by Theo Padnos
In their caliphate, the truth about hidden financial dealings was coming out. Anyway, so it was felt. One afternoon during my first week in prison, a pair of heavily bearded, heavily armed visitors to my cell had a discussion about ransoms. It began like this:
First visitor: The Americans don’t pay. Too bad for him.
Second visitor: By god, the Americans pay twice what the other countries pay. They lie about it in public more. In private, they pay more.
Whenever men came to my cell to speak about ransoms, I was happy. Their tone made me think that they were willing to horse-trade and knew how to carry out swaps. But when I questioned them, I could see right away that they didn’t know who in America they might call to advance their ransom project and didn’t want to find out. All of them were too locked inside the Arabic language and too preoccupied with killing regime soldiers to have a go at charming the CIA into a cash drop. How would they begin such a dialog? What demands would they make exactly? They didn’t have a clue. I knew, in any case, that if an operator at the US embassy in Amman or Ankara or Cyprus, or anywhere, for that matter, managed to figure out what the person who claimed to be an al Qaeda commander in Aleppo was on about (unlikely but conceivable) the operator would reply, “Freelance journalists are known for getting themselves in trouble. This one went to Aleppo? How unfortunate. It’s been nice talking to you. Good-bye.”
If the US government wouldn’t pay, perhaps someone else would? I clung to vague hopes like these during my first weeks in prison, but the more I discussed matters with my captors, the more obvious it was to me that the sums they required were too vast and the crimes America had committed against Muslims too unforgivable for them to accept a simple cash payment in exchange for my life.
One visitor to my cell wanted me to know that an army under his command had positioned itself across the neighborhoods outside the prison. The army was planning to attack a regime-controlled village in the evening. “Do you think anything you can pay us will last my men beyond breakfast time?” he asked. Other visitors chuckled happily to themselves, then asked, in pretend politeness, about the amount of money I thought I might be able to raise on my own. Maybe I could hawk peanuts in the street? What was my plan, really? Did I wish to sell my kidney? A lung? A liver?
In any case, money, I soon understood, couldn’t possibly get me out of my fix. All the fighters were certain that the American army had killed one million Muslims in Iraq. “You think we will be satisfied with money for this?” The fighters would ask me this question, hold my eyes, stare into them in quiet curiosity, and then, as the enormity of the American misadventure in Iraq dawned over us, they would shake their heads.
Almost every day, the younger guards in this prison found a way to mention my upcoming execution. Did I have any last wishes? they would ask. Did I prefer to die by hanging, by the knife, or by a bullet? I assumed at first that the delay in killing me had to do with the emir’s desire to set the scene. He would have wanted a good camera, flags everywhere, a happy crowd. Yet after a month of life as a prisoner, it became clear to me that they had all of these things on hand.
During my first weeks in prison, I attributed the delay to a need I imagined in them for a moment of maximum religious solidarity in which to carry out the crime. Such moments normally occur on the holidays, in the early afternoon, after the prayer. Those hours came and went. Nothing happened. I began to think the emir in charge of such matters was away. Whenever he returned—that’s when it would happen. I waited for an emir-like figure to materialize on the threshold of my cell. Many men in robes appeared. Some of them had powerful beards. Some didn’t. Nothing happened.
Meanwhile, the corridor outside my cell was evolving into a bustling underground boulevard in their caliphate-to-be. In the bathroom, I heard Russian, French, Turkish, and Kurdish voices. In the mornings, when teenage guards escorted me in a blindfold through the corridor, I listened as the men of the caliphate recited the Koran. Some lifted weights then. Others feasted. A kitchen opposite my cell had equipment with which to make stews and soups for dozens, maybe hundreds, of visitors. Along our basement corridor, there were dormitories for travelers, a sitting parlor for distinguished visitors, a mosque, and at the end of the corridor, in the windowless cavern that housed the hospital furnace, a torture room.
I learned to ignore the children. When I happened across them in the bathroom, the ten-year-old boys would ask me, “Do you know what I will be when I grow up?” I knew that they had been brainwashed into telling strangers that they dreamed of becoming suicide bombers. I tried not to engage. “Do you know what they are planning to do to you?” the kids would ask. I ignored them. The older, more distinguished-looking visitors to my cell talked much less. Unlike the children and the teenage soldiers, they never sang. The older men held their tongues and I assumed them to be in possession of secrets—or anyway, of information relevant to my fate. When these make spoke, however, the things they said were every bit as outlandish as the things the children said.
One afternoon, four elderly men in gold-fringed black robes, the picture of sobriety, it seemed to me, slipped into my cell. They collected in a semicircle over the mattress on which I was sitting, then stared at me. Their formal regalia, long beards, and grave faces made me think they had come to make a declaration or to issue a formal judgment. Eventually, one of the men pulled back his robe to reveal a knife and a handgun fixed to his waist. Like a movie villain, he removed his knife from its sheath, then ran his fingers across its blade.
