Brody said that in order to move forward with charges against the Canadians I’d have to identify them, which I was extremely excited to do. Then she told me how I’d have to ID them: she would lay out some photographs of them wearing masks and play me a recording of their voices, as if it were the 1930s and she couldn’t just arrange a lineup or record a video of them on any cell phone. When I told her I wasn’t sure that I could ID people who’d been wearing masks from photographs and voice recordings and would need to see them to size them up, she tried to put my mind at ease by assuring me it was them, but at this point I trusted her about as much as I would a hungry lion. I didn’t want to risk identifying the wrong person—which would totally discredit me as a witness—or failing to identify the right one and giving his defense lawyers ammunition. I told her I wouldn’t do it—if she wanted me to make the Canadians it would have to be with me on one side of the glass and them on the other, to avoid any mistakes.
Brody was livid, and her response has ranged from having two agents show up on my doorstep on the anniversary of my abduction—threatening to arrest me for interfering in a federal investigation if I spoke to the press—to having my speaking engagements canceled. At the threat of arrest, I actually laughed in the agents’ faces.
“I can do your time standing on my fuckin’ head,” I said, holding out my wrists. “Where you gonna put me—in a federal prison? Go ahead, I’ve always wanted to learn how to play tennis.”
Over four years have passed, and not one of the Canadians in custody has been put before me for identification, much less indicted or extradited to Canada.
God bless the Patriot Act.
I spent the first month I was back in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Being that I hadn’t paid my bills in over seven months and the FBI refused to give me a new social security number or any help straightening out my credit, finding an apartment was a challenge. The social worker from the FBI’s Victim Assistance Program did suggest that I look into homeless shelters, because she’d heard they were “not that bad.” That was pretty much the extent of their “assistance” when it came to this victim.
After I was turned down by what felt like every landlord in the city, one finally looked at my near-perfect credit score from before the kidnapping and decided to rent me a modest one-bedroom on the Upper East Side. I moved in on September first, exactly one month after landing at JFK, and having my own place again could not have been a greater feeling. On my first night in my new home I sat on an air mattress looking up some of the soldiers I’d been locked up with on Facebook. I stared at a photo of Shareef on his page—I could tell from the date and his unwounded hand that it had been taken just before he was captured, and his huge smile brought tears to my eyes. I looked to see if he had any family listed and found three relatives; all had blocked the ability to message them except one, his cousin Heba. I figured reaching out to her was the right thing to do, and I wrote her a message letting her know that Shareef was alive and being treated as well as one could hope for under the circumstances. Within a few days I received the most beautiful response, full of gratitude, and in no time Heba and I were friends.
Knowing that Brody was probably monitoring my every move, I told her about my communication with Heba right away. She’d already jumped to the conclusion that I’d joined al-Qaeda before; I didn’t want her getting the idea that I was working with Bashar’s regime. I also told her that I thought this was our best chance of getting information that might lead to Theo, being that I knew al-Nusra was openly negotiating for Shareef and the rest of the men. She blew me off.
Needless to say, after all I had seen and endured in the months leading up to my homecoming, it wasn’t easy to surprise me. But when I received a message from Heba just twenty-five days after we’d first connected, telling me that Shareef and Ali had been exchanged for six high-level al-Nusra figures, to say I was surprised would be an understatement. I couldn’t believe it—I’d been so afraid I would never see any of my friends again, and this news brought not only relief that at least some had survived, but hope that others would as well. Naturally, once he was home it didn’t take me and Shareef long to get on a Skype call together, and we beamed at each other like brothers who were just as grateful to God for the other’s survival as we were for our own.
“Theo?” Shareef asked almost immediately.
“He didn’t make it out,” I told him.
“Kawa, Skype. Theo, mother,” Shareef said then.
I smiled.
“Give it to me.”
And just like that, I had Kawa’s Skype name—and Kawa, I now learned, was in charge of all negotiations on behalf of Jabhat al-Nusra for any and all prisoners in his custody.
