by Theo Padnos
Abu Osama stood up. All three men sitting on the child’s bed stood up. “Yalla, ya shabbab?” said Abu Osama. Shall we go to it, boys? He was smiling as he spoke these words. It was a friendly sentence. I heard it as an invitation he meant to extend to me. Because he was rising to his feet as he spoke, and because I was anxious to leave, I leaned forward. I rose to my knees. Mohammed, my fellow actor, would have been prepared for this. He had held himself close during the interview. Now he seized a clump of my hair, then yanked my head to the floor.
Abu Osama kicked me in the face. My head snapped backward. An instrument—I’m not sure what, the handgun?—crashed into the side of my skull. Blood oozed into my hair.
“Oof,” I said. Someone else kicked me in the chest. There were blows to my face. Someone was stomping the heel of his boot into my chest. “Oof,” I said. There were further, sharper kicks to my forehead.
A voice called out, “Bring the handcuffs!” In Arabic, the word for “handcuffs” is kalabshe Kalabshe? I thought. But we had been discussing kalabshe in the car the day before. What is the meaning of this word? I wondered. It was on the tip of my tongue. And then I was lying on my stomach. A boot was pressing into the back of my neck. Someone was locking my hands into a pair of cuffs at the small of my back. Ah, I thought, al kalabshe.
For a moment, I was able to bring myself to my knees. Probably my attackers allowed me to do this. I knelt as if in prayer for an instant and then another blunt object, perhaps a boot, swung at the base of my skull. I toppled forward, face-first, into the floor. “Oof,” I said.
When at last my vision refocused, I happened to see, out of the corner of my eye, that Abu Dujanna was pointing the handgun I had explained away, in my daydreams, the day before, as a cops-and-robbers toy, at my head. He stood in a sunny corner of the room. He held his eyes on mine—a level, even-tempered gaze.
“Please,” I said. “Don’t shoot.” He did not move. “Please!” I repeated. I pulled on the handcuffs. “What do you want?” Having asked this question of dozens, perhaps hundreds of similarly minded militants in Syria by now, I know how silly a question this is. It almost always elicits a slogan or a string of stock phrases. Then comes an interlude of silent, blank staring. They want the violence. They want to say the slogans. They want to watch as the tables turn. They want to stare.
That afternoon, I saw the staring for the first time. There was love of guns in my kidnappers’ eyes, and pride in themselves. There was pleasure in being part of a cool film. I doubt Abu Dujanna wanted anything in particular, however, and so when I spoke he also seemed confused to me, as if I had asked him to solve a math problem too complicated to work out in his head.
I promised that I wouldn’t move. “I’ll do what you want,” I said. “Anything you like.” Thirty seconds of calm passed, and then Abu Said lashed a leather strap I had rescued from the master bedroom floor during our straightening-up project around my ankles. Mohammed allowed me to sit myself upright on the mattress. Having managed this, I asked Abu Dujanna to lower his gun. He did not react.
Abu Osama knelt in front of me. He grinned into my face. He touched my hair. The success of his operation—or maybe it was the fear in my eyes—caused him to turn his smile to his friends. He told Abu Dujanna to lower the gun.
“Surprised you, didn’t we?” Abu Osama said. I watched as he giggled to himself, then rose, stepped to check on the viewfinder of his camera, patted his friends on their backs, then returned to me. “You are a prisoner now,” he said. He asked Abu Said to search the pockets of my jeans. I had to rise to my knees for this procedure. From a back pocket, Abu Said retrieved the $50 I had changed into Syrian liras the night before. In the front pocket, he found my driver’s license, a debit card, and a SIM-less iPhone. As Abu Said removed these items from my pockets, he spoke softly to me, as if he meant to forestall my indignation. It wasn’t illegal for him to take these objects, he said, but rather proper and customary, since items in my possession were ghanima. I had an English-Arabic dictionary on my phone. I asked Abu Said to look up the word. Mohammed interrupted in English: “I think your word is ‘booty’? ‘Spoils’?” he said.
