by Theo Padnos
Their plan was to leave Antakya the following morning at seven thirty. If I wished to come with them, I could meet them in the lobby the next day, Saturday, at that time. Both of these young men made sure that I understood: If I were to travel with them, I would have to assume responsibility for my own well-being. Were I to find myself in trouble, I understood from the stern look in their eyes, I would be on my own.
“Don’t you need an ID to get on a bus?” I asked.
Adnan shrugged. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” I asked about pop-up checkpoints on the highways, the cost of bribing highway officials, whether the officials would be pro-government, pro-rebel, or something else, and what would happen to the traveler if he didn’t have the money to pay.
A few minutes later, after we had said our good-byes, when I was outside again in the sunshine, I tried to imagine what was likely to occur during a voyage to Sayyidah Zaynab. It was a regime-controlled, mostly Shia suburb, lately settled by waves of Iraqis in flight from the violence there. Every few weeks, the rebels in this newer Middle Eastern war tried to blow up the Sayyidah Zaynab Mosque, a destination for Shia pilgrims. My traveling companions belonged to the minority Sunni population in this majority Shia suburb, which was itself under assault from the all-Sunni suburbs in whose midst it sat. Could be interesting, I thought. My traveling companions would be on the side of the young men who disguised themselves as women—their childhood friends, so they said—who hid their suicide belts under their black robes, then blew themselves up among the crowds of Iranian pilgrims.
Adnan and Gibriel did not strike me as suicidal. They seemed rather cordial. They were certainly quick to warm to the idea of traveling with me. I was certain they could teach me about the difficulties of escaping to Cyprus. But if I should find myself questioned at an improvised checkpoint along the highway or blocked by an ID-demanding bus driver, I knew—because they had been as explicit as they could be without being impolite—that they would leave me to my own devices. Downstairs, in my favorite restaurant, as I drank a glass of angelic orange juice, I decided that too much of Adnan and Gibriel’s itinerary passed through country too thick with Syrian government agents. Those agents were on the hunt for undocumented foreigners in Syria. “American journalist” to government minions in Syria meant “undercover CIA agent.” I dreaded the minions. And then how would a voyage to Sayyidah Zaynab help me with my fault line of villages?
* * *
Later that day, I walked to the top of the escarpment that overlooks Antakya. I contemplated the views the tourist takes in: The Alexandretta plains about which Gertrude Bell had written in her 1907 chronicle of a voyage through Syria, The Desert and the Sown, lay to the left. Beyond those plains, the Mediterranean shimmered. Beneath me, flocks of birds floated over a field of minarets and church towers. I took a picture with my iPhone. I sat on a rock. At my feet, a column of ants was marching away, into a talus field and, from there, upward, into the highest reaches of the escarpment. How duty bound the ants are, I thought, how single-minded, how unquestioning, and how busy. Why was I not capable of living out my life with as much purpose as the typical Turkish ant?
As I walked downward, into the center of town, I turned into the narrow, darkened alleyway by which one entered the Ercan. Almost always, at every hour of the day, Syrians with whom I had a nodding acquaintance could be found milling about in front. On this evening, a café lounger who called himself Abu Firas happened to be smoking a cigarette at a sidewalk table. During our first meeting, I had told him that I was a reporter who wished to travel into Syria. The moment I appeared in the street, when I was still fifty paces from him, he called out my name. I ambled to his table. He invited me to sit. There were no formalities. He proposed a trip into Syria. For $100 in cash, up front, he would take me to any village I wished to visit in Idlib Province. He had grown up in the province. He knew everyone there. Okay? Was I in agreement? Okay?
“Idlib?” I said. “What’s in Idlib?”
“Okay,” he said. “Fine. Aleppo.”
Apparently, during our first café conversations I had related details of my life I don’t normally relate to strangers. Or had someone else related these on my behalf? Ashraf? Adnan and Gibriel? Anyway, Abu Firas knew my story: I was the American reporter who wanted to spend no money, was curious about religion in Syria, had once lived in a Damascus neighborhood called Sha’alan, and now lived in a hovel with Ashraf.