After this was out of the way we moved on to other topics, like how they had heard from Obeida that the Moroccan had been judged a “bad man” and executed. Neither of us exhibited an ounce of emotion at the loss, and moments later Shareef was suddenly wearing the all-knowing smile of a man who already knew the answer to the question he was about to ask.
“So, Jumu’ah,” he said, “you still Muslim?”
“Yeah, about that . . .” I smiled and scratched the top of my head as I looked down and then back up at him, searching for the right words. “There’s something I kind of have to tell you . . . I’m Jewish.”
A second after he absorbed this information, Shareef’s jaw hit the floor, and then he broke into the biggest, loudest laugh I had ever heard. I cracked up, too, but when we were done laughing at the fact that I had tricked al-Qaeda into thinking that a unicorn was a donkey for seven months, Shareef grew serious and assured me he didn’t care that I was Jewish, that he had nothing against my people, and that he still loved me and would be my brother forever.
After our call ended I sent Brody an email, containing Kawa’s Skype name preceded by one short sentence:
The following day I sent her another message, this one outlining what I knew, specifically the fact that Kawa had expressed an interest in dealing with Qatar when it came to any negotiations. I told her that this was who the Skype name should be given to in order to secure Theo’s release.
Sorry—unable to talk right now, she replied.
Ten months later, James Foley was brutally executed by ISIS for all the world to see. Five days after that, Peter Theo Curtis was released—in a deal negotiated by none other than Qatar. I had kept my promise and gotten help; they just chose to leave him there until it suited them to bring him home.
Ali’s response to the news of my Jewish heritage during our first Skype call was much less dramatic than Shareef’s. In fact, he didn’t look surprised at all—and for very good reason.
“You know, we discussed that you might be Jewish once,” he said with a smile. “Because every time we asked you a question about Christianity, you never knew any of the answers.”
Ali’s smile had always had a grounding effect on me when we were inside, and now that we were out it was no different. His and Shareef’s survival made life easier for me. I was home, but I no longer had any friends I could relate to—they made me feel less alone, even though they were always seven hours ahead and over seven thousand miles away.
Between Brody’s antics, one Bowfinger-esque movie producer after another trying to hustle me out of my story, and scumbag journalists doing the same, over time my happiness at being out was soured by anger. It seemed like everyone who contacted me wanted something for nothing. And then, one day, I received an email from the US Army—they wanted to know if I’d speak at their annual Antiterrorism Conference in Orlando. I had only done one speaking engagement before, for the LAPD, which Brody had canceled as I was flying there and only green-lit again after I promised not to discuss the Canadian connection in front of over four hundred counterterrorism police officers and detectives—my guess is she didn’t want these highly trained individuals asking me questions during the Q&A about who was responsible for my bank accounts not being frozen; why none of the addresses any of the goods
were shipped to in Turkey or Canada had been raided; or about what was purchased, like over a dozen laptops and tablets. It’s quite possible some of these detectives would have been able to connect the dots long before I did to see that the FBI was most likely letting them steal my money so that they could then intercept the laptops and tablets before delivering them directly into the hands of al-Qaeda, creating the intelligence community’s wet dream for infiltrating the enemy. So in reality, the FBI wasn’t conducting an investigation; they were conducting an operation. Brody and her colleagues just used me as chum, to bring the sharks to the surface.
But when it came to the army, I jumped at the opportunity to tell my story to people who weren’t trying to use it to make money or make their careers, and I wrote back and said yes. To be honest, though, I expected the gig to be canceled as soon as the organizer contacted the FBI. In fact, I was so confident that this was going to happen that I didn’t even bother to rehearse. Little did I know that when it comes to their conferences, the Mother Army asks permission from no man and no woman—as the man who’d contacted me later said, “They need to just stay the fuck out of it.”