“In Islam,” Abu Osama said gently, as if he were explaining the rules of a game to a child, “we are allowed to take the property of the enemy when he is captured. You are our enemy. You are captured. See?”
I searched the four faces watching me. Was no one winking? Mohammed made eye contact but only for an instant, and his eyes were dead. Abu Dujanna watched me, but without expression, as if he were watching a football game. Abu Osama’s eyes were alight with happiness and surprise. Abu Said, for his part, glanced at me, then turned to my phone. He tapped and shook. He made it play music, then held it to his ear.
Abu Osama was kneeling in front of me. He would have been in the camera frame. How was I feeling now? he wanted to know. Did I like the handcuffs? “Do you know who we are?” he asked.
No, I did not know.
“We are from the al Qaeda organization,” Abu Osama said, grinning. “You didn’t know, did you?”
I glanced at the others. I looked into Abu Osama’s eyes. “Al Qaeda?” I said. “I don’t believe it.” He shrugged.
In his corner, under a beam of sunlight, Abu Said was looking for information about the phone. “iPhone Three is all?” he asked. Newer, more expensive models were available by this time, even in Syria. Did it have a tracking device on it? he wanted to know. Was anyone following me through my phone?
It took several minutes for me to convince him that there was no SIM card in the device, that no one from home knew I was in Syria, not even my mother, and that, as far as I knew, no one could track me through the phone. Everyone in the room doubted these assurances. Abu Osama examined the empty SIM tray, turned the phone off, then turned it on again. Eventually, he shrugged. He returned it to his brother, who slipped the phone into his pocket. Abu Osama stood to adjust his camera, then returned, kneeling, to his spot in the camera frame. He held my hair. He turned my face to the camera.
“Do you think Islam does not permit us to do what we’ve done?” he asked. I had no intention of engaging this person in a debate. I did not answer. “It is legal for us to kill you, to exchange you for ransom, or to let you go. Do you think we are making this up?”
I turned to Mohammed. He stared at me but did not smile. I glanced at Abu Dujanna and Abu Said. They met my eyes but did not speak.
Abu Osama recited a line of scripture. I barely caught its meaning. He glared at me, then uttered further, louder words from the sacred texts. His eyes flashed around the room.
“You killed our sheikh, Osama bin Laden,” he said.
I stared at him.
“Why did you invade Iraq?” Outrage filled his eyes. “Do you think this is normal? This is not criminal behavior? Where are your morals? Where?”
My silence must have encouraged him. The Vietnam War, the Hiroshima bombing, the killing of the Plains Indians—episodes and places in American history came at me in volleys. Each item on his list made his lip curl in disgust. “You are animals,” he said of Americans in general, of all eras. The killing of Saddam Hussein, drones in Yemen, Blackwater contractors, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo—every word astonished him, and the astonishment made him turn to me for answers. “How can it be?” he asked several times, of… what, I did not know. The astonishment issued from him like bile that had been caught in his throat. It had caused him great suffering, over many years, even, and now, finally, after choking on it for much of his adult life, chance had allowed him to spit it away. So he spat. He did it in a kind of a trance, his eyes alight, his mind churning. “Do you think you are the policemen of the world?” he asked. “Do you think we want your freedom?”
It was our arrogance, he said, that he would never understand. Also, our preoccupation with sex. Also, our submission to “the Jews.” “You are their slaves!” he exclaimed. Periodically, during the course of his denunciations, he paused to goggle at me, as if he couldn’t
get his head around the scope of our wickedness. Still, he was in no mood to reconcile himself to anything. The situation, he seemed to feel, called out for further, louder lecturing.
The Americans, he said, had entered into a secret alliance with the Shia in Iraq in order to kill “our brothers” there. “You don’t know? How can you not know this? Liar.” He felt Obama had organized a pact with the Shia-esque government in Damascus to the same end. He felt Americans believed themselves to be immune to all forms of retribution. “But this is your stupidity,” he said. “You’re all stupid like this, and every one of you will learn from us.”
