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

by Matthew Schrier

  Later that night, a gunshot rang out just outside our door.

  On our fourth night in the room, the door opened and Fenster entered holding a flashlight. He ordered us to pick up our covers and follow him. We kept tripping over the blankets and each other on our way up the stairs, so he gave us permission to uncover our eyes. When we exited the building I stopped in awe at the sight before me.

  We were in what felt like an abandoned city. All around us were these huge battered buildings, with broken windows and no signs of life at all: no lights, no voices, no gunshots; only desolation. After taking it all in I turned to Fenster, who was giving me a confident boast of a look that said, Yeah, this is ours. Standing behind him in the distance was a circular concrete tower about sixty feet tall. In the second or two before we started moving again I studied it well. I always kept my eye out for landmarks in case I ever got out of Syria alive; the tower looked like something I could locate on a satellite view.

  Once we’d cleared the building, Fenster told us to cover our eyes and keep walking. Theo kept losing his grip and dropping his blankets, which slowed us down and pissed off Fenster. We approached a building and another guard headed toward us holding a flashlight. As we entered, I paid close attention through the bottom of my cap. There were no guards stationed by the wide open doors and the entire first floor seemed to be vacant. We were led to a staircase and for once told to go up instead of down. On the second floor we were marched up the hall; we heard the voices of militants coming from within the rooms we passed. Fenster opened a wooden door and told us to get inside. When we did, he immediately slammed the door and locked it. We were in a tiny, freezing room, engulfed in blackness.

  “This is not good,” said Theo.

  “No shit!” I replied.

  What we saw in the few seconds before the door was shut didn’t make us feel any better. There was a window, but it had been concreted over. There was a light, but it had been ripped out. It was colder than the Room of Broken Glass, colder than anywhere we had been kept so far, and there was dust and dirt all over the floor where we had to sleep. Theo was clearly in distress so I took control of the situation and spread out our blankets to make a bed; we crawled under the remaining ones together to keep from getting sick. The room seemed custom-made for suffering, with no ventilation or illumination at all, except for what filtered through the thin crack beneath the door.

  It’s hard to imagine what one could have done to deserve being locked in a dark room. I wondered, was it something I did in the past? Or maybe something I should have done and didn’t? Mostly, though, I just wondered how long they were going to keep us here.

  It was in this place, in the endless cold darkness, that I finally let myself cry. I don’t think Theo noticed because he’d started spending pretty much all day and night under the covers, which honestly was one of the things dragging my morale down the most. General Mohammad had taken me from a cell packed with soldiers who had become my friends and placed me with this guy specifically so I’d have someone to talk to—and now all he did was cower under his blankets, lying there as if he were already dead. He rarely spoke, or even moved. Some days I hated him more than ever because if it weren’t for him I’d still be with the POWs or alone, either of which seemed better than watching someone else silently lose his mind and his humanity. I needed a brother, someone to support me as I supported him. Instead I got Theo.

  When we did talk, it was mostly about the past. I remember telling him all about my youth, specifically how insecure I was, always trying to display an air of swaggering confidence I didn’t feel. He responded by telling me he’d gotten into a lot of fights in high school, where he’d been a tough guy with a reputation for violence. I didn’t believe it for a second and wasn’t sure why he’d bother to lie—probably because he wanted me to beware of some hidden beast within.

  “So what are your books about?” I asked him one day.

  His first was about the students he’d taught at a jail in Vermont, kids who’d been convicted of some pretty serious crimes. It was a one-time thing for him, teaching in a jail, but it gave him enough material for a manuscript. He told me he got a quarter-million-dollar advance, but the book wasn’t a success.

