by Theo Padnos
When the five of us climbed into the taxi, at about seven in the evening, we had resolved, I felt, to find a telephone on which I could call one or both of my parents. I would inform Mom or Dad or whoever I could raise on the line that I would soon be killed. I would utter whatever words had to be uttered in order to accomplish the mission at hand: $400,000 in cash had to be delivered to a point somewhere near us, at any rate inside Syria, within seven days.
I had made it clear—by listening, I felt, and by making sympathetic noises—that I sympathized with the kidnappers’ cause. Obviously, I could not approve of the means by which they meant to advance their cause. But we didn’t discuss means. We had discussed the near-term goal: their suitcase of cash.
I was on board with their plan. They understood this and so did not hector or threaten.
Thus the mood that evening as we set out for where I did not know was one of businesslike collective purpose. We would cooperate. They would get what they wanted. I would get what I wanted. In the meantime, I would have to wear the handcuffs. I would be a prisoner—but not, as in the regime jails, an object of contempt or abuse. We were business partners, in a manner of speaking, and now we were embarking on our first business trip. Though an exact hour for the expiration of the deadline had yet to be set, I assumed that it would come soon enough. Thus, in addition to our purposefulness, I felt that we were in a bit of a hurry.
“It’s the exchange of prisoner for dollars that makes things complicated.” Mohammed sighed as he inched the taxi out onto the Binnish-Taftanaz highway. “Very, very complicated.”
I agreed that the swapping of a prisoner for a small mountain of cash wouldn’t be a routine transaction, exactly, but neither would it be unheard-of. Somewhere, in today’s world, I said, an oil company executive or politician was kidnapped practically every day of the week. Always the kidnappers demanded a ransom. Always an insurance company paid. In Yemen, every time a tribe in a distant province needed a new road or wished for a visit from the president, the tribe kidnapped a handful of tourists. “He who is kidnapped in Yemen is the luckiest victim in the world, since his hosts always feed him qat, treat him to delicious food, and in the end the government always builds the new road,” I said.
As I talked, I didn’t feel a surge of kidnapper confidence in my confidence, but neither did anyone scowl or contradict me or order me to shut the hell up. I supposed that the kidnappers’ ransom scheme might have daunted them a bit. Perhaps their response to looming difficulties was to ignore them. Anyway, my kidnappers declined my invitation to chat about how the ease with which kidnappers in this day and age secured their ransoms. Their minds seemed rather focused on the camera Abu Osama cradled in his lap, the gun Abu Dujanna was babying in his, and on recent additions to their wardrobe.
Mohammed caressed the sleeves of a white cycling jacket. It looks quite like something I own, I thought to myself. Abu Said, I noticed, wore a pair of new New Balance trainers. Smiling to himself, he propped his foot on his knee. Someone had doused himself in cologne.
At a rise in the road that offered a view north into Turkey, Mohammed wondered, apropos of nothing, if I felt the ransom might come more quickly if we announced to the world that I had been kidnapped.
I thought about his idea for a moment. “We could call Al Jazeera,” I suggested. I had no experience with TV journalism. I knew no editors. Or reporters or interns. I wasn’t at all sure that it would be possible to persuade someone at Al Jazeera that this was no crank call. I did, however, want to get on the phone to someone. The idea of my being on TV made smiles appear on the faces of my kidnappers. “However you’d like to proceed is okay with me,” I said. I said that I knew many people at Al Jazeera, and could call the studio whenever they liked.
“We’ll see,” said Mohammed.
We drove without headlights. The moon lit our way. After about fifteen minutes of driving, a road sign indicated our arrival in the village of Marat Misrin. As the car drifted past apartment blocks on the outskirts of this agricultural settlement, it occurred to me that as long as someone was going to be robbed of $400,000, it might as well be the US government. It occurred to me that as long as the kidnappers were asking for $400,000, they might as well ask for millions. “Let’s ask Obama for ten million dollars,” I said into the moonlight. “You all can have nine million. I’ll take one. Everyone’s happy. Okay?”