“You have memorized well,” I said. “You are spying for whom?”
He smiled. “Yes. Spying. Like you.”
I smiled back. I asked him how he proposed to take me to Syria.
“A car,” he said. “A Mercedes.”
“Right,” I said. “I should take you there in my private jet.” He did not smile. Anyway, I said, if I was going to pay $100, I wanted a proper guide, approved by the Syrian ministry of tourism, with degrees in Roman history, classical architecture, and Syrian politics. “What do you really have, Firas?” I asked. “A bicycle?”
I meant to tease him. Most of the Syrians in the area were more of a mind to blow the ministry of tourism in Syria into little bits than to apply to it for a certification. Firas was meant to chuckle at the mention of their certifications, and to scoff at the idea that anyone should want anything from them.
He stared at me. “You don’t like me?” he said.
I told him that I wanted a man of culture as a guide. He spoke a rural, hard-to-understand version of Syrian colloquial Arabic. “What have you studied, my Abu Firas?” I asked. “Anything at all?”
His face darkened. I waited a moment for him to smile. He stared at me, frowned, then turned away. I sighed. Why must I make smart-alecky remarks? I had wanted to be cute. For an instant, I regretted it. I needed to apologize. And then I caught myself. Was not every Syrian café lounger in Antakya on the make?
Perhaps some of the Western reporters in Antakya were easy marks. I wanted it to be known that I was no rube. During our first meetings, Abu Firas had come across as too forward, too aggressively friendly, almost angry. I had felt he was working an angle. I wanted him to take his line of patter elsewhere. So it was okay to have crossed a line with him. I didn’t regret putting him off.
Abu Firas, however, was not put off. It took him an instant to swallow his pride. He sucked on his cigarette, then ordered me a tea. We chatted a bit about conditions in Idlib—such government troops as had not yet been killed or kidnapped, he said, were besieged on every side. Sooner or later, they would die. The people would rule. The government would be gone. He sighed. He took another drag on his cigarette. Would I object if he made a phone call?
When his correspondent picked up, Abu Firas stepped away from the table. He began one of those warmhearted conversations, full of Syrian formulae for good wishes, followed by doublings and tripling of the wishes, that affirm membership in a venerable brotherhood. He chatted for a moment under his breath, then returned to the table, the sour mood I had provoked in him earlier vanished. He suppressed a grin.
“I have excellent news for you,” he said. The friends he had just now spoken with were journalists themselves. They were Syrians, friendly to the opposition, who would be returning to Syria soon.
“Yes?” I said. “Journalists? Who do they work for?”
Abu Firas wasn’t sure. Anyway, his friends were constantly occupied with work. Probably they had many employers. They were in demand because they knew every back road in Idlib Province. They knew the main roads, too. Basically, they were travelers. One day, they were here; the next day, they were elsewhere. As chance would have it, this evening they would be at the hotel above the central taxi stand in Antakya, just around the corner from the Ercan.
“They want money,” I told Abu Firas.
Abu Firas shrugged. “Maybe they want free,” he said. “Ask them.”
“Free, free?” I asked. “Or free now and pay later?”
He shrugged again. He didn’t know. “Possibly free, free. Maybe a few liras.” I
could find out the details myself, since the two people in question would be upstairs, in the first-floor hotel lobby of the Hotel Antakya, that evening at 7:00 pm.
At that hour, a breeze was rolling through a wall of floor-length curtains. Otherwise, the lobby was dead. I examined the reception desk, peered down an empty hallway, then stepped through the curtains. I met my kidnappers out there, on the balcony, in a haze of soft evening light. It cast a coppery glow over their jeans, their baseball caps, and their white basketball sneakers. They had propped their feet on the balustrade. They turned their heads but did not remove their feet. Probably this was a bad sign.
Eventually, Abu Firas stood. He smiled in surprise and awkwardness, then abruptly stopped smiling. He offered me his hand. “This is the American journalist,” he said into the slanting rays. I was the one who wanted to visit Syria, the one who spoke Arabic, the one who used to live in Damascus. The kidnappers offered me their hands.
