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

by Matthew Schrier

  About two weeks later, on March ninth, we did the same thing for Theo’s mother on her birthday. When I woke up that morning I could see an ocean of emotions racing through him as he sat with his back to the wall. It was the only time I ever really saw him look concerned for another person, and I made sure to be just as supportive of him as he had been of me.

  The next morning, the door opened and it was Yassine and Sancho, holding hand ties. They were moving us again. Our time in hell had finally come to an end.

  THE HOSPITAL II

  MARCH 10, 2013

  When they led us outside, I was surprised at how beautiful the weather had become over the past month. Our room was always freezing, so once in the sunlight the change in temperature hit us hard. I felt my ski cap–blindfold becoming saturated with perspiration as I looked out beneath it at the crowd of jihadis standing around, waiting to take us wherever we were going. This time we were laid shoulder to shoulder instead of head to foot, and once we were in the trunk of the SUV they piled wool blankets on top of us until we could barely breathe. Within minutes my clothes were drenched with sweat and I leaned forward to pull off my hat. Yassine opened the back door, reached through to where Theo was lying, and started punching him on the top of the head over and over again like he was knocking on a door, all the while carrying on a conversation with one of his friends as if it were the most normal thing in the world. A few minutes later we were on the road, headed toward the unknown with General Mohammad’s voice blaring from the front seat.

  About an hour had passed when we arrived; we were taken from the trunk and led into a building, down again, a flight of stairs to the basement. Once we were alone and locked inside a room, Theo and I lifted our blindfolds—to see that we were in the exact same cell they had taken us from over a month before. Nothing had changed except that the window was no longer blocked by bags of gravel, and a thick cable was fed into the cell between the bars and then through a hole in the concrete wall.

  “Thank God!” I said. “We’re home!”

  Theo felt the same. We were both hugely relieved to find ourselves brought back to the hospital, although we were still unclear about whether this meant our punishment for the door incident was over. Before we were transported I’d pocketed a piece of bread that I was saving; once we were alone I broke it out to avoid it being confiscated in case they searched us.

  “Here,” I said, holding half out to Theo.

  “No,” he said. “That’s yours.”

  “No, look—we may fight about everything, but when it comes to food and water we’re brothers, and we share everything.” I handed him his piece, and we ate.

  We kept expecting either the Little Judge or Mohammad to pay us a visit, to warn us against messing with the door again, or the cable running through the room, but neither came. Instead, a guard of around twenty popped in to take us to the bathroom, a cheerful new recruit with a baby face and a big head of thick black hair above it.

  After the guard locked us in the bathroom I noticed a bag of old bread sitting on the radiator, and we ripped into it. This stale bread was actually trash, but since wasting food is considered haram, they often left a stockpile of it here. We didn’t know whether they planned to keep starving us, so to be on the safe side we stuffed our mouths and pockets with whatever we could. A few minutes after we were returned to our cell the new recruit was back again, this time with fresh bread and a big bowl of steaming-hot Mamouniyeh, a sweet porridge-like dish that tastes like heaven when you’ve just spent more than a month being starved in hell.

  As the days passed, not only were we no longer being starved, we were fed better than ever. The last time we’d been here the standard had been two meals a day; now we got three. They brought us some extra clothes and three blankets apiece, which was a big step down from the nine that I’d had before we left for the electrical institute, but I guess in their view I did bite the hand that fed me and there was obviously no coming back from that.

  By March fifteenth it almost felt like we’d never been gone—except for Theo’s behavior. It had been five days since our return and he was still spending all his time under the covers, only emerging to eat or hunt for bedbugs. Sometimes he’d humor me with a round of 20 Questions if I annoyed him long enough, but not often. To me this was more than a game, it was an important exercise to keep our minds active. Theo didn’t care, though, because he seemed to have barely any mind left.

