The ISIS Hostage

by Puk Damsgård

  Susanne and Kjeld wrote about how they were keeping his disappearance a secret, so that the press didn’t get wind of the story:

  We are doing everything in our power to get you safely home to Denmark, so just keep going and fight on. You should know that we are all ready to receive you with love; we will help and support you, and together we will no doubt move forwards, together we are strong.

  Here in Denmark, it’s the same old stuff. Christina has started her third year at high school. Signe is in school. Anita and her boyfriend both have new jobs, which are fortunately going really well. Dad is driving his truck and cycling a lot, and I’m working at Legoland, of course. Granddad and Grandma are worried, of course, like the rest of us, but they are holding out well.

  We have had a fantastic, fine summer here in Denmark with a lot of sunshine and warm weather. We had three good days on Samsø, along with Anita and her boyfriend, who kayaked over and stayed at a campsite. Dad and I stayed in a boarding school, so now we have also tried that. We had our bikes with us, so we cycled all over Samsø. Christina went to Move Yourself in Viborg and has also worked at Legoland. Signe is a wonderful girl – she has been on holiday with her parents and her brothers and sisters. She misses you very much, but she is contributing enormously and fighting alongside us.

  The harvest is now in and autumn is approaching; the leaves are falling from the trees and the dark time of year is approaching, the time with candles and cosiness. So we hope with all our hearts that you will come home soon and be able to enjoy yourself with us.

  They ended the letter with a saying:

  A tree with strong roots can withstand even the fiercest storm.

  Many hugs and warm thoughts to you from your Mum and Dad.

  · * ·

  After months with no proof of life or any signs of negotiations, Daniel was finally collected from the cell and taken up to an office that had windows all around, like a glass cage.

  He cast a quick glance out of the windows and managed to get a sense of where he was – some old cars were parked in a yard, where there was also some building clutter and two dumbbells – before an English-speaking guard ordered him to sit down on a chair. The guard said some phrases that Daniel had to repeat in front of a video camera:

  ‘My name is Daniel. I am a Danish citizen. I got caught by this group, because I had some pictures on my camera showing the houses of the mujahideen. This is a message to the prime minister of Denmark, Helle Thorning-Schmidt. Stop the support for groups like Liwa al-Tawheed and pay money in order for me to return home,’ he said, referring to one of the larger, moderate rebel groups.

  He was then taken back to the cell, without having the slightest idea whether or not any of the video appeals he had made were ever sent to Denmark.

  James was holding a candle out towards the door. The electricity kept disappearing for increasingly longer periods in the evening. When it happened, the hostages called the guards, who lit the wick of the candle they had finally been given.

  All thirteen of them were sitting covered by their blankets, staring into the flame, as they looked forward to a small meal – a little bread and olives. No one said anything. Daniel looked at the others’ faces in the yellow gleam of the candlelight and for a moment he felt that it was actually quite cosy, especially when James distributed the food in equal portions.

  The basement had become cold and damp. December was on its way. Daniel suggested a game he knew from when he taught at Bjerre Gymnastics and Sports School. During the Christmas month, the head of the boarding school had arranged a Secret Santa exchange that Daniel thought would work in the cell too. The rules were that everyone was secretly allocated someone who would be their Secret Santa and who would pamper them until Christmas. Then, on Christmas Eve, they all had to guess who was their Secret Santa.

  Some were sceptical about playing Secret Santa in a Muslim prison and, except for James, who thought it was a good idea, those who had converted to Islam didn’t want to join in. One of the Muslims who didn’t want to be involved allocated Secret Santas to the hostages. He whispered in Daniel’s ear that he should be Secret Santa for Steven and Daniel started thinking about how he could be pleasant towards him in the coming weeks.

  The Christmas season also brought a new acquaintance. Daniel woke abruptly one night in early December when the door to the basement room opened and a new hostage came into the cell. It was a Russian called Sergei Gorbunov. He had a receding hairline and a bushy goatee beard on his chin and didn’t speak any English, but Marc, the Spaniard, could communicate a little with him in Russian.