The kidnapper closest to me wore a red baseball cap. His tresses glowed in the evening light. His eyes twinkled. He could have been a model in a magazine advertisement. “Welcome, my brother,” he said. “Welcome, my American friend!” He offered me a cigarette. I declined. He put a glass of tea in my hand.
His name, he said, was Mohammed. He was Syrian, lived in Syria now, and planned to return there soon. He grinned his Cheshire cat grin. I like this person, I thought. I liked the way he tipped backward in his chair, his tea perched high above the Antakya din, and his blue-jeans-and-baseball-cap ensemble. I had to restrain myself from peppering him with questions.
“Speak English?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I told him in English.
“My language speaking very well,” he said. “I am study. English, if you please.”
He switched to Arabic. In Arabic he said that he had had to abandon his university course but carried on now as best he could, by studying the grammar on his own, reading stories, and of course watching American movies.
In the midst of these declarations, Abu Firas announced, out of nowhere, implausibly, as if he’d been struck by a bolt from the heavens, that he had left his phone in his hotel room. He apologized. “You’ll be fine by yourselves?” he asked. He is giving us space to discuss money, I told myself. So Abu Firas, despite my earlier rudeness, was being polite.
“Going?” I said to him. “Stay. Drink tea.” This, too, was a politeness.
“I have things to do,” he said. He offered me his hand. “Anything I can do for you?”
“Anything I can do for you?” I replied. These were formulaic, situation-appropriate courtesies, but Abu Firas had gone out of his way to do me an act of generosity. He couldn’t have known what his good turn meant to me, and I had no way to express my gratitude. Still, I felt it. He had introduced me to an ideal traveling companion: the Syrian citizen-journalist. I despised all other kinds of reporters. The citizen-journalist, however, I liked. I liked the idea of the citizen-journalist and didn’t care about the details. I would learn the details along the way. I wished I had some truer way to thank Abu Firas. In the event, the only thing that came to mind was: “God be with you, brother. A thousand thank-yous!”
Hours later, it occurred to me that Abu Firas probably wouldn’t have sought out my kidnappers for me if, earlier in the evening, I hadn’t made condescending remarks about his accent, his sophistication, and his car. One oughtn’t to tell strangers in Antakya that one is an American. This, too, had been a mistake. Perhaps he genuinely believed me to be scouting around on the CIA’s behalf. I oughtn’t to have joked with him about the possibility. Hours later, when I was trying to retrace my steps, in my mind, to the library of a house in which I was being tortured I kept seeing Abu Firas’s half smile in the evening light. I saw his uneasiness, and his urge to slip away. Perhaps the kidnappers had been telling him, before I arrived, of their feelings that Americans deserved to be shot wherever they could be found. I came to know those kidnappers. Declarations of this nature would have been quite in line with their true feelings. Perhaps he had misgivings about sentencing me to a voyage with such friends. Perhaps he half-agreed that Americans should be shot when possible but didn’t feel like carrying out the shooting himself, so made an excuse about his cell phone, then slipped through a dusty, diaphanous curtain, and so out of the plot he had set in motion.
In the fall of 2012, he was a common sight at the coffee tables in the Arabic-speaking section of Antakya. His phone number is in my iCloud account. He doesn’t answer it now. I never saw him again. Where have you gone, Abu Firas, you travel agent of death?
Though no one offered me Abu Firas’s empty chair—though the kidnappers had returned their feet to the hotel balustrade—I sat in Firas’s chair. I smiled at my new friends.
I made a remark about the sweeping view the hotel balcony offered. My hotel, I said, was a stack of dark boxes, in a darkened street. Mohammed nodded and grinned. His friend grinned. They gazed outward, into a flock of cotton candy evening clouds just then settling over a ridgeline about ten kilometers to the south. That balcony permitted an expansive view: the busy taxi stand beneath us, the forest of Turkish rooftop bric-a-brac in the middle distance—water tanks, satellite dishes, ventilation pipes—and, beyond this, the falling night.
I was curious about what these young Syrians were up to in Antakya.
