by Theo Padnos
I am on my own, I told myself. I crumpled my sheet of paper into a ball. I stuffed the ball into the pocket of my pants. A few days passed and then one afternoon, after a visit to the prison bathroom, a guard happened to pat down my pockets as he pushed me into my cell. He pulled a wad of grimy paper from my pants. “What’s this?” he said. He locked me into my cell, then returned a minute later with the prison manager and two guards. Under a foam rubber mattress, the guards found my pen and the rest of the paper. The manager thrust them into my face. “What are you writing?” he screamed. “Who gave you the pen?”
I explained: He himself had given me the pen. I meant to write a fiction. My story took place far away, in Amrika al Latiniya, I said. I had written it in order to divert myself. The manager stalked around the room for a moment. He stared into my eyes and clenched his fists. “Why do you lie?” he screamed. He kicked over a water bottle, then kicked a soccer ball I had made for myself out of the stuffing in a quilt the captors had given me. The assistants shook out the quilt, then patted down my clothing. They tossed the foam rubber mattress across the room. When the manager had satisfied himself that he had found the pen and every bit of purloined paper, he gathered his assistants, then strode into the hallway. An assistant slammed the door.
During the following days, I clung to the feeling that the fragments of Kafka’s stories I had learned when I studied German could help me understand the world in which I was trapped. “ ‘How did I get here?’ I exclaimed. It was a moderately large hall, lit by soft electric light…” These first lines of a Kafka parable called “The Cell” seemed to offer a promising beginning. But I couldn’t recall the rest. Why had Kafka written parables at all, I wondered, and what had he been on about in “The Cell?” I had no idea. One evening during this period of desperation, I managed to persuade myself that the complete text of The Trial could sort things out for me. Of all the stories in my memory, this one, about a man arrested one morning in his bed (“without him having done anything wrong”) seemed to most truly describe the events that had overtaken my life. So I grasped after suggestive scenes in that book, half-recalled them, fell asleep, then woke in a mood of frustration and fear. Kafka had described the world of a Jew in Prague at the start of the twentieth century. I needed to know about Arabs in al Qaeda in Aleppo a hundred years on: al Qaeda reality. I wracked my brain for the bits of “In the Penal Colony” I could remember. There had been torture in that story. Had the victims survived? If so, how? Recalling nothing useful, and feeling that no amount of seeing into made-up stories could help me, I tore at my hair.
* * *
Nowadays, I suspect that the world I was living in at the time had much more in common with dreams and hallucinations—and novels and plays, for that matter—than I knew. Now I think that the people in charge of that prison were consumed by their own kind of creative mania. Their passion was to conjure an age-old Islamic dream from the Aleppo rubble. That dream was of Muslims living in serene harmony with the land and with themselves, invincibility before the enemies of Islam, and oneness with the Koran.
In the days after the prison manager confiscated my writing materials, I spent most of my time lying prone on the foam rubber mattress. I might have had a bit of a concussion. When the fluorescent light bulbs in my cell turned themselves on, as they did now and then, the light seemed to pound and flash in my head. Rising from the floor brought on dizzy spells. Sitting down made the dizzy spells come back. I tried to move as little as possible. In order to pee in this prison, I had to walk down the corridor in the blindfold, with a pair of guards at my sides. Right away, they guessed that if they let go of my elbows I would stagger into the walls. During the first steps of this excursion, I would step forward, holding my hands in front of me like a zombie. I would float for a moment, feel the vertigo, bump into something, then crumple to the floor. The spectacle invited onlookers. The onlookers helped me to my feet, ushered me forward (“Quickly, you! Quickly!”), then kicked obstacles into my path. Or they held out their feet, or they pushed me into someone else’s extended foot.
When I tripped over the obstacles, a general hilarity spread through the corridor. Despite the dizziness in which I lived in those days, or perhaps because of it, I felt I was beginning to understand what the young men in the corridor were talking about as I stumbled around at their feet. I felt I knew what they were dreaming about.