  But that night something happened, something so shocking it even drew Theo out of his blanket cave: we got a new cellmate. We’d been purposely isolated, kept apart from other prisoners for the almost three months we’d been together. When the door opened and a man hopped in on one leg, smiling and joking with the guards, we couldn’t have been more surprised if Navy SEALs had stormed the castle to rescue us. As soon as the door shut I stood up, extended my hand, and introduced myself. His name was Abdelatif.

  “Are you American?” he asked, in perfect English.

  When I said I was, he lit up and started talking—he had lived in the States for twelve years, until his deportation back to Morocco five years earlier for falsifying his personal information on a Banana Republic job application, and he still had two wives and three children in the US. I spread my blankets out to share, as they hadn’t yet given any to the Moroccan, and we all took a seat. After so long with only Theo to talk to, the presence of another person who spoke my language was almost intoxicating. For all his hermit tendencies, Theo seemed to feel the same way—he was giddy as a schoolgirl, lying propped up on his elbows with a big smile on his pale face.

  I received my second shock of the evening after Abdelatif asked who I was and what I was doing in Syria. When I told him I was a photographer, his face changed as if he’d had a sudden epiphany.

  “Were you tortured?” he asked, sounding as if he already knew the answer.

  “Yeah, how did you know?”

  “Because I was in the room when they did it to you! I heard you saying Ana moswer! Ana moswer! Did you know there was an old man hanging by his wrists from a pipe right above your head?”

  “No . . .”

  And then there were three.

  Abdelatif’s story was fascinating, but full of lies so fantastic it was hard to believe there was a person on earth foolish enough to believe them, lies about everything from his occupation to the events leading up to his kidnapping. At thirty-two, he was the youngest of the three of us. He said he’d been trained as a cardiologist at an American university, and was one year from finishing his program, but I had my doubts. He’d been shot in the leg when the jihadis took him a month ago, and upon lifting his pants leg we saw that his entire thigh was filled with some kind of fluid and looked like it was ready to explode, though the wound had healed. Despite his supposed medical training he was baffled by this and kept asking us to diagnose him. I told him I didn’t know, but to put him at ease said his femur probably wasn’t broken (though we could feel the bone poking out). I almost laughed in the doctor’s face at his response:

  “What’s a femur?” he asked seriously.

  His excuse for not knowing about things like femurs was that his primary focus had been cardiology, so then I asked if he knew what an arrhythmia was and he didn’t have a clue. Needless to say, after hearing that he’d been diagnosing and prescribing medications to the Syrian population when he was grabbed I was pretty sure I knew at least one of the reasons he’d been arrested, though he claimed to have no idea.

  Abdelatif came to Syria from Morocco to aid the jihadis as a fake doctor. He arrived in early December after running away from home because of a brutal argument he’d had with his father, stealing his sister’s car and selling it so he could fund the trip. Once in Syria and posing as a doctor, he linked up with some FSA and Jabhat al-Nusra fighters from the town of Anadan, just north of Aleppo; started his own practice; and to hear him tell it, went on to save over 250 lives with nothing more than antibiotics.

  Another cataclysmic error h
e made was marrying a veiled woman in her early thirties—women here usually marry young, and this one had waited years and what she got was a con man. Now this was a big deal. Not just because marriage is sacred, but because in the Muslim world, deciding to get married is a lot more involved than just getting on your knee and popping the question. You need to get permission from the woman’s father and after that you have to hand over a dowry. Abdelatif said he’d done all this, and on the night of the wedding, right after the ceremony, he decided to take a ride with his new brother-in-law. About fifty feet from the headquarters of a Jabhat al-Nusra katiba that he thought were his friends, a car cut them off and four armed gunmen jumped out with their AKs raised. One fired a shot through the center of Abdelatif’s windshield as a warning, but the Moroccan was impervious to fear and went for his pistol . . . which he dropped in the car after fumbling with it. His new brother-in-law ran off into the night, taking a bullet to the shoulder on the way, while Abdelatif got out and fought off all four men without a weapon for forty-five minutes, Bruce Lee style. You see, he had twenty years of Muay Thai martial arts training, or “My Thai,” as he pronounced it, and was a lethal weapon. In the end, the jihadis were only able to subdue him by pressing a pistol against his thigh and pulling the trigger. After that, he was blindfolded and thrown in the trunk of the car. They didn’t give him a tourniquet until he started banging on the roof of the trunk and begging them to pull over. About forty-five minutes later he arrived at the hospital, where he was greeted by someone sticking a pistol in his mouth and telling him he was a dead man before pulling him from the trunk and tossing him on the ground to be kicked and stomped by a group of men.