  Sergei told them that he was a Muslim and a scientist and that he had been on his way to an area of Aleppo with some important papers when he was captured. The others couldn’t figure out what he was really doing in Syria. He spoke incoherently and maybe he was a little crazy. But Sergei was good at being a prisoner. He settled in and quickly got into the rhythm. Apparently he had been imprisoned for several years in Russia, and Daniel thought that maybe there wasn’t a lot of difference between an ISIS prison in Syria and a Russian state prison. The everyday routines were probably much the same.

  Sergei was also good at chess, even though he cheated and moved his knight in a non-regulation manner. But not everyone was enthusiastic about the Russian. Pierre didn’t like his energy and kept his distance. He thought that Sergei had come in with animalistic tendencies, where he attacked the weak and obeyed the strong. Most of all, Pierre’s aversion was the result of his own efforts to maintain a civilized level of behaviour, a little dignity in the midst of a world in which they were controlled by the Beatles.

  · * ·

  The hostages were dragged out of the cell one at a time. When it was Daniel’s turn, he was thrown on to the floor of a room in which one of the Brits sat behind a table. On the table were a small computer and a sub-machine gun. Daniel was on his knees and handcuffed, staring at the floor in front of him, while the hooded guard asked him his name and why he had come to Syria.

  ‘Would you like to go home? Who can pay for you?’ were the next questions.

  ‘My family doesn’t have any money, but they’ll do everything they can to pay a ransom,’ replied Daniel.

  ‘If nobody pays, we’ll shoot you,’ said the guard, getting up and sticking a pistol barrel into Daniel’s mouth.

  ‘Do you want to die now or will you tell us what possibilities there are?’

  Daniel calmly gave him a signal with his hand that he wanted to say something and, when the barrel was removed from his mouth, he told them how much he was insured for and reeled off email addresses for Susanne, Kjeld and his sisters.

  ‘Have you heard of Guantánamo?’

  Daniel nodded.

  ‘What can you tell us about the place?’

  He tried to say as little as possible about the US detention camp in Cuba, where there was evidence of widespread torture. The Brits were rough, uncompromising and unpleasant.

  ‘I know they’re holding Muslim prisoners who have been treated very badly,’ said Daniel.

  ‘It’s your duty to know. You are part of the democracy that holds these people prisoner,’ said the guard, emphasizing every word as he continued to outline how Daniel was complicit in the mistreatment of Muslims in western democracies.

  ‘This is our response to how the West is treating our brothers.’

  Daniel nodded again, knowing that the Beatles had previously subjected some of the hostages to a method of torture called waterboarding, which they had imported from Guantánamo. This involved putting a cloth over the prisoners’ faces and pouring gallons of water over them so that they felt as if they were drowning.

  The guard punched Daniel hard in the torso and led him back to the cell. His ribs were aching, but he was surprised that he hadn’t reacted to having a pistol stuck in his mouth – as if he were indifferent to dying. Maybe his body had
stopped feeling fear. Maybe he was just tired and had become immune to death threats.

  The other hostages had also had email addresses demanded of them, which made the British and Americans happy. It was the first sign that contact might be made with their families. Until now, James had always been told that he would never be going home. Sergei was the only one who had no email address to give the Beatles. The prisoners talked a lot about what this demand for email addresses meant, while simultaneously getting involved in their Secret Santa roles.

  Steven slept by Daniel’s feet and some evenings Daniel would wrap him up in the blanket like a sausage, from his shoulders all the way down his body and around his feet. When Steven got up, Daniel would wish him good morning, and every time Steven suggested a game of chess, he would volunteer to be his opponent. He consistently took part in Steven’s yoga classes three times a week and asked afterwards whether Steven would tell him about Israel and Palestine. The American was Jewish, something they never mentioned in front of the guards.

