The Dawn Prayer[Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison]

by Matthew Schrier

  After I checked my gear thoroughly and was certain I was free of critters, I started to pull my clothes back on. As I zipped up my vest, a short man with more salt than pepper in his hair walked over to my bed, put on my slippers, and walked off toward the small bathroom at the far end of our cell.

  “Excuse me, what do you think you’re doin’?” I asked.

  He just kept going, ignoring me, so I looked at Oqba.

  “Did he just steal my slippers?”

  “He’s the boss,” said Oqba.

  “Well, what makes him the boss?”

  “He’s the oldest.”

  “He’s the oldest? That’s how you pick your bosses?” I asked, incredulous. “What is this, kindergarten?”

  I’m not normally a confrontational person, but this being my first time as an outsider in a terrorist prison, I thought it would be a good idea to assert myself sooner rather than later, to prove I wasn’t a punk and avoid any further misunderstandings. “Well, he may be your boss,” I told Oqba, “but he’s not mine, and I’ll be taking my slippers back when he gets done in there.”

  “We share everything here,” said Oqba mildly.

  As I looked around, I noticed that—aside from the two pairs of boots in the middle—my slippers were the only shoes in the room. This made me feel like kind of a jackass.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Oqba.

  “That’s quite all right, my friend,” he said sincerely.

  When the Boss came out of the bathroom, he walked directly over to me and took off the slippers, leaving them exactly where he’d found them. I later learned that he wasn’t the boss just because he was the oldest—he was also a colonel, and a tough-ass colonel at that. The man took nine bullets from an AK-47 when he and three other officers were ambushed in a car by the FSA. He was the only one who survived.

  Within minutes I found myself over by Oqba, the Boss, and several other prisoners; among them Shareef, the tall and lanky captain with the shot-up hand, and Fadaar, the lieutenant colonel, who was extremely good-looking, with piercing blue eyes and a commanding presence. Oqba’s earlier request that I refrain from talking to him (and everyone else in the room) had been seemingly forgotten. Now he was my way of connecting to the others, and not just as a translator, but as a friend.

  As I stood talking with the group, they kept patting the blankets and inviting me to sit with them.

  “No way, man, I’m cool here,” I said, flattered but also in no hurry to be infested. “You guys are crawling with bedbugs and I wanna hold them off as long as possible—no offense.”

  This they understood, and Rias offered me a piece of his flatbread. It was about the same length and width as a rolling paper, so after accepting it I rolled it up like a joint, licked the edge, and put it in my mouth, pretending to light it with an invisible match. The men were transfixed by my actions. I took a big imaginary hit and held it in.

  “Hashish,” I croaked, as if my lungs were full of smoke, and then I coughed while passing the “doobie” to Rias.

  Everyone—especially the Boss—started laughing hysterically as Rias hit the joint. When he passed it back to me I ate it, and he handed me another piece of bread. For the next few hours we talked about cigarettes, beer, and of course, women. I was truly surprised by how open-minded and laid-back the Alawites were.

  “Jennifer Lopez,” said Shareef, who spoke a little English.

  “Oooh, Jennifer,” I said, drawing a line straight down through the air, ending in a big curve to represent her ass before giving it an imaginary slap.

  “Yes!” said Shareef.

  All the guys agreed.

  “Angelina Jolie,” Shareef said next.

  “Oh, Angelina, I love Angie,” I said, puckering my lips.

  “Britney Spears!” Shareef cried enthusiastically, pointing at me.

  “Fuuuck that crack whore!” I bellowed, waving her off like the bum she was.

  The laughter that exploded once Oqba translated this was epic. I was honestly surprised they had a translation for that. By the next time the lights went out, I no longer felt like an outsider.

  A little while later after the lights came back on, I sat talking to Oqba, just the two of us. He had one rule for our conversations:

  “Don’t ask any personal questions of me,” he said seriously.

  And this meant anything.