* * *
By my calendar, my first weeks in the Aleppo eye hospital occurred in the last days of October 2012. By their calendar, a time of reckoning—of reaping what had been sown and each being rewarded according to his merit—was dawning over Aleppo. The physical center of the reckoning was the hospital basement. Early on, during my first days in this hospital, a visitor to my cell who was neither armed nor wearing military clothing at all—who seemed, I thought, only interested in helping me understand the facts—told me that this underground corridor was the place in Aleppo to which the defenders of the faith brought its enemies. Competent judges were determining the facts. The innocent were being let go. Those with “things upon them,” as the Arabic phrase has it, were being made to pay.
Right away, I could guess something of how the system worked because I could hear the commanders in the hallway as they opened the doors of prisoners in the neighboring cells. “Time to take what you have earned,” the commanders would say. What had this person earned? By doing what? I would listen to the handcuffs coming out, and then would come the order: “Stand!” A few minutes of silence would intervene. Then from a room at the end of the corridor, the screaming came. It would last for twenty minutes or so, and when it died away the crack of electric shocks would break the silence. There was more screaming then, and after another twenty minutes or so the voice faltered, then died away. There was more electricity then. Then, nothing. Every few days, new prisoners were brought to the cells next to mine.
In those early days of the Syrian war, ISIS had yet to break away from the Syrian al Qaeda affiliate, Jebhat al-Nusra. Except for the owner of the library, the al Qaeda spokesman, the fighters who frequented this basement didn’t seem to think of themselves as members of any sect or branch of the rebellion. They were Muslims. They had come out to defend Islam. Most of the young men who distributed food in the hospital spoke in Syrian-accented Arabic.
My first conversations with the people who brought food and water to my cell in the hospital were about paradise. Did I feel I would ever be in paradise? they wanted to know. “I don’t know,” I said. They knew just how they would live out the rest of their lives and how they would die. Every moment that remained to them on Earth would occur in battle, against the enemies of God. In the instants of their deaths, they would be transported to the side of God. He dwelled on the highest of the ninety-nine levels of paradise. Here fellow martyrs were watching them and waiting for a beautiful reunion. Everyone would live in happiness together. “Allah has purchased the lives and the wealth of the believers,” reads a line in the Koran that came up often in casual conversation in that basement.
For that, they shall have paradise. So they fight in the cause of God, and kill and are killed. It is a true promise God has made….
Perhaps others elsewhere have different ways of glossing this passage. In this basement, it meant that long ago, at the dawn of time, God had offered a solemn contract to these young men. They had contemplated the offer, then accepted it. Accordingly, they would kill and be killed. Afterward, the ascension. Then, the togetherness. For now, all was well. They would fight and die. Then God would honor his side of the agreement.
“You also might be killed this evening,” the fighters in this hospital would tell me—not so much to threaten me, I thought, but because they knew life here, on our planet, to be unpredictable. They wondered if I was prepared for my death as they were prepared for theirs. “You’ve done nothing to prepare?” they asked. They smiled. It seemed to me that these young men had at last understood that the were the holders of a binding contract wit
h God himself. Now they meant to live and die by the terms of their contract. In this respect their oneness with the sacred book wasn’t entirely a dream.
Down there, the caliphate was real, too. As any resident of one of the Islamic statelets in Syria and Iraq will tell you, a caliphate does not come because a swell in a robe and a Rolex declares that now is the time for a caliphate. The believers in a caliphate think it comes because fifty thousand years ago, at the dawn of time, the angels wrote that the current generation would throw up such a quantity of heroes so filled with divine purpose that they could not keep themselves from making the dream come true. Yet even the believers will admit that a caliphate is also a psychological phenomenon that settles over crowds, then works its way through neighborhoods, cities, landscapes.
In October of 2012, the soldiers of our Islamic state weren’t asking the citizens to pledge their allegiance to anyone in particular, nor did they want to give their caliphate a name. The armed men called themselves Muslims or Believers or sometimes, simply, “us.” Their ambition wasn’t to bring an al Qaeda government to Syria but rather, they said, to bring Islam.