  Once inside he was placed on a gurney with a few parasite-infested blankets for a mattress and cuffed to the frame by his ankle and wrist before being wheeled into the filthy boiler room. There he lay for a week with a catheter emptying out into a bucket on the floor. That week had left its mark: he had a scar around his ankle from the handcuffs and this awful infection that had eaten through the entire back of his heel where it had rested against the metal bed frame. It was a sickly yellowish purple; I thought it was gangrene, it was so rotted. Twice a day someone came to feed him, but when he asked for water he was almost always denied—and all the while, the torture and the screaming continued in the boiler room, right there in front of him.

  Whatever the reasons for his arrest, it was clear that his offenses had called for the harshest of treatment. Occasionally he’d received a visit from a man named Kawa, who was in charge of investigating him and his case. When I asked him to describe Kawa, Abdelatif said he was “the short one, with glasses.” It was the Little Judge. We finally knew his name.

  Within a few hours, Abdelatif and I were friends. He may have been a liar, but at least he had a sense of humor—after almost two months with Theo, this was the most refreshing thing God could have given me besides freedom. Abdelatif did pledge his allegiance to al-Nusra, but he also spoke extremely highly of America and said it was his dream to move back there someday. The fact that he loved rap music, women, and American movies and TV gave us plenty to talk about. In fact, I could not have been more surprised to learn what his favorite sitcom was.

  “You like Curb Your Enthusiasm?” I asked, shocked.

  “That’s my nigga!” he said—referring to Larry David.

  I was surprised they hadn’t shot him for that.

  When the guards finally brought him some blankets, we spread his on top of mine to maximize our comfort and slept side by side. As for Theo, his excitement over our new cellmate waned once we started talking about American pop culture—a subject even a Moroccan terrorist knew more about than he did—and he’d retreated back under his own blankets. We invited him to join us several times, but he stayed put the rest of the night while Abdelatif and I stayed up, telling stories about where we came from and the people we knew there, and about life here as well.

  “What’s he saying?” I asked, referring to an inmate up the hall, who we could hear banging on his door and yelling.

  “He’s hungry,” said the Moroccan. It had to be at least 2 AM, so the request for room service seemed a little much.

  “What does he think this is, his mother’s house?” I asked.

  About half an hour later, one of the guards finally came to see what all the knocking was about. Their voices carried easily down the quiet hall, and the Moroccan and I just about fell over laughing when he translated the guard’s response:

  “What do you think this is, your mother’s house?”

  Needless to say, the guy got nothing.

  When we heard the Adhan calling everyone to prayer we couldn’t believe it was morning already. By the time we passed out it was broad daylight, and I felt better than I had since being thrown in with Theo. I finally had someone to really talk to. It’s amazing how little a difference in ideology means when two people are tossed into the same boat heading toward the same waterfall—or so I thought, anyway.

  Abdelatif was shocked to see how poorly Theo was treated, and in the beginning, he pitied him. Because he was a Sunni and a jihadi, he was pretty sure that he was going to be released soon, so he gave Theo his Nike jumpsuit jacket, figuring that he wouldn’t be needing it for long. I told him not to offer it and Theo not to accept, being that the room was cold and there was no guarantee that Abdelatif was going anywhere—not to mention that, as nasty as it was, Theo already had a jacket—but Abdelatif wasn’t worried about the temperature and said Allah rewards those who give charity to the less fortunate. However, potential rewards from Allah were something Abdelatif was willing to forgo if it gave him a better chance of freedom, as we learned the next morning when the door opened and Fenster asked if we needed to use the bathroom.