The kidnappers grinned but did not bite. The road led us through fields in which squat olive trees stood in orderly rows. In the midst of one such field, at a bend in the road, Mohammed stopped the car. That evening, ours was the only one we had seen. He didn’t bother pulling to the side of the road.
Abu Osama stepped out, then ambled down a dirt track. At the end of this track stood a single-story house, almost entirely obscured by overhanging foliage. He knocked, waited a moment, then disappeared within.
I needed to pee. My captors allowed me to step out of the car in my handcuffs. I stood in the center of the road, gazed at the moon, then walked a few steps into the olive grove. As I stood in the dirt and looked forward through shadowy lanes, it seemed to me that a vast darkness stood before me, that a helter-skelter sprinting through the tree trunks could well bring me to a provisional kind of safety and that a Marine, a Navy SEAL, or anyone true physical courage would have made a run for it. I didn’t dare. I cursed myself for lacking the courage to seize the freedom that was everywhere around me. But then wasn’t it wiser, I wondered, to play to my strengths? I wasn’t the type to go Jason Bourne–ing it through the wilderness. It occurred to me that I wouldn’t have been able to sprint in handcuffs, would have tripped in the olive grove furrows, panicked, and eventually collapsed, on my own, in a heap. When he caught up with me, Abu Dujanna would have put a bullet through my thigh. If, that is, he was feeling friendly. Neither in this moment nor at any other did I believe a ransom in dollar bills might somehow reach Syria within seven days. I’ll get myself out of this on my own, I told myself, by playing the strongest, safest hand I have to play. I would charm, chatter, and cajole. Eventually, I hoped, the kidnappers would see the folly of their scheme. They would come to reason, lose heart, then let me go.
So when I returned to the car, I told Mohammed that “Doshka,” in Russian, meant “little soul.” I said that we would get Obama on the phone, insist on $10 million, right away, to be delivered via helicopter, and that with this money Mohammed could purchase a little army of little souls. And brand-new pickup trucks with which to carry each Doshka around. I said that peeing in handcuffs wasn’t at all as easy as it looked. “I want my million at the end of this,” I said.
I think everyone in the car knew I was kidding. But we were faced with a knotty problem. It had to be solved somehow. I was coming up with ideas. Was this wrong? I think the captors rather felt it was right. Why shouldn’t the US government supply Syrian rebels with Doshkas? Why wouldn’t a well-meaning American wish to help in the supply-the-rebels program? In any case, all the kidnappers understood, I think, that my heart was in the right place, that I wished to make myself useful, and that if we played our hand wisely, the lot of us might well bring our current dilemma to a positive conclusion.
Thus, after ten minutes of waiting for Abu Osama, when he and a companion emerged from the house at the end of the lane, the mood in our car was cheerful. It was one of bemusement, with a tinge of comedy.
The companion ruined everything. He was Abu Osama’s cousin Behajat Nijaar—also a photographer, as it turned out. Here is his Facebook self-portrait:
An undated self-portrait from Behajat Nijaar’s Facebook page.
The themes in Behajat’s Facebook photo archive are as follows: the joy that waving the black flag brings to demonstrators in Marat Misrin, the savagery the Syrian Air Force inflicts on the citizens of northern Syria, the heroism of the defenders of the faith, the impossibility of driving them from the land and the bravery of the local photographers.
The war he depicts on his Facebook page has two sides t
o it: the believers and the enemies of Islam. In his photos—and in the friends’ many comments, too—the believers are winning, though the outside world, knowing nothing of the happiness belief brings and never guessing at the invulnerability it supplies, doesn’t understand this. How to communicate these facts to the world? The solution Behajat the photographer has devised is for him to post photos of Behajat, the defender of the faith, to his Facebook account. These photos dare the enemies. They summon the believers to take up the fight. Here is Behajat with his surface-to-air missile:
Another undated self-portrait from Behajat’s Facebook page.