  His second book was called A Journey into Yemen, but when I asked him to describe it he was vague, saying just that it was a history of the country with some “brief discussion” of extremism. Much later I’d find out that the full title was Undercover Muslim: A Journey into Yemen, starring Theo as the “Undercover Muslim.” The book was meant to be an exposé—he moved to Yemen in 2005 and feigned conversion to Islam in order to deceive the locals and gain access to the incredibly secretive mosques and madrasas. This was an act of heresy so severe it would mean an immediate death sentence if it were ever discovered, which is why he went by two different names—he’d had to change his name after the book’s publication, for his own safety. I was unknowingly locked in a cell with someone who had disrespected the religion of our captors so blatantly and publicly that if they ever found out who he really was, he’d wish he were only a CIA agent, and things definitely wouldn’t improve for me, either.

  The guards on the floor were all in their late teens and early twenties and seemed to be running the place with no adult supervision. The one thing I had to be grateful for was the fact that Yassine had been transferred to the new building with us. He still encouraged the guards to abuse Theo, but he always protected me from them, and never raised a hand to me himself.

  Bathroom trips were a nightmare, with all the punks coming out of the woodwork to jeer at us and whip our elbows and the backs of our knees as we walked the hallway like a gauntlet. Occasionally I took a lash to the head from Sancho. Past the staircase the jihadis had spread sheets over the ground, but when we got there they’d kick them aside and make us continue on the dirty floor as if we weren’t good enough to walk on them. As we passed one of the rooms they slept and hung out in, I noticed a number on the door and beds inside. The place looked like it had been a dormitory before the war.

  The bathroom was all white with a high window through which we could see a patch of sky. There was one squat toilet stall and two showers. While we were in there the jihadis would gather by the door to hurl insults and laugh at us. One time, a kid I had never seen before and never saw again gave me a lesson on Islam while I was standing there waiting my turn. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

  “You’re going to hell!” he said fiercely, eyes glittering. “You’re not a Muslim! You’re going to hell! You’re all going to hell! Your mother is going to hell!”

  As Theo translated, I just stood there looking at this mindless little turd, fascinated. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that I was going to hell, when here I thought I was already there. He would have been happy to kill us. That passion and intensity of belief in someone so young was a frightening thing, because these are the kids who can be talked into blowing themselves up, or flying planes into buildings.

  The water was often out at this point, so it wasn’t uncommon to enter the stall to find the hole in the ground completely filled with the shit of what looked like twenty men, making it impossible to empty our piss bottles there. This also meant there was no way for us to clean ourselves up after using the toilet, and one time I had to go bad.

  “Yassine, please, man, give us a pail of water,” I begged.

  “No,” he answered sternly, “there is no water.”

  I put my hands to the sides of my head in frustration. “Come on, Yassine!”

  “All right, one second.”

  He left the bathroom and returned a few seconds later with three tissues—two for me and one for Theo.

  I rarely got much time to relieve myself because Yassine and the boys would usually start beating on Theo as soon as I was in the stall, and his screams forced me to hurry as much as possible in order to get him inside. I’d often emerge to find him already on the wet, filthy floor, screaming “Please, please, please!” in A
rabic with one arm raised above his head. They kept a special cable in the bathroom just for him, thick and black like the one they did my feet with.

  Whack! Whack! Whack!

  Both the blows and Theo’s screams were especially loud this day.

  “All right, I’m almost done!” I yelled, pulling up my pants.

  When I stepped out Theo was on the ground and Dingleberry, who got his name because he was a little shit, was standing over him with the cable and a big smile, Yassine egging him on from the sidelines. While I was in the stall they’d managed to thrash Theo’s arm and hand badly enough that they’d knocked off one of his fingernails. I’d told him a hundred times to stop falling on his back right away like he did and to stand and take it instead, because they bring that cable down with a lot more force than when they lash it sideways, but either he didn’t listen or he just couldn’t help it.

  “Go on, man, go,” I said, and Theo got up and into the stall. “So Yassine, you kill Bashar yet?”

  “No, not yet, but I will,” he answered, smiling.

  “Yeah, no doubt. Can I photograph it?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right!”