There were no uniforms. At the end of the corridor outside my cell, there hung a black-and-white flag emblazoned with the seal of the prophet. The trucks in which the armed men drove their prisoners around often flew this flag or the al Qaeda flag from their antennae.
This state’s bureaucracy, I gathered, was a work in progress. In our Aleppo neighborhood, there was an emir (he never appeared, though allegedly you could write him letters). Above at higher levels of this new government, were other emirs, elsewhere. Some, I understood, were judges. Others were historians. Others were military experts and still others were state planners. Collectively, the emirs were referred to al ulema, or “the men of science.” In this state, there was an internal police force with an investigative branch and punishments for criminals that suited their crimes. You could be hung by your wrists from pipes beneath the ceiling for having insulted God. You could be shocked with car battery cables for having tried to chat up a girl in the street. Their caliphate was real, even then, more than a year before it announced its presence to the world, in that Alawites were being arrested in the street, charged with apostasy, then dragged into underground cells. This apostasy had occurred, so it was alleged, in the eleventh century, when the first Alawites appeared in the mountains along the Syrian coast. Only now were the Muslims of Syria, as my captors liked to refer to themselves, getting around to holding these apostates to account. Many of the apostates had been soldiers in the Syrian Arab Army. Now they faced execution—not for anything they had done in the army of Bashar al-Assad, but because the punishment for apostasy in Islam, so the feeling in that basement had it, is death.
Happily, the law of God allowed for prisoner exchanges.
Sadly, the Assad regime refused to negotiate with terrorists.
The Alawite prisoners were being kept alive, for now, I understood, in the unlikely event that the regime should change its mind.
As for the soldiers of this caliphate: Many had already killed and died in order to take over the border-crossing stations on the Turkish border. On the day they overran the crossing at Bab al-Hawa, on the Antakya-Idlib border, in July of 2012, one of the commanders yelled into the camera as the banner that later became the ISIS flag waved over his head, “As you can see, we control the entirety of this place. And we announce from this day forward the existence of an Islamic state under the laws of the noble Koran. We are now forming suicide cells to make jihad in the name of God!”
Before I set out for Syria, as it happened, I watched this video. I’m sure all the reporters who were writing about Syria then saw it, too. Its existence was reported in the New York Times. We wanted to keep up to date. So we read the Times. But then… I didn’t believe a word of it. There had never been an al Qaeda presence in Syria. Where would they find their suicide bombers? The extremists in the video lived in a tiny bubble, I told myself. Soon they would blow themselves to bits.
Down in the hospital basement, it would have been impossible not to believe in what was going on. Every few days, Soldiers of the Land of Sham, as they called themselves using a word for the Levant in sacred histories of the region, brought in new prisoners of war. They came in handcuffs and blindfolds. Every few days, new young men in combat gear, some of whom stumbled through the simplest phrases in Arabic, trooped through the basement corridor.
In a caliphate, I discovered, people are no longer afraid to disclose the contents of their hearts to strangers, and all the believers, even the most innocent-seeming children—perhaps especially them—reveal themselves to you at the drop of a hat.
Ask an eight-year-old child of a commander inside a caliphate what he wants to be when he grows up. “Ingimassi,” he will say, lisping through his gap-toothed smile. An ingimassi (from the Arabic verb for “to plunge,” as in “plunge into death”) carries a Kalashnikov in order to kill as he himself is being killed. Sometimes, in some cases, he carries out his suicide mission, survives by a miracle, then returns in the evening to hang out with his friends. He has submerged himself in death yet somehow lives. In that hospital, I think we all came to know what life feels like when you have left the earthly plane yet carry on, alert, wiggling your toes and fingers, waiting for what comes next.
About the things society once hid from view: In certain private conversations in Syria, even before the war, it wasn’t uncommon to hear Sunni Muslims discussing the Alawites’ secret-but-all-the-more-real-for-that talent for making themselves invisible. Having no special feeling for Islam themselves, Alawites, it was thought, were okay with dressing up as Muslims, inserting themselves into the prayer rows, then eyeing their neighbors as the neighbors spoke to God. If the faithful prayed too well, studied too much, or came to understand the power of the religion too well, these enemies of Islam, the Alawite agents, pounced.