Behajat was carrying a Kalashnikov when he emerged from his house. He and Abu Osama climbed into a separate car. Abu Osama motioned for the taxi wreck to follow theirs. We were in motion. I breathed a private sigh of relief. I hadn’t wanted to enter that house, in the dark, in handcuffs. As we drove, I tried to think positive thoughts. I told myself that the companion was bringing the Kalashnikov to enhance the safety of our little business enterprise. Were there not bandits about? Was there not a significant sum at stake? We require more gun and more guards, I told myself. In the taxi, as we followed the sedan, there was further chatter about Al Jazeera. It seemed to me that the momentum of things was turning in my favor. There would be a village soon, I thought—Binnish, perhaps—then lights, dinner, maybe a phone.
The sedan led us to a block of shuttered, electricityless flats on the edge of the village of Marat Misrin. We parked in a gravel-strewn patch of dirt. As we were climbing out of the cars, something enormous—a van? a boulder?—hurtled through the air above us. It crashed into the upper floors of a nearby building. I dropped to my knees. Bursts of tracer fire arced through a deep purple sky. “Careful of the shelling,” said Behajat. I could see now that he was older and stockier than the others. He directed us to a flight of stairs that led to a landing at the base of one of the apartment buildings. A key materialized. A door opened, and then we were climbing an interior stairwell. We walked up a single flight of stairs, then entered a spacious, carpeted apartment. Cell phones lit our way, and after a few seconds inside the apartment candles appeared. I stood in my bare feet in a clean sitting room. A heavy sofa upholstered in olive-green faux wool sat to my left. There was a velvet painting of a verse from the Koran over the sofa in this room, shuttered windows, and a dining table. In the kitchen, there was a stove and a sink. In the bedroom sat a single well-made bed and a TV set.
The six of us filed into the bedroom. Behajat sat on the side of the bed. He laid his Kalashnikov on the bedspread. He motioned for me to sit at his feet. He twinkled his eyes at me. He shook his head in slow wonderment but did not speak.
He wore a navy-blue wool sweater and tiny reading glasses with a dark octagonal frame. The glasses made him look a bit like Benjamin Franklin. I can deal with this person, I thought.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said. I’m sure my voice trembled. I’m sure he noticed this. I asked him his name.
He grinned. “Why do you want to know?” he asked. He gave me a nom de guerre. Was it Abu Baraa, Father of the Innocent? Abu Masaakin, Father of the Poor? It was something obviously fake, along these lines. I don’t remember.
We stared at each other for several long seconds. Eventually, Abu Osama interrupted our silence. He sat on the bed next to Behajat. He opened his laptop, tapped at some keys, then invited the others to gather round.
The five of them peered into the laptop screen. Their faces glowed. When the video began, it stopped all movement in their faces. They watched in a trance for thirty seconds or so, and then smiles appeared at the edges of their mouths, and then I heard my own voice from the laptop:
“What is your name?” I said.
“Mohammed,” Mohammed replied.
“How old are you?” I asked. He replied.
“I have no more questions,” I said. “I’m done.”
An interval of silence followed. Abu Osama’s voice emerged from the laptop speakers: “Shall we go to it, boys?”
There was a crash, a pause, scuffling, and then my voice came again. “Oof,” I said.
The faces in front of me erupted in violent laughter. There was snorting, hand slapping, and more laughter. It seemed to me that the film had done for the new kidnapper what the real-life attack had done for the four people who had enacted it: It brought him into something illicit and delightful. It surprised, though he knew just where the plot was going, and comforted, since the resolution (me bleeding in handcuffs, Abu Osama lecturing) proved that all was right with the world.
The audience wanted a second showing. The second time around cast the same spell of motionlessness over the audience in the beginning and brought out, at the end, the same thigh-slapping mirth and oneness.
Hearing my own voice made me curious about the film. I asked to have a look. Behajat reached for his rifle. He held the sole of his foot in my face. “You sit, Animal,” he said.
There was no time for a third viewing. Behajat was in a hurry. He had committee meetings to attend, he said. He had books to read and articles to write.
“Really,” I said. “What kind of books?”
He glared at me. He did not speak.