A minute or so of collective knife admiration went by and then one of the visitors wondered, apropos of nothing, how much I thought my life might be worth, in dollars. The men ran their eyes over the objects in my cell: a pee bottle, a water bottle, a tin dish. They massaged their beards. “You could sell your blood,” one of them suggested. “Do you have AIDS? Your liver is worth something?” The other men turned their faces to me, as if genuinely interested in my thoughts. “You want to try?” said one. I watched their eyes to see if they were joking. I couldn’t tell.
After they had left the cell, I scoffed. A band of dodderers had wanted to frighten me. I had seen through their game. Men of this age, in this clothing, in Aleppo, I knew, spent their days reciting the Koran to themselves on sun-filled patches of mosque carpet. They gossiped. They might have fantasized about selling the blood of their enemies. In real life, they were harmless.
I clung to my theory for the rest of the day, but in the evening, as the light drained out of my cell, my theory began to disintegrate. If my captors were operating on prisoners, the operations might well occur in the basement of a hospital. If they were killing their prisoners, why wouldn’t they take an organ or two first? Perhaps their own soldiers required transplants. Anyway, night after night, in this hospital, an inhuman screaming, as if from beasts in a slaughterhouse echoed through the cells. Could this be the sound a human makes when his insides were being ripped apart? Maybe it is, I thought. Anyway, the sounds I heard in this prison indicated that ghastly things were being done to prisoners. Sooner or later, ghastly things, I concluded, would be done to me.
In the darkness inside my cell, I clung to one theory, then clung to its opposite. My captors were on the side of the Syrian people, against the dictator, I told myself. Basically, they were good. I answered myself: Do good people torture their neighbors? Would a good person do to anyone what they were doing to me?
One afternoon, a commander opened the door of my cell, poked his head in, then told me that I should prepare myself, for I was to be executed in five minutes. “In the Islamic manner.” He slammed the door. He returned five minutes later to lecture me, apparently, but not to execute me. In the midst of his lecture, the call to prayer came. He turned on his heels. “We’re busy,” he said. Again, he slammed the door.
After this incident, I began to think that they were keeping me alive because the sight of a blindfolded, terrified American shuffling through their corridors gave them visual proof of a tr
uth the citizens of their state believed in but could not see. Americans cower, they wanted to believe, by nature. We covered up the fact with ridiculous technologies. Now, in their basement, I covered myself with a pair of hospital pants, a bloody T-shirt, and a tennis jacket. In other words, they had taken my cover. “Your rights are with us now,” a commander told me.
This meant, I assumed, that I no longer had any of my own. Their right, for their part, was to behold the true nature of the enemy, to look on him as he really was, without his technologies, without any adornment at all.
As it happened, the true nature of this enemy was to tremble. In the darkness, in the presence of flashlights, he held his hands in front of his face. When he was in cuffs, he held these in front of his face. He hardly spoke. When the eight-year-old children told me to drop to my knees, I dropped. Thus the longer my life went on, the more Muslims from every corner of the Earth could see the inner qualities of this enemy: He was not above pleading with the cubs of the jihad, as the preteens called themselves, for food. He flinched when the cubs slapped him. “Why are you afraid?” the boys would ask, laughing. “Are all the Americans as fearful as you?”
But if I was a walking exhibit, my value, I judged, wasn’t much. “Your life is cheap to us,” the teenagers used to say as they escorted me to the bathroom. “It will cost us only a single bullet.” Maybe they were kidding. Maybe they were half-kidding. Yet the handguns they poked into the base of my skull when they guided me to the bathroom were certainly real. The screams from the torture room were real. Were they killing people down there? I was much too frightened of the answer to this question to ask it of anyone. But when they were torturing someone, I sometimes put it to myself. The answer came back in my head: This is the sound of someone being murdered.
The fighters in this hospital were often bored. To relieve their boredom, they abused me. When I passed them in the hallway, on my way to the bathroom, they slapped the back of my head. They locked their elbows around the back of my neck, wrestled me to the ground, then sprang to their feet in mock triumph and real, unfeigned happiness.
When I had lived through a week or so of such assaults, I decided that my safety required me to avoid the bathroom as much as possible.
I converted my water bottle into a pee bottle. I kept away from the corridor during the times—the dawn prayer, for instance—when I knew the most violent, abuse-prone commanders would be present.
One afternoon, when I judged that no commanders at all were about, I banged on the cell door. A teenager led me to the bathroom in perfect tranquility. He escorted me back to my cell in the same silence. I began waiting for these silences.
Most of all, I feared the prison manager. I imagined that he was in touch with faraway al Qaeda bosses. He could plead my case to them. Or condemn me in front of them. His hatred for me seemed a personal thing, so I feared his voice above all others, but there were stretches of days during which it seemed to vanish from the hospital corridor. He often went about in a suicide belt. Maybe he had blown himself up? Maybe the regime had caught up with him? There were times when, listening for this commander’s voice, it occurred to me that the other elder, important-seeming al Qaeda figures had vanished, too. Were they hiding out in the hills? Away on vacation? There were intervals of four or five days in which only the teenagers, it seemed to me, had been left to run the headquarters.