  “So, where are you from?” I asked innocently that first evening.

  “I told you—don’t ask me anything personal,” said Oqba, with a cold stare.

  “But you just asked me how many women I’ve fucked!”

  (I totally lied when I answered that one, too—fuck him, he wouldn’t even tell me where he was from!)

  He’d reacted the same way when I asked if he was married or had kids. At first I thought it might have been because his family had been killed, but I’d later find out it wasn’t. He just didn’t want to tell me.

  “January seventh, 2013,” I whispered to myself, lying on my back in the dark.

  I said the date every day, sometimes five times a day, so I wouldn’t lose track.

  Just an ocean of misery as I lay in the blackness, staring at the feeble light shining through the vents on the doors from whatever light source the jihadis resorted to when the power was out. It was darker here than in my other room, and when the electricity was out it was almost impossible to tell whether it was night or day. There was no window in the cell, except in the bathroom, which stunk so bad you didn’t spend any more time in there than you had to. In the background, our soundtrack was the screaming of someone being tortured and a twelve-year-old boy, Abu Jaz, walking around singing the Koran as if nothing were happening.

  Whack! Whack! Whack!

  Jesus Christ, the only difference here was that it was even closer.

  I started pacing again in the darkness. I couldn’t stop thinking about how my mother was going to feel when she heard her only son had been kidnapped by terrorists. As I thought of this I started working up to my first real cry. Just as a tear was sliding from my eye I heard my name ring out in the darkness.

  “Matthew,” said Oqba.

  “Yeah?”

  “Come here, sit down.”

  I did, and he started speaking to me in a soft, melodic tone.

  “Do you like Michael Bolton?”

  “Well, I really only know maybe two of his songs,” I said, caught off guard.

  “I used to love to drive my car and listen to Michael Bolton.” He sang a line of some song I had never heard. “Do you know that one?”

  “No, I only know, like, ‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’”

  “You are thinking of your mother right now?” he asked me.

  “Yeah—what if they cut my head off and put it on the internet? She’ll drop dead and it’ll be all because of me.”

  I started to tear up again and began berating myself for being such a selfish prick—going off to Syria and getting myself kidnapped—but Oqba cut me off.

  “Matthew, you are an American. You are strong. You are my brother.” He grabbed me by the hand. “Now, no more of this; not here.”

  I was so embarrassed. I felt like such a pussy all of a sudden.

  “Yeah, all right, never again,” I said gratefully. “Thank you.”

  That was the last time I came close to crying in front of the men. Still, it can be good to cry, as long as nobody sees it. It keeps you human and that keeps you hungry to survive—more and more with each passing day, in a weird way, because what was the point of going through this hell if you were only going to die at the end?

  To pass the time I started playing stories from my past over in my head, watching them like movies, going through every scene, over and over again, word for word. Sometimes I would start laughing at all the dumb shit I had thought up over the years and the crazy guy they’d put me next to would start laughing along with me. Poor Crazy Mohammad, man, they’d really fucked him up. His wrists and ankles were so swollen they looked like they
were about to burst. Once in a while I would talk to him, even though I knew he didn’t understand a word of what I said, and he would just giggle. One time I asked him what his favorite color was—he didn’t understand the question—and then I just moved on to Angelina Jolie. That he understood. If there was one thing they all understood it was Angelina. Too bad we couldn’t get a big poster of her. We could’ve used it cover up our burrow hole, if only one of us could’ve gotten his hands on a rock hammer.

  Around this time I started to examine the moments leading up to my abduction, replaying them like one of my stories. After we left Aleppo, Abu Mohammad drove up the enormous steel arch with “Industrial City” written on it in huge English letters. This was a major checkpoint, the largest I had seen in my travels around the country, with at least thirty rebels manning it. When Abu Mohammad tried to drive through, a rebel knocked on my window and he pulled over. After getting out and having a short conversation, he jumped back in again and turned the taxi around. This was what should have set off alarms in my head, but I just assumed the road beyond the checkpoint had been bombed from the air and we had to find another route. I was wrong—less than ten minutes later I was in the back of the Cherokee with the man in black.