  “No, I’m good,” I said, closing my eyes to go back to sleep.

  “No thanks,” Abdelatif said in Arabic, doing the same.

  “I have to go,” said Theo, standing up.

  “No, you can wait, dog!” Fenster barked, and slammed the door.

  “Damn, Theo!” said Abdelatif. “What did you do to make them hate you so much?”

  “Nothing,” Theo insisted.

  Still, seeing this made Abdelatif worry that being nice to Theo could jeopardize his release and lead to persecution from the guards, so he asked for his jacket back. Theo took it off and handed it over, but Abdelatif was so disgusted by the foul odor it emitted after only a day in Theo’s possession that he gave it back again. I would have offered to wash and return it, seeing as the man now had no jacket and the room was chilly, but Theo accepted it without a word.

  Since returning from the electrical institute, Theo had become increasingly distant and his behavior increasingly disturbing. One morning we caught him on his elbows and knees with a blanket pulled all the way over his head, playing with the bedbugs he had just removed from his clothing. I watched this as I paced, and it really started to get under my skin.

  “Theo, come on, what are you doin’, naming them?”

  “Leave me alone,” he responded, without taking his eyes from the parasites.

  “Jesus Christ!” I exclaimed in disgust, bringing my slipper down on the five or so bugs that he’d corralled and smearing his blood all over the floor.

  Displays like this would send my mood plummeting when I’d been up minutes before. Theo was losing it a little more each day and there didn’t seem to be anything anyone could do about it. I’d tried to talk to him, explaining that his behavior was affecting the morale of everyone in the room, hoping that he’d try to get it together for us if not for himself. His response was always confrontational, some version of telling me that he didn’t care, or to shut up and leave him alone. No matter how much I sometimes hated him, I never stopped trying to reach him, though it became harder and harder the more withdrawn and difficult he became.

  Two days after Abdelatif joined our happy little family the door opened and Kawa, the jihadi formerly known as the Little Judge, entered in a deni
m shirt, looking determined and walking tall.

  “Jumu’ah, come with me!” he ordered.

  I covered my eyes and we walked out into the hallway together. As soon as the door was closed he grabbed the hood of my sweatshirt, pulled it down until I was hunched over, and punched me in the face. The punch was curiously painless and wouldn’t even leave a mark, so weak it was hard to believe it had come from a grown man. He pulled me down the hallway by my hood and led me into the boiler room, sitting me down on the floor in the dark. I listened as others followed us into the room, and I braced myself for the tire or the electricity I had heard them using on other prisoners. Yassine then crouched down to my right and translated for Kawa:

  “Say you are a CIA or I will hit you very hard.”

  “But I’m not a CIA,” I said.

  Yassine conveyed my response to Kawa and I immediately felt a kick to the side of my head at the same time that a thick cable struck the side of my foot. Unlike the punch, this hurt, and I let out a yell through a clenched jaw.

  “Say you are a CIA or I will hit you very hard,” Yassine repeated.

  “But Yassine, I’m not a CIA.”

  After he translated this I felt another kick to the side of my head along with another lash to my foot. Kawa then stormed out of the room as if he was going to get something, something to use to break me and end this game once and for all. I sat there and contemplated my situation. I knew that management’s patience in waiting for my confession had run out, and I had heard enough victims screaming by now to know that if these people wanted you to say something, you were eventually going to say it. It didn’t matter how tough you were; it didn’t matter who you were—and it definitely didn’t matter if it was true. I came to the conclusion that I had lasted longer than any other civilian probably would have and it was time to fold. It wasn’t like I was endangering anyone else with my fake confession, and if I ever wanted to make it home or escape I had to stay as healthy as possible, which meant not inviting torture out of foolish pride.