There was more. The racism in America, the adultery, the alcoholism—did I know there wasn’t any such thing as an American? “The real Americans are the Indians,” Abu Osama said, lecturing now more to his friends than to me. “The land on which they built their country belongs to the Indians,” he said. He used an old-fashioned Arabic word for “Indian,” which translates as “Red Hindus.” He turned to me. “You killed the Red Hindus. Yes! In order to take their land. So you are thieves, on top of everything else.”
“The Red Hindus?” I asked.
“Shut up, Animal,” he replied. “If the Americans come looking for you, we’ll kill you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said.
“If the Americans set foot in Syria—one toe inside our country—we will kill them. Then we’ll kill you.”
“Yes,” I said.
“We will put Obama’s head in the trash.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
Before he switched off his video camera, he announced to me what I would have to do to save my life. Islam, he said, entitled him to sell me back to my family for the value of a quarter kilo of gold. The cash equivalent, he said (incorrectly, as it turned out), was $400,000. “You can get four hundred thousand dollars?” he said.
I pretended to consider the matter. “If my life is in danger, yes.”
In that case, he said, I was to have one week of life. If I could bring him the cash within a week, I would live. If not, I would be killed.
I nodded. A wound on the back of my head was causing blood to trickle down the back of my shirt. I asked if I could have a towel. Abu Osama sighed. He asked his brother, Abu Said, to turn off the camera. Abu Said rose, clicked a button on the camera, brought me a towel, then dabbed it—gently, as if he felt himself under a moral obligation—at my face.
He threw the towel to the floor, but the blood returned right away. It had drenched my T-shirt. It was smearing itself across the plaster above the divan. I told Abu Osama that if my hands were handcuffed in front of me I could clean myself up on my own. In addition, I could preserve the cleanliness of the house. My suggestion caused Mohammed and Abu Osama to exchange glances and then whispers. A key appeared. My hands were unlocked, then locked again in front of my body. I retrieved the towel. I asked to be allowed to undo the leather strap that bound my ankles. “If you run, we shoot,” Abu Osama said. I nodded. Abu Osama allowed me to untie my legs from the leather strap. When I was done cleaning the back of my head, I asked to be allowed to pee. Mohammed escorted me to the bathroom. He waited for me outside the door, then escorted me back to my spot on the divan.
When I had resumed my place, Abu Osama smiled at me. He yawned. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
This lunch, I sensed from the twinkling in my kidnappers’ eyes, was to be a festive occasion. Sunlight filled the room. It filtered through the iron filigrees that had been welded, I noticed just then, over the outside of the window frames. It splashed across my multicolored divan.
For the kidnappers, there were ablutions, then prayers, and then Mohammed was sent off in the taxi wreck to comb the countryside for suitable fare. Twenty minutes later, when he pushed open the bedroom door, he was carrying four white plastic bags, all of them stuffed, and pulling themselves toward the floor. Rich, steamy lunch smells wafted through the air.
The kidnappers arranged themselves in a circle on the bedroom floor. Mohammed passed around sheets of newsprint to be used as place mats. There were deep-fried potato wafers, plastic tubs of mayonnaise-garlic sauce, two two-liter bottles of orange soda, an uncountable quantity of smaller water bottles, and at the center of the circle, on its own bed of newsprint, a steaming roast chicken. My cash had paid for the feast, apparently. Mohammed held up a chicken leg. “Thank you, Obama! To your health.” Everyone laughed. The kidnappers wished for Obama to send them more agents. They wanted him to come to Syria himself, and to bring his wives and daughters. “Please, Abu Hussein,” said Mohammed, using a nickname for Obama common in the Arab world. “Be welcome! Welcome!” He gestured at a space by his side. “Eat,” he told me. “You are our guest. Welcome, please.”
I was too shocked to eat. I was too afraid and too sickened by their happiness.
They stuffed swabs of bread into the corners of their mouths, then chased the bread down with drafts of orange soda. They wrapped bits of bread around the skin of the chicken carcass, tore at the flesh, then sank their fingers into their mouths.
Halfway through lunch, Abu Osama paused with a tub of mayonnaise in his hand. He held it out to me. “Eat?” he said. He stared for a few moments, then shrugged. A question occurred to him. Why, during the “arrest operation,” as he put it, had I allowed myself to be taken into custody without a struggle? Why?