  The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that Abu Mohammad—and my host in Aleppo, who’d introduced me to him—had set me up. He had an AK-47 in the car, but didn’t reach for it when they came at us. He insisted on being paid up-front for the ride and then made four stops before finally leaving the city. And even before all that, he just seemed . . . off.

  When I told Oqba my thoughts on the subject, he agreed with me right away.

  “You are a very smart man,” he said.

  I felt myself tuning in to Edmond Dantés the more I thought about it; that old Bible quote Tolstoy used in the beginning of Anna Karenina constantly floating around in my head: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”

  One night when the lights were out, General Mohammad paid us a visit with two of his subordinates. One was a guy I called Fenster (because he mumbled like Benicio Del Toro’s character in The Usual Suspects and kind of resembled him, too); the other one, pudgy with an expression of stone, was the type who just crackled with negative energy, a guy you knew was capable of horrific acts. He stood there impassively, shining his flashlight in our faces one by one like he was choosing his daily sacrifice. Mohammad, on the other hand, was in high spirits, joking around and laughing, telling us that we would all be going home soon, Inshallah—“by the will of God.” After a few minutes of this the lights came on and he left the room, returning a minute later with a blue plastic tub and an electric heater so we could bathe.

  Later he came over and sat down next to me on the floor.

  “Jumu’ahhhh!” he said like always, with a smile.

  “How you doin’, Mohammad?” I asked.

  We went back and forth for the next few minutes.

  “You C-I-A?” he asked me.

  “Nah, man,” I answered.

  “Jumu’ah, bin Laden a good man.”

  I sat there, trying to think of something to say to that.

  “Well, he definitely was fascinating,” I allowed, shivering.

  “You cold?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He said something to Fenster that sent him from the room, and a minute later he came back holding another blanket for me. Fenster was someone who I later heard had said he enjoyed torturing people because “it brought him closer to God,” and I could feel the jealousy of everyone around me. All prisoners got two blankets, if they were lucky, and now I had four. Mohammad liked me, and everyone knew it. I later found out from Ali that he was the one who had informed the men I was coming to be their new cellmate, and that I was not to be bothered. This was a serious message to them: fuck with Jumu’ah and there will be blood.

  It was on my fifth day with the POWs that the door opened and the Shabiha were ushered into the room. There were thirteen of them, all dressed in civilian clothing, ranging from their early twenties to sixty or so. Shabiha were not treated with the same respect as the soldiers. They were basically civilians who’d taken up arms to fight on the side of the regime, which made them far more despised by the opposition—al-Nusra, at least the group we were with, could respect a soldier’s duty to fight, whereas a Shabiha was just a traitor who’d turned his back on the revolution. Their chances of survival in an environment like this were much slimmer than mine given their lack of value.

  I sensed an immediate shift in the room’s mood as the new inmates congregated in small groups all over the place. The cell was now crowded beyond its capacity; everyone was uncomfortable. None of the Shabiha had been given blankets, and I was ready to have to fight to keep what was mine if it came to that. There was an unspoken tension in the air. When I heard someone unlocking the door I remember praying to hear my name called so I could just be judged and go home already.

  “Jumu’ah,” said a young voice.

  “Yes!”

  The voice told me to grab my blankets and follow him, which I did. Looking out through the bottom of my cap as we walked down the hallway, I saw a crowd of jihadis. We stopped at a door, and a second later I found myself locked back up, in an empty room this time.

  Solitary again.