  It was Yassine and conversations like this that got me through the bathroom trips mostly unharmed. Unfortunately, sometimes Bubbles was there instead, and Bubbles was dead set on breaking me, to be the hero who got my confession. One day when I came out of the stall I found Bubbles hitting Theo with a thin piece of wood that looked like molding for a door while the usual punks gathered around and laughed. He moved from hitting him on the arm to his back, and Theo fell to the ground like always, one hand raised in submission.

  Now Bubbles turned to me. Theo translated without getting up.

  “Admit that you are a CIA agent,” Bubbles demanded.

  “La,” I said.

  “Turn around and face the wall,” he ordered. I did. “Now, speak Arabic.”

  To appease him I began spitting out what little Arabic I knew, but I did this in the most condescending tone possible, thinking he wouldn’t pick up on it. But Bubbles immediately cut me off, yelling:

  “Tell him to talk normal!”

  I continued, this time in my regular voice, until I felt a slight tug on my vest.

  “He wants you to take it off,” said Theo.

  I removed the vest. Then he tugged on my hoodie and I removed that too. Now I stood in the white sleeveless tee shirt Yassine had given me—with part of my shoulder tattoo visible. Not only are tattoos in general a sin in Islam, I knew that this one in particular could cause me considerable problems. It was a picture of Leo Tolstoy as an old man, with a long gray beard that made him look Hasidic. Aside from the “Jewishness” of the figure, the fact that Russia was supplying the regime with the bulk of their weapons meant that I had no desire to explain who the guy was. For this reason I had worked hard to keep Leo totally concealed—and I had, until now. Bubbles noticed the tattoo immediately and pulled my shirt aside to expose the rest of it.

  “He wants to know who that is,” Theo translated.

  “It looks like a Jew,” said one of the guards.

  “Tell him it’s just an old man I picked off the wall in the tattoo parlor,” I said. “Tell him it’s a wizard.”

  Theo translated but Bubbles was less than convinced, so we settled on Walt Whitman. Then Bubbles tugged on my tee shirt. I took it off and stood there in the freezing cold, exposed in front of everyone, keeping myself turned to the wall to conceal my other tattoo.

  “He says this is your last chance to confess,” said Theo. “Just do it.”

  “And be treated like this?” I asked, turning slightly and motioning to him where he still lay, cowering on the floor.

  I looked Bubbles right in the eye.

  “No!” I said defiantly, in English.

  Bubbles instructed one of the guards to return Theo to our cell so he could tend to me alone. Once it was just the two of us he wasted no time in getting to work.

  Lash!

  I screamed as a strip of garden hose landed on my back.

  Lash! Lash! Lash! Lash! Lash! Lash! Lash!

  The bathroom was an echo chamber and my screams must have reached every corner of the building. And then, as suddenly as he’d begun, Bubbles stopped. I don’t know if he saw that I wasn’t going to break or he just didn’t want to get in trouble with management for inflicting too much damage upon me, but something made him think twice about continuing, and as I stood waiting for another blow he abruptly reached around me and pulled my shirt from where it rested on the radiator. I looked at him and he nodded for me to get dressed. I didn’t hesitate. Sancho appeared to grab me by the arm and lead me back to the cell, where Theo was sitting on the blankets. Sancho ordered me to get on my knees and place my head to the wall, then with his thick cable dealt me a blow to the elbow that made me shriek at the top of my lungs. He left; the door slammed behind him.

  At that point I was still determined never to admit I was a spy under any circumstances, if only to avoid being placed in the same category as Theo, who’d “confessed” after one lash to the feet and was now the prisoner on which every jihadi vented his hatred. Mine was a good strategy, but it would not stand the tests of time and torture.

  Sometimes we’d go long stretches without being taken to the bathroom—the record was two and a half days. Since we had our piss bottles and were hardly being fed, most of the time this wasn’t really a problem. Other times it was. We had a bucket, but at this point I still refused to take a dump in it, just on principle.

  “Don’t knock on the door,” Theo would warn me.