Before he left the apartment, Behajat took a minute to go over the security procedures that were to be observed during the night. He brought me to the sitting room. He unlocked my left hand from the cuffs, then had me sit on the sofa. He smiled, pulled at the empty cuff, then locked it to the sofa’s wooden armrest.
“You sleep here,” he said.
If my hand was to be locked to the sofa’s armrest, I was going to have to sleep sitting up and to hold my arm in the air. I pointed this out.
He shrugged. “Aren’t you an agent?” he said. “Haven’t you been trained for this? Do your best.”
I told him that I would need to pee during the night. He thought for a moment, then stepped into the kitchen. He returned with a plastic bucket. He planted it under the armrest. His quick thinking—or maybe it was the prospect of my being made to pee in a living room, then sleep next to my urine—made his face light up in happiness. “Anything else you need?” he asked. “Any service for you?”
He cocked his Kalashnikov, then handed it to Abu Osama. He made loud whispers into Abu Osama’s ear. I didn’t catch what was said, but it occurred to me that the Kalashnikov had been brought for me and that I—rather than enemy soldiers or bandits in the night—was the enemy the gun was meant to keep at bay.
Before he left, Behajat took a moment to wish me good night. He stood over the armrest to which my right hand was locked. “Sweet dreams, hero,” he said. “Do you need a pillow?” I did not answer him. “Tomorrow will be fun for you. You will meet many friends. Do you like parties?”
Moments later, he and Abu Said slipped out of the apartment. I never saw Abu Said again.
At first, in the silence after their departure, I sat by myself in the darkness. The three kidnappers who remained in the apartment chatted among themselves in the bedroom. I inspected the armrest to which I was locked. My hand had been fastened to a sturdy, milled dowel. It was much too robust a piece of wood to dislodge without an axe or sledgehammer.
The new addition to the kidnappers’ gang, I felt, had materialized like a sinister guest. He had refused to tell me his name, had made mocking, honey-voiced threats about a party, had not uttered a word about a phone call or a ransom, and had brought a new, steely sense of purpose to the group, though what this purpose was I could not discern. I hoped he would not return. Mohammed, at least, had told me his name. Perhaps it was false. Fine. He, at least, had a past, was willing to chat with me about it, and did not snicker when I spoke to him.
I hoped he didn’t mean for me to spend the rest of the evening by myself, locked in a darkened room. I called out for him. He came right away.
Within seconds of his sitting down next to me, I knew—from his quiet voice and from the personal nature of the conversation he initiated—that he sympathized with
my plights.
He said that many, many innocent people had been imprisoned in this war. In his opinion, if I was truly innocent—if I could prove that I had nothing whatsoever to do with the CIA—I would be let go. In the meantime, there were things I ought to know about life in detention. It was natural that I should be afraid now and natural that I should have no appetite. He said that the fear would give way to boredom, and the boredom to loneliness. He told me about the room in which he had had his first interrogation: a cavernous empty hall in a branch of the Syrian state security apparatus, outside of Damascus. The emptiness of the room had terrified him. The officer had screamed at him. At one point during the interrogation, the police had brought in one of his Facebook friends. The friend, he learned then, had all along been working with the secret police. Every incriminating thing he had said to his friend—and there were many—had been printed out on reams of computer paper. He had been certain that they meant to kill him that evening.
Mohammed was speaking to me then in quiet, courteous tones. We are not such people, his stories told me. He and I agreed that the regime was afraid of its own shadow and that if it would only agree that its people were good and so leave them in peace all would be well. The state, however, insisted on poking its nose into the minutest details of private life. It was afraid of Islam because it knew nothing of Islam. It hated Muslims. It meant to crush the life of anyone who dared to believe. We shook our heads in sadness. He said that he meant to die before he allowed himself to be imprisoned again.
After a few moments of silence, he rose without a word of prompting from me, whispered with Abu Osama in the neighboring room, and then both of them returned to me.
A handcuff key appeared. I was released from the sofa. I was allowed to pee in the bathroom, to drink without handcuffs, and to eat a bowl of lentils that materialized from the kitchen.
Mohammed turned to Abu Osama. “Where should he sleep?” he asked.