  The new room was identical to the one I had been placed in my first day as a prisoner; the only difference was that this one had five blankets neatly folded into a bed on a plastic mat, bringing my grand total of blankets up to nine. Pipes ran from one side of the room to the other just below the windows, and within minutes I was testing them to see whether they were strong enough to support my weight. Once I was sure they were, I hoisted myself up on them and pulled open the window. The bars over it didn’t budge no matter how hard I yanked at them. There was a door over the window too, of course, but once I was lying against the bars I could see around the sides of it. There was open ground to my left, and if only I could figure a way out of that window I thought it would be an easy escape.

  When I got down and dusted myself off, I noticed the best part of the room: it had a light switch. I turned it on, but the power was still out. A little while later, though, shortly after it got dark, the lights flickered on. I sat on my bed with a huge smile on my face, thanking God over and over again for giving me light. One night when I was with the POWs, I had awoken to find everyone asleep but the lights still on, so I got up and hit the switch. As soon as I did, I heard Oqba’s voice.

  “Can you turn the lights back on, please?”

  I did what he asked and then motioned to everyone in the room.

  “But why? Everyone’s sleeping.”

  “I do not like the darkness,” he said.

  Now I understood. Light is one of those things we take for granted—when you’re no longer in control of it, you realize its power. I resolved to myself that the lights would always stay on in this room, as long as the electricity was running, even while I slept. Within an hour, the door opened and one of the guards blurted something in Arabic and hit the switch. Even though I didn’t understand a word that came out of his mouth I knew what he’d said, but as soon as he left I turned the light back on anyway. A few minutes later he returned, and when he saw the lights on he ran off screaming in anger. He returned with the Ghost Man.

  “You will leave the lights out,” said the Ghost Man sternly.

  “Come on, man, can I have a candle then?”

  “No.” And they killed the lights and shut the door.

  Back in black—not my best color.

  “I gotta get outta here,” I whispered into the dark.

  When the Little Judge came to pay me a visit, I was lying down with my back to the door. Someone entered and tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and saw a short, skinny man with glasses, standing over me wearing a black judge’s robe open over a leather motorcycle jacket. He kind of resembled an Arab Himmler. You know the type—a little fucking weasel who could only rise to power in a time of wa
r, thanks to his willingness to commit the atrocious acts no sane or rational being would ever even consider.

  “Matthew?” he asked. He looked at me with unmistakable disgust.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  And that was it. He left without saying another word. I realized immediately that he was the same guy the Ghost Man had brought in the time I’d offered ten grand for my release, and kicked myself for not trying to engage him. Later, as a guard led me past the office on the way back from the bathroom, I tried to say something that would grab his attention.

  “If I could speak to the judge I sure would be grateful,” I said loudly, right at the office door.

  A few minutes after I was put back in my room, the door opened and there he was. He couldn’t have been more than 120 pounds soaking wet and he spoke in a high-pitched voice that made my blood run cold.

  “Matthew, what do you want?” he asked me impatiently, in English.

  “I just want to introduce myself to you,” I said, rising with my hand out. “My name—”

  “No,” he said, motioning for me to stay on the floor when I spoke to him. He didn’t shake my hand either—the first person there not to do so.

  “My name is Matthew Schrier and I’m a freelance photographer from America,” I said, from back on the floor.

  He stood there staring at me for a moment, and then turned and left the room. A few hours had passed when he returned, this time with a piece of paper with all my credit card numbers written on it.

  “What are the passwords?” he asked, holding it out to me.

  “Five zero five zero, but that will only work for the ATM cards. The rest are just credit cards,” I answered.

  I knew he wanted my online account passwords, but it was obvious that his English was too limited to express this, so every time he asked I just repeated the same thing. After a few rounds of this, frustrated, he left the room.

  The Little Judge may not have been much to look at, but the more I got to know him the sharper and more cunning he would prove to be. It didn’t take me long to realize that he was unlike any of the other high-level figures I would meet there. He had a different kind of power than Mohammad. I got the impression that he was on the intelligence side of al-Nusra, which was appropriate, because if there was one thing the Little Judge was, it was intelligent.