When I arrived at the hotel in Orlando and met my contact, he walked me around for a while, introducing me to various high-ranking military and government officials—including several generals. They all said the same thing: “I can’t wait to hear you speak tomorrow.” Apparently I was the main event; once I found out, I ran back to my room and began to rehearse like crazy. The next day I gave a thirty-five-minute speech, mostly about how I’d used humor to build relationships, the intelligence-gathering methods I’d successfully employed, like memorizing the serial number on the window, and the escape. By the time I wrapped it up, all 225 people in the ballroom were on their feet giving me a standing ovation. I was later told that no one in the conference’s fourteen-year history had ever received such a reception.
After I got offstage, people kept coming up to me to shake my hand. They all asked if I had ever served, and when I said I hadn’t they were shocked—most of the tactics I’d employed were taught in some of the military’s most physically and mentally challenging programs. Being among these men and women who understood me, and being so appreciated by them, was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life; it was what I’d hoped to receive from the FBI, but never did. In Syria I’d fought to show our enemies exactly what Americans are made of, and all I got from my government in return for my patriotism were lies and betrayal. Now I was being accepted into a community of people who could understand what I’d gone through and what I’d risked, who knew what it was like to wage war from a battlefield instead of an air-conditioned cubicle. I finally had friends here like I’d had over there, the kind I knew I would have been able to count on if they’d been with me in those cells. As for Theo, they were all in agreement that I’d done the right thing in leaving him behind (well, to tell the truth, a lot of them said I should have killed him).
Since then I have spoken to military audiences all over the country, using my experience to give perspective and insight into what it’s like to be held in an Islamic prison—in case, God forbid, any of our soldiers or pilots ever end up in a situation like mine. It’s a service that I’m proud to perform, and to not only support our troops but to have them support me is an honor and a privilege for which I will die a grateful man.
At the end of my speech there’s always a Q&A session. I usually get a lot of the same questions, and one that I hear almost every time is whether I have nightmares. My answer is always the same. “No,” I tell them. “I have dreams.”
Most of my correspondence with Shareef these days is via emojis, thanks to his poor English and my poorer Arabic, but as the weeks turned into months and the months into years, my friendships with him and with Ali have endured. I’m not certain how long it was after we came home, but during one of my early conversations with Ali, he told me that days before he and Shareef were exchanged they were allowed to make Skype calls with their families. When Shareef was on his call he learned the most unexpected thing: that an American photographer who had escaped from Jabhat al-Nusra had made it home, and this photographer had contacted his cousin on Facebook to let the family know that he was alive. After the call, Shareef stepped back inside the cell and two words rang joyfully from his lips.
“Jumu’ah escaped!” he yelled to the room. “Jumu’ah escaped!”
His words spread like wildfire and within seconds every soldier was on his feet shouting “Jumu’ah escaped!” and celebrating my victory as if it were his own. The Wolfman, not believing his eyes at the sight of his prisoners, these Arabs before him rejoicing over the escape of an American, was overcome with rage.
“What are you doing?” he screamed. “Stop cheering for the American! Do you hear me? Stop cheering for the American!”
But it was too late. The cuckoo had already flown over the nest. Ali told me that after they received the news he saw Ayman sitting against the wall alone, wearing a smile born from a brother’s love; Ayman, who, along with the rest of the soldiers, I think of every day with a full heart—one that always hurts, knowing I may never see them again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Schrier is from Deer Park, New York, and a graduate of Hofstra University, where he studied film production and English. In 2012, while outside Aleppo on his way home from photographing the war, Schrier was captured by the al-Nusra Front, a group better known in the West as al-Qaeda in Syria. Seven months later, he became the first Westerner to ever escape from them. His story has been covered by 60 Minutes, the New York Times, and CNN, and since his return home, Matthew has devoted himself to working with the US military, using his experience in Syria to educate American troops about survival after capture by extremists. The Dawn Prayer is his first book.
The Dawn Prayer[Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison] Page 28