  “No, fuck that!” I’d yell back. “I’m knocking!”

  The rules in this prison were different than the last: we weren’t allowed to knock on the door; if we did, we were told, we would be punished. This threat wasn’t enough to deter me when I really had to go, and so when the time came, I knocked and yelled the same phrase over and over, figuring I was bound to annoy them into taking me to relieve myself, eventually.

  “Bathroom, please, bathroom!” I bellowed, pounding on the door.

  I would do this for as long as it took—and sometimes it took hours.

  Usually, that was the end of it: I got to shit in a toilet like a human being, and despite their threats, no one was punished—a win-win. However, on other occasions we got a different reaction:

  “Who knock door?” we heard Sancho scream once as he marched toward our cell.

  “Oh shit, it’s Sancho,” said Theo, trembling.

  “I did!” I yelled, knocking some more.

  A second later the door opened and standing before me was a vexed Sancho, holding a thick rope. Yassine was with him.

  “Who knock door?” Yassine asked me, enraged.

  “I did,” I said.

  We stared into each other’s eyes for a second, and then Yassine abruptly turned his attention toward Theo, ran over to him, and began beating the shit out of him. Sancho joined in, bringing the rope down on Theo’s back again and again as Yassine kicked him and yelled about the knocking. I tried to stop them, but my attempts were futile.

  “Yassine, wait!” I said pleadingly. “It was me! I knocked!”

  It didn’t matter. They got in a few last shots and then Yassine turned to me, jabbing his finger at my chest.

  “Don’t knock on the door!” he said, and as they left, he slammed it behind them.

  I stood there, guilty and untouched, as Theo moaned on the floor.

  “Oh shit, dude, you okay?”

  “No!” Theo yelled. “Don’t knock on the door!”

  I told him I wouldn’t, but I knew that this was a lie. If I really had to go or was painfully hungry, I would be back at that door. Maybe that seems hard to understand, but I had drawn a line. In my mind I was a human being, and human beings do not shit in buckets. We cry two tears in them.

  Starvation: I had read about it, but the reality was worse than I had imagined—it wasn’t just the hunger, it was being so
completely at the mercy of others. We were usually fed once a day, but there was no guarantee we would be. Most days it was a piece of bread for each of us and a small cup of yogurt, or a bit of halawa on a saucer for us to share. We rarely saw food arrive before Asr, the third prayer of the day, which took place in the late afternoon. Sometimes it would come even later, long after Isha in the late evening. When Yassine delivered our meals I could usually get an extra piece of bread out of him for me and Theo to split. I tried to eat as little of the bread as possible to save it for the next day. It was tough waking up hungry, just lying there listening for the call to prayer, and hoping to be fed. At times while on bathroom runs I would beg Yassine to feed us that night.

  “Please, don’t starve us,” I said. “Feed us, Yassine. Please, feed us.”

  “You will eat well tonight, Inshallah,” he would always answer, but he rarely delivered on that promise.

  Once in a while we got a warm meal, which Yassine served to us as if he were doing us a favor—a little plastic bucket with rice and other leftovers dumped in it. Theo and I would pass the bucket back and forth, taking turns pinching up mouthfuls with our bread. I don’t think we were ever full once, not the entire time we were there.

  Nights when they hadn’t fed us during the day were the most painful and seemed to last forever. By then any bread we had saved would be long gone. I would lie there with barely enough energy to move, alert to every footstep I heard, hoping it was someone coming to feed us, their pets. Most of the time the footsteps just walked right past our door. I would babble during these times. I don’t remember what I talked about but it drove Theo crazy, and if he said something I didn’t like or agree with, I’d practically bite his head off. It’s horrible, waiting to be fed. It makes you feel like an abused dog, stuffed into a crate and forgotten. Sometimes they never came at all.

  We’d been in the darkness for a few days when the emir came to check on us, accompanied by a bunch of the guards. The door was open and the hallway was illuminated—the electricity was on. We were given permission to turn from the wall and face him.