“Four against one,” I said. “What would you do?”
He thought about my remark for a moment. “Good point,” he said. “If it were me, I wouldn’t spy for the CIA. If I were a spy, I wouldn’t come to Syria.”
This made his friends laugh. They poured orange soda into their mouths.
Later in their feast, Abu Osama recalled that the Prophet had advised Muslims to beware of dining with non-Muslims. “Actually, it is forbidden to eat with you,” he said. Because of the non-Muslim’s contamination by alcohol, pork, and, possibly, drugs, a Muslim risked infecting himself when he shared his food with a non-Muslim. The solution was for me to sit at a distance from the kidnappers, in a corner, by myself. Abu Osama nodded at a pile of dusty children’s clothing we had swept into a corner. The suggestion hung in the air for a moment. I declined to move. Then Mohammed reached for the sheet of newsprint on which a pile of potato slices had been laid out for me. He rolled it into a package, then carried my lunch to the corner. “Sorry,” he said as he walked, in a tone of voice that I thought might have conveyed something like regret.
From my corner of indecency, I watched the diners gnawing on their chicken bones. As they smacked their lips, I tried to reckon with the psychology that had brought the five of us to this fix. It seemed to me that some sinister accumulation of photos from Abu Ghraib, rumors from Guantánamo, and YouTube diatribes from bin Laden had worked themselves into a froth inside my kidnappers’ brains. Abu Osama was the most affected, but the feeling was present enough in everyone’s blood to have pushed them all out into the blue, beyond reason, unreachable in any language, citizens of some parallel reality. I wondered how the transformation had occurred and when. Abu Osama, I told myself, dressed as an everyday Syrian twentysomething but concealed beneath his hoodie the kid killer, the recluse, the sort of failed joiner who hopes to be liked in school, is shunned, takes to watching videos of people being killed, and finally contrives to produce such a video himself. Abu Osama, I guessed, was the Syrian cousin of the American schoolboy killer. During his school years, he would have collected guns, obsessed over slights, and dreamed of himself as an avenging angel.
I felt the others in the room were passive enough and stupid enough to help Abu Osama live out his fantasy. Now, in this land without a government, there was no one around to tell the lot of them not to kill me.
As their eating slowed, my heart raced. They have nothing to do with al Qaeda, I told myself—correctly, as it turned out. But I thought they might shoot me on behalf of the vanished tribes in the American West or because they felt the time had come to avenge bin Laden’s death or because they wis
hed to put themselves through the experience of a killing—in other words, for fun. The video camera would egg the lot of them on. I gulped at the water bottle Mohammed had put in front of me.
In subsequent months, when I was learning to adjust to life as a prisoner, I found that even brief, not-especially-injurious beatings left me desperate for water. My mouth felt like cotton against my tongue. My throat ached. Why such thirst? Maybe it was the effort of pleading with my assailants as they hit me. Maybe it was the strength I wasted in straining against my handcuffs. Probably terror makes you thirsty. Probably it was a bit of everything. I never lost much fluid during these beatings and hadn’t been especially thirsty beforehand, so the craving for water that overcame me seemed irrational to me, as if something unknown and belonging to them had taken control of my body. This frightened me, and the fear, in the darkness in my cell, turned into panic.
I learned to prepare for beatings by hiding extra water bottles in the wool blanket on which I slept. I learned not to swallow all the water in my cell in the minutes after a beating because sometimes the men in black left the cell, entered the neighboring cell, beat that prisoner for a few minutes, then came back to me. My only relief when they left was my hidden water.
On this occasion, in the child’s bedroom of a sunny farmhouse, the thirst came to me like an attack. It seized control of my instincts. It made me pour liters of water down my throat. Naturally, right away, I needed to pee. During my first trip to the bathroom, Mohammed brought me to the toilet. He waited, then brought me back to the child’s bedroom.
The second time I asked permission to use the toilet, about fifteen minutes later, Mohammed gave me a skeptical look. “Is it fear?” he asked.