During these periods, it often happened that schoolchildren (the commander’s sons?) and a few of their teenage friends would bring a soccer ball into the corridor. They would have penalty shoot-outs. Or they would gather round, as I was being brought to the toilet, to ask questions about the details of my life in America. We all knew they weren’t meant to be interested in the dreck and trivia of everyday life in the United States, and yet… One of these basement teenagers had somehow convinced himself that over there, in the vast Playboy mansion that was an unmarried man’s life in America, I had had nine girlfriends.
When he was in the mood for it and when the commanders were away, this young man, Yassin, and I would have cheerful discussions about nine beautiful, willing American women, all in love with me. Didn’t I feel it was immoral to “sit with” (his phrase for “have sex with”) so many women? How did I find the time and the money? There weren’t that many, I replied, I didn’t just sit with them, they weren’t all American, I didn’t pay them, and I was glad for those relationships because they had helped me learn about life. Almost all those young men understood at least something of how complicated romance in America can be because of the “It’s complicated” button on Facebook and because in Syria, everyone under forty has seen at least a few episodes of Friends. All young people everywhere, of every faith in Syria, can sing in English at least a line or two from the Celine Dion ballad “My Heart Will Go On.”
In that basement, when the commanders were absent and when the subject of American love was in the air, the caliphate took a nap. It was still there, but for a few seconds no one cared. In those moments, it was clear to everyone that a girlfriend was good, not bad. My logic was impervious to argument, not theirs. A girlfriend would open the world to you. Her presence in your life would fill you up with pride, not shame. Why had I ever left America? the teenagers wanted to know. What on earth had brought me to Syria?
Once, in those early weeks, when no one special appeared to be lurking in the basement, I told a teenager who seemed, on some days, to be interested in English lessons that I liked his hotel just fine but had some business to look into and needed to check out. “Now,” I said. I smiled. He smiled back. He was standing on the threshold of my cell. He flung the door open. “Out you go, then,” he said. He stepped aside. “Be my guest.” For an instant, the hospital was just a hospital. This young man was just a kid from the neighborhood. He played soccer. Before the war, my rapport with the soccer-playing teenager was the single thing in this nation of invisible realms and mercurial people that I could rely on. Soccer had been like a universal code for friendship. The feelings a game brought waited in every alley, in every village. They were as natural and as good as the sunlight. For an instant in the hospital basement, this teenager was one such friend. I was his American guest.
And then, an hour later, the young man with the bee in his bonnet about my nine girlfriends, Yassin, would be standing on the threshold of my cell with a length of three-quarter-inch galvanized steel cable in his hand. Something, what I did not know, had woken the ancient, collective dream. “The floor of your cell is filthy!” he would shout. There was a pee bottle on the floor of that cell, a lice-filled, woolen army blanket, and nothing else. How was I to clean the floor? “You clean it with your tongue!” he would say, shouting. If the floor didn’t sparkle when he returned in ten minutes, he threatened, “the shabab”—the other young men in the corridor—would make me regret my filth. I would search Yassin’s face for a hint of a smile. He would stare for a moment more, then have me lower my head to his waist, then push my face to the floor.
The caliphate had come back.
Toward the beginning of December in 2012, a band of teenage Turkish fighters took up residence in a room next door to my cell. In the mornings, they lounged on an armchair in an alcove outside my cell. In the evenings, after the prayer, they lifted weights and staged wrestling tournaments in which they threw themselves from the chair’s armrests. It didn’t take them long to discover that the prisoner in the cell across the way was an American and afraid.
Somehow, the Turks acquired a cattle prod. Somehow, they acquired the key to my cell. Perhaps the Syrian guards had gotten bored of escorting me back and forth to the bathroom. Perhaps the Syrians wanted to allow their Turkish friends some fun.
For several weeks that December, whenever the door to my cell opened, a band of bored Turks would appear on the threshold. I would tie up my blindfold, then allow myself to be led into their recreation zone. They would leap on my shoulders and laugh and ask me to carry them along as if I were a camel. Eventually, they evolved a
game in which several of them leapt on my shoulders at once and tried to make me run. I would stagger to the floor. They would kick me in the ribs. They would apply the cattle prod to my backside and to my head. I would scuttle down the hospital corridor in my blindfold.
I resolved to collect spare bottles I found in the toilet stall, to hide them behind the door in my cell, and to pee into them. A guard found me out. He removed the bottles from my cell. A puddle of radiator water stood in the back of this cell. I peed into this. The odor outraged the guards, who informed the prison manager, who appeared, out of nowhere, on the threshold of my cell, surrounded by four Syrian assistants. They sprinkled disinfectant over my head, then dragged me from my cell, then beat me with their shoes in front of the Turks. “Your name is Shoe!” they called out. “What is your name?”
So I was a shoe. I still had my pee problem. The situation, I felt, was degenerating. I knew that I was becoming disgusting to my captors. If only the Turks would leave me alone, I thought, I could bring the prison manager, with whom I shared a language, at least, to an accommodation. If only I could pee in peace, I thought, I could turn my thoughts toward a long-term survival strategy. As things stood, however, whenever the Turks felt like it they subjected me to their blindfolded piggyback game. I was too afraid to use the bathroom. I wasn’t sure I could survive the Turks, never mind the punishments the Syrian authorities had in mind.