“We’re tourists,” said Mohammed, in an accent that suggested “educated” to me, “middle class,” and “Damascus.” “Vacation,” he said. “Marvelous, Antakya. Yes?” He winked.
I changed the subject. Mohammed had grown up in a rebel-held suburb outside of Damascus called al-Tal, he said, had studied computer science and English at the university in Damascus. Sadly, the violence in Syria had prevented him from continuing his studies.
He wore his baseball cap backward, like an insouciant pop star. I judged this to be a sign of boyishness. His clothing was clean, possibly new. I judged this to mean “comes from a nice family.” He was neatly shaven. I judged this to mean “not particularly religious.”
As he talked, I scrutinized his eyes for evidence of the qualities I meant to avoid—bossiness, an insistence on having the upper hand, recklessness. Here was someone too into American mall fashion to insist, I thought, on taking me to witness a battle or a bombing. Perhaps he and I would strike up a friendship? That evening, in that light, I judged this possible.
After twenty seconds of conversation with Mohammed, I turned to the other kidnapper—the leader of the plot, as it turned out. “And your name, my friend?” I asked. He thought over my question for a moment. He stared into the distance. “Abu Osama,” he replied. Then he turned his face toward the mountains. He grinned over some private happiness.
In prison in Syria, whenever I saw these moments in my imagination, which was often, every detail of the scene made the malevolence of Abu Osama’s character flood into my consciousness. I couldn’t get these details out of my head. The reason Abu Osama hesitated before giving me his name, I knew after it was much too late, was that he hadn’t expected his kidnap victim would turn up of his own accord, smiling and gregarious and ready to be eaten up. I was a fish leaping into his net. The fish spoke cheerfully, in colloquial Syrian Arabic. The singularity of the situation would have thrown him for a loop. So his surprise—and a need to rummage through his imagination for a suitable name—left him at a loss for words. Instead of speaking, he skipped a beat. He stared into the void. And then his stroke of wit in naming himself after the Terrorizer of America, as one of the anthems popular in Idlib at the time referred to Osama bin Laden, made him giggle. He couldn’t laugh in my face, and so he smirked at the rising moon, at the Antakya rooftops, and at the painterly clouds on the horizon.
I, however, was too interested in the idea of the citizen-journalist to notice. Probably I wanted to prop up my feet alongside a crew of friendly, principled, moneyless Syrian reporters. Probably I was lonely.
“May the mercy of God and blessing be upon you,” I said to Abu
Osama. “May he keep you and preserve your parents.”
Abu Osama said he was from Idlib. “In truth, Mohammed and I are activists,” he said. “Activist-journalists, actually.”
Did he write? No, he and Mohammed took photographs. They also made videos.
“I see,” I said.
Mohammed turned to me. He spoke in English. “No vacation,” he said. “We are work. Journalist sometime. Sometime activist. See?”
“I see,” I said. I said I would help him with his English. Of course, it was fine as it was. If he wanted help, I would help him.
“You are welcome,” he said.
“So you go out on demonstrations?” I asked. “You also do some reporting. Is that right?”
“I lead the demonstrations,” Abu Osama corrected.
His Facebook page, which I didn’t bother checking at the time—which I discovered easily enough after I was released—shows that he hardly lied at all during our first meeting. To be sure, he spoke in generalities. I filled in the rest.
As for leading the demonstrations, his Facebook page videos show him to have been a fiery, effective leader of the crowds in his native town, an agricultural outpost on the northern Syrian plains called Marat Misrin. On Facebook, he called himself the singer of Marat Misrin—by which he meant that he led the dads and sons who gathered on the boulevards here in colorful, strident, naughty, outraged song. The crowds—especially the little boys among them—adored him.
His Facebook page shows him to have been a busy Facebooker, with 3,124 friends. He posted new pictures every few days. By 2014, he had married. His real name was Abdou Nijaar. In 2015, he had a son. Naturally, he called the son Osama. Because fathers in Syria often adopt their sons’ names, his friends on Facebook began calling him Abu Osama. Probably his wife, who did not post on his Facebook page, called him Abu Osama.