But what in heaven’s name would prompt a young Belgian jihadist to fabricate a story about having met James? he asked himself. The only motive Arthur could imagine was immunity, meaning that Jejoen hoped he might be released if he gave information about a well-known, kidnapped American in Syria. There were several details in Dimitri’s story that aroused Arthur’s curiosity, since much of his information about Daniel had also been obtained from released Syrians who had been held in the same prisons.

  In the United States the FBI didn’t think Arthur should spend even a second of his valuable time on the returned Belgian fighter. Even though the Syrian regime denied that James was in one of their prisons, this possibility was the only lead that Arthur had been asked to prioritize by the FBI. Prominent sources in the regime said that not even President Assad would necessarily know if there was an American in one of the secret prisons, because when prisoners were registered, their name was thrown away and the prisoner reduced to a number. It would be difficult to find the person without being able to match a name with a number. Moreover, it wasn’t inconceivable that a general or a colonel somewhere in the system had ‘stashed Foley away’ as an insurance policy. If the regime fell, releasing him could be a ticket out.

  ‘We have to use our scarce resources to follow the lead in Damascus,’ was the message from the US. But Arthur, ignoring the FBI’s view on the matter, followed his gut feeling and flew to Antwerp, Belgium.

  Through Dimitri, Arthur obtained a permit to visit Jejoen under the guise of being a family member who had come from the United States to welcome him home.

  The high-security prison couldn’t deny the prisoner a family visit, but if he came for investigative purposes, the police had to be involved. Arthur wanted to avoid the latter at all costs. He could already imagine how authorization for the visit would evaporate in red tape and delays.

  Before going through the prison security search, Arthur wrote a number of names on the broad palm of his hand that he wanted to check with the fighter. Abu Athir, Abu Ubaidah and Abu Suheib were among them; he wanted to know what they looked like and where they had been staying. He had also rolled up his shirt sleeves and hidden a mini ballpoint pen in the cuffs so the wardens didn’t discover it when he went into the visiting room.

  It looked like a classroom with small desks, and the visitors and inmates were only allowed to sit in specifically designated chairs. The prison wardens walked between the tables, keeping an eye on things; pen and paper were not allowed.

  A few moments later Arthur was sitting opposite Jejoen, whose dark skin came from his Nigerian mother. Arthur spoke quietly and honestly from the beginning.

  ‘I’m not a member of James’s family. But I’m not from the intelligence services, either. I’m looking for James on behalf of his family. I’m also looking for a Dane called Daniel.’

  ‘I’ve seen James and heard about the Dane,’ said Jejoen.

  In order to verify his statements, Arthur asked him to explain how he had ended up under the children’s hospital in Aleppo.

  When he finished recounting his story, there was no doubt. Jejoen told Arthur where James had gone to school and that he had been a teacher. He also gave information about John Cantlie that no one knew publicly, and John hadn’t even been in the press. At that point in time the Brit’s capture was still unknown to the public.

  Arthur wrote everything on his forearm with his mini pen as unobtrusively as possible, while his cheeks burned. This is the breakthrough! a voice said inside him. After searching for about a year, he finally had the first proof of life of James Foley. He was still alive.

  The next breakthrough came a few minutes later when Arthur read out the list of prominent ISIS leaders that he had written on his palm. Jejoen nodded and described all of them in detail. Arthur suddenly understood the connection: James and Daniel had been taken prisoner by the same people.

  With the knowledge that Arthur had about the other western hostages, it became clear to him that the same key characters among the kidnappers were popping up every time. Perhaps all of the hostages were being held at the same location.

  As soon as Arthur came out of the maximum security prison he called the United States and Britain. As euphoric as he was to finally know where James had been staying, he was equally depressed at the thought that Daniel was sitting in the hands of the same Islamists who had made James disappear for a year without any sign of life.

  It was no longer just one Dane who was imprisoned or one American. It was a multinational hostage-taking, since there was much to indicate that some Frenchmen, a Brit and a German were also hostages in the same place. Arthur knew from experience that when a case involved many nationalities, it would mean every government fighting against the other. But that wasn’t the worst part.

  When the kidnappers had several hostages in their custody, the risk increased that one of them would be killed. Not all of the captives would have the same value, and the captors were usually willing to sacrifice some more than others. Daniel might not be at the top of the list of t
hose they wanted to keep.

  Given these circumstances, Arthur realized that the appeal letter Daniel’s parents had sent to Emir Abu Athir had been completely irrelevant. Now it was simply a matter of how long it would take before someone tried to get in touch with Susanne and Kjeld and what ISIS’s grand plan was for Daniel, James and the others. Was it about money, politics, ideology or a combination of them all?

  As Arthur saw it, Daniel and the other foreign hostages had become pawns in a dangerous political game in which the Islamists moved the pieces as and when it suited them. It was a game that could end up putting governments under pressure and presenting them with a dilemma: if they wanted their countrymen to be freed, they would be forced to indulge ISIS and pay ransoms to terrorists.

  Arthur left Belgium with the feeling that anything could happen.

  · * ·

  The family in Hedegård was living in the iron grip of uncertainty. It had been many weeks since they had received any sign of life and even longer since anyone had shown any interest in negotiating Daniel’s release. Susanne was desperate to talk to her son, to see him and hear his voice as she remembered it. She and Kjeld went to the cinema more often than they had ever done; it was a place where they could forget reality for a while and where there was no one who asked about Daniel.

  They wrote another letter, which Arthur’s contacts would try to get delivered to Daniel. Susanne spent a whole morning writing it, crying and crossing out. The letter was to give her son information about what was happening. It was meant to inspire hope – and show that they loved him, in case they never saw him again:

  Dear Daniel,

  We, Signe and the rest of your family are thinking about you very much. How are you? Are they treating you well? We have seen pictures and videos of you; it was hard, but nice too. We hope and believe that you can use your always positive outlook and attitude in the difficult situation you’re in, and your kind, friendly personality and maybe your gymnastics to benefit your body and soul.