  One day, beside his sleeping place, Daniel found a small boat shaped out of the wrapper from a packet of butter. In his universe, this gift from his Secret Santa symbolized freedom. The foil boat could drift wherever it wanted, depending on where Daniel’s thoughts led it. The Secret Santa game was creating a larger mental space in the cell.

  The daily guards who brought them food mainly spoke French. They called themselves Abu Idriss and Abu Mohammed and they acted professionally by keeping a distance and addressing the prisoners with the formal vous instead of the informal tu when they took them out to the toilet and brought them food.

  Pierre also recognized a third French guard, Abu Omar, whom he had met when he first arrived at the hospital in Aleppo. He had evidently moved with them to the Dungeon, as the hostages called the prison. Sometimes, when Abu Omar was on duty, the prisoners didn’t get any food, and the first time he came into the cell, his face wasn’t covered.

  Maybe it was the presence of Pierre and the other Frenchmen that got Abu Omar hanging out with them in their cell. He really enjoyed talking about the French police, the former Yugoslavia and the so-called Roubaix gang – a terrorist cell whose members had been in Bosnia during the war in 1992 and who had robbed and attacked several places in France throughout the 1990s. A large-scale attack against a police building in Lille in 1996 had failed, however, when their home-made bomb had destroyed only the Peugeot they had parked outside.

  While other people had their favourite actors, Abu Omar had his favourite major criminals, which Pierre interpreted to mean that he personally wanted to become a famous felon. Little did Pierre know, but Abu Omar would later fulfil his wish. His name was in fact Mehdi Nemmouche. He had Algerian roots and, in 2014, he was accused of killing four people in an attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. According to prosecutors, the twenty-nine-year-old French national from Roubaix admitted to carrying out the attack, which had been caught on the museum’s security cameras. On 24 May he ran into the museum, took a Kalashnikov out of his bag and shot and killed two Israeli tourists and a Frenchman, while a fourth victim, a Belgian employee of the museum, later died of his wounds. Mehdi Nemmouche managed to flee on foot and got as far as Marseille before being apprehended.

  It was the first attack in Europe in which the perpetrator had a connection to ISIS.

  Although Abu Omar probably beat the Syrian inmates in the prison – some of the hostages thought they heard it happening – it was still the British guards they feared the most. When the Beatles were in the room, no one knew what was going to happen.

  One day in December Daniel immediately became apprehensive when they dragged him out to the toilet. He was told to take off his shirt and stand up against the end wall. Ringo was holding a video camera, while the other two coached Daniel to speak into the camera and appeal to all the important and rich people in Denmark to pay a ransom, so that he could go back home to his family. They handed him the front page of a Danish tabloid, which he had to hold up in front of him while asking for help.

  ‘Pull yourself together!’ shouted one of the Brits. ‘Do it again!’

  Daniel repeated the speech, while Ringo filmed.

  ‘Stooooop! You sound like a tourist, like you don’t mean it. Pull yourself together now. Do it again!’

  Daniel tried to sound more frightened and after three or four takes the Brits deemed that the video was finally in the can. He put on his shirt and went back to the cell, where he and Pierre were getting ready for Christmas Eve.

  They had been putting aside food from their meals for weeks. As a rule, they saved a chunk of bread, spread it with margarine and apricot jam and wrapped it in a plastic bag that lay between them while they slept. The feast grew every day as they added another piece of bread and jam. Pierre had convinced Daniel that the bread wouldn’t go mouldy if it was smeared with jam and Daniel regarded the greasy jam roll in the bag almost like a baby that was growing between them – and which they had to guard with their lives, so that they could celebrate Christmas Eve.

  · * ·

  In the days leading up to the first Sunday of Advent, Susanne strung Christmas lights up in the pots and bushes outside their house.