Now that the caliphate had come, the agents were visible to everyone. Many had already been seized. Inside the hospital, it was easy enough to identify these formerly invisible spies. The men in the military uniforms being made to clean the toilets were Alawites. The men on their hand and knees who swabbed the corridor tiles were Alawites. The foreigners and children who stopped to peer at these house cleaners didn’t always understand what was going on. “Nusayris,” the men with the guns would murmur, using a derogatory term for Alawites.
One afternoon, not long after my arrival in this prison, a guard left the door to my cell open as he ladled soup into a bowl for me. Behind him, a line of six men in blindfolds shuffled in slow motion, like sleepwalkers, through the corridor. Some of the men wore military pants. Some wore green hospital scrubs. Each man clasped the shoulders of the man in front of him. A guard had hung a tether around the first prisoner’s neck. The guard walked with a handgun in one hand and his end of the leash in the other. Some of the prisoners craned their necks at the ceiling, as people in blindfolds sometimes do. Others walked stooping over, as if they were scouring the ground for lost coins.
“Nusayris?” I asked the guard who had brought me the soup.
“Yes,” he said. “And Pigs.” I wanted him to tell me that these men were not going to be killed. “Are they not killing us?” he shrugged in response to my question. The laws of Islam, he said, required murderers to be put to death. The laws also required cleanliness in the streets. Now that the people of Aleppo were living under Islam, he himself could not have intervened to help the condemned men even if they had been his best friends. To interfere in the disposition of their cases would have been to supplant the law of God with whim. When the male Alawite population of Syria had been killed, the Alawite women and children, he thought, might be spared. Perhaps Israel would be willing to take them. Perhaps they could travel from nation to nation, he suggested, like Gypsies.
By October of 2012, the American spies in their caliphate had run out of time. We were being unmasked. It wasn’t just my journalist cover they meant to shear awa
y but my hair, the orderly civilian clothing in which I had come to Syria, and the veneer of decency beneath which my truer nature lurked. To remind me of my true nature, they gave me new names. Often I was Pig. Sometimes my name was Donkey or Insect or Filth.
One afternoon, a few days after my head had been shaved, a man in a mask who spoke English with a Canadian accent and his boss, a Syrian commander, put me in an orange jumpsuit, then set me before a tripod-mounted camera. At the time, their caliphate was such that, in this facility, at any rate, they had only a single orange jumpsuit. After I had made my film, about which there will be more later, they made me undress, then turn the jumpsuit over to the prisoner in line behind me.
As I was pulling on my everyday jail clothing again, I showed the commander the tennis jacket I had been living in during the previous weeks. It disgusted even the other prisoners. Lice were living in its seams. I had been dragged up and down the hospital corridor by its collar. It was covered in floor grime. “Sheikh, the jacket… it’s disgusting,” I said. I had played my part in his film. Could he give me a new jacket?
The filmmaker fixed his eyes on mine. “It’s not the jacket but the wearer who is disgusting,” he replied. He declined to give me new clothing.
In fact, all of the prisoners in that basement were disgusting in the same way. We had all been pounced upon, and so all of our clothing was smeared with blood. We all wore similar lice-filled, grime-stained rags. There were times when we vomited on the floors of our cells. We had nothing to clean up with. The filth the men on the path of God imputed to us was real. Their disgust was real. They lived in a world of patchouli oil for their beards and Head & Shoulders for their cascading curls. Their cleanliness was in the way they smelled, in their pink and white prep-school shirts (Ralph Lauren was popular in Aleppo then), in the zeal with which they performed their ablutions, in their immaculate robes, and in their speech. Normally, in Syria, when young men wish to express contempt they bring up your sister’s vagina. Or they tell you that you are the son of a whore. In this hospital, even when the fighters had discovered the inmates defacing their cells, as they sometimes did, and so screamed at the top of their lungs, they did not bring up vaginas or whores.