  ‘We’ve got to carry on living as normal, so that we don’t attract attention,’ she thought to herself. She put on some Christmas music, while placing gnomes and spruce twigs in the windows. With tears rolling down her cheeks, she tidied up the Advent wreath that stood on the table, ready for the first candle to be lit.

  Susanne and Kjeld went out and ate some delicious food at an Italian restaurant, and afterwards they laughed for a while at the Christmas show at Vejle Music Hall. One Saturday Kjeld went to a Christmas party with some truck driver friends, while Susanne went to a spa, then they ate steak and drank red wine together. They tried to honour their usual Christmas traditions, both outwardly and at home. As Susanne quoted in her diary: ‘Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.’

  They ate traditional pastries and drank mulled wine, cut down a Christmas tree in the forest and sent a parcel to Daniel in Syria. It contained an old work sweatshirt from Bjerre Gymnastics and Sports School with greetings written on small slips of paper in the pocket. Christina enclosed a school photo of herself and wrote her own message on the back, along with an extract from the same song her mother had been listening to: ‘I love you. I think about you every day and know that you can handle it. It’ll all work out, when the time is right. I miss you so.’ Despite this, every time Susanne stopped in the middle of the Christmas rush, she was overcome with grief.

  ‘Tears are words the heart can’t say,’ she wrote in her diary on 16 December.

  Two days later she read an article online about former Syrian prisoners of ISIS. A fieldworker from Amnesty International in northern Syria had collected eyewitness accounts by hostages released from ISIS prisons in the Raqqa and Aleppo provinces. The prisoners had been held between May and November 2013 and they told the fieldworker how they had been detained by masked, armed men who blindfolded them and drove them to a prison cell, where they were tortured. Susanne tried to forget what she had read and hurried outside to put out some firewood that her younger brother was coming to collect the following day.

  Some evenings, when the sky was clear, she would gaze for a long time at the moon that shone over Hedegård’s brown winter fields and empty roads.

  ‘Can you see the moon, Daniel?’ she asked quietly. ‘I wonder if you can see the moon.’

  It reassured her to think that they both found themselves under the same sky. Then her son didn’t feel so far away after all.

  · * ·

  Arthur spent December 2013 holding meetings with his network in the border region between Turkey and Syria. He was now receiving reports that Daniel, James and the other western hostages had apparently been moved from the children’s hospital to what was thought to be a sawmill
in the industrial area of Sheikh Najjar on the outskirts of Aleppo. The information didn’t surprise him, since any negotiations or access to Daniel had ground to a halt after late August. Arthur was told that the guards had demanded email addresses for all the hostages’ families. A Syrian prisoner who had since been released had overheard them being questioned. He had been sitting in a one-man cell just opposite the western hostages in the basement and heard the British guards question each of them.

  In mid-December James Foley’s family received an email with the kidnappers’ demands. In return for James’s release, they demanded that the family press the US government to release Muslim prisoners, or else they wanted the astronomical sum of €100 million. The email also contained an invitation to the family to send some proof of life questions for James.

  Arthur interpreted the message as a serious opening. Even if the demand was sky high, the kidnappers couldn’t be discounted as negotiators. He had seen before how kidnappers started out with enormous demands in order to suss out the families. The US authorities responded to the Foley family and rejected any question of a prisoner exchange or ransom negotiation. But that didn’t mean that the dialogue should end.

  ‘The starting point for all releases is dialogue,’ Arthur told the Foleys.

  He thought it might be a deliberate strategy to reach out first to a family in the one country where the payment of a ransom seemed the most impossible to achieve.

  The Foley family quickly got an email back with James’s answers to questions about where his brother got married, who had wept during his speech at the wedding and what position James played on the football team. But the communication stopped as suddenly as it had started. After only a few emails, before the family could begin any real negotiations, there was silence from the other end. The kidnappers wrote what they called a final message in which they insisted on €100 million in cash to release James.

  Susanne and Kjeld in Hedegård were sharing a destiny with Diane and John Foley in Rochester. They too were waiting in vain for an email about their son.