by Theo Padnos
There were picnic tables, propane tanks, sofa cushions, and stray car doors. The more she stared, the more the sight of the debris moved her. She had presumed these effects to belong to the underlying structure of the place. Now they were bobbing away in the troughs of the waves. How fragile life is, she thought, and how prone things are to being swept away.
Looking back now, it seems that this teenager appeared in my imagination because I required a means of seeing how suddenly disasters can descend on a life. I had not known. I hadn’t had occasion to reckon with my own impermanence.
Of course, I badly wanted to understand what was happening in the war outside my window, too. I suspect this is why my thoughts kept returning to a person balancing in the air, high above a landscape. I required a seer, a reader of the shifting currents, and a neutral observer. I couldn’t see the facts for myself so I invented a watcher, imagined her to be wise, and tried to see through this person’s eyes.
Nowadays, I know that during this period in the war, an important kind of news really was developing on the other side of my cell door. That March, the Iraqis and the European fighters in Jebhat al-Nusra were making plans to form a new group, to be called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which wouldn’t fight only in Syria but across the globe. Outside my cell door, this splinter faction within Jebhat al-Nusra was developing its secession plans.
For their part, the loyalist Jebhat al-Nusra commanders were focused on the battle against the Syrian Arab Army. They were keen to show the citizens of Aleppo that as the Syrian Air Force carpet-bombed eastern Aleppo, they alone defended Islam. Accordingly, Jebhat al-Nusra, once a secret organization, launched itself into a high-visibility hearts-and-minds campaign. The sub-commanders affixed the black al Qaeda flag to the antennae of their pickups, and sometimes attached loudspeakers, from which they broadcast Jebhat al-Nusra anthems, to the roofs of these trucks. When their soldiers had nothing special to do, which was often, they piled themselves into the pickup beds, then drove the trucks in columns, at walking pace, through the streets of eastern Aleppo.
From time to time, these pickup caravans parked themselves in front of my window. Looking up from the floor of my cell, I could see the boots of the passing fighters. I caught glimpses of the black flags they flew from their trucks’ antennae and heard the anthems playing over the loudspeakers. Many of these parading soldiers were not Syrians. Through the window that had bars but no glass in it, I could hear their broken Arabic. I could see the foreignness in their faces.
By this point, I had long since stopped daydreaming about writing the news article that would rescue my career. Still that spring, as the dream of a caliphate came to life outside my cell, I often wondered what my erstwhile reporter colleagues were making of the recent turn of events in Aleppo. A local hospital had been converted into an al Qaeda command and control center. Martyrs-to-be from across the world were filtering into our basement corridor. The torture of American reporters, their orange jumpsuit videos, the al Qaeda flag–bedecked pickup trucks—surely, I thought, an enterprising reporter would find rich material in such a setting.
Now I know that during the hours in which thoughts along these lines were running through my head, the Beirut bureau chief for the Washington Post, Liz Sly, was upstairs in the reception room researching a story about our hospital.
The report that eventually appeared in the Washington Post, “Islamic Law Comes to the Rebel Held Areas of Syria,” published March 19, 2013, noted that Jebhat al-Nusra, though ostensibly a terrorist organization, had turned itself to civic administration. It had adopted the eye hospital as a kind of “wartime city hall.” Here, it concerned itself, as Sly wrote, with “administering day-to-day matters such as divorce, marriage, and vehicle licensing.” Toward the end of the article, the report quoted a demonstrator who had been locked up in the city hall basement as punishment for having pushed the al Qaeda flag aside during the course of a march. In the basement, the detainee had been beaten. “It didn’t hurt,” Sly quoted this person as saying because the pipe with which he had been beaten was thin, “like the ones used in a toilet. It was just a reprimand, a way of saying, ‘Don’t do it again.’ ”
Looking back at this article now, I marvel that the hospital authorities allowed her to poke around their premises at all. Perhaps they assumed that she would miss all the important news, as she seems to have done. Certainly, their notion of “the news,” in any case, would have born no relation to hers. For these authorities, the important news was that a divine form of government was descending over the Land of Sham. A great, global coalition of enemies, they believed, would soon be attacking this government. They trusted that a critical mass of Muslims, composed of citizens from every nation on earth, was on its way to Aleppo in order to fight and die in its defense. The hospital authorities would have been keen to meet a trustworthy Muslim, capable of transmitting this variety of news to the world’s Muslim population. They would have regarded a Washington Post reporter as an enemy from the capital of a land of enemies. It’s a wonder they didn’t arrest her.
Thinking back on that time and place now, it also seems wondrous to me that a reporter could come away from this hospital with the impression that it meant to administer city affairs. In fact, the authorities here meant to put heretics to the rack. They dreamed of an imminent combat between good and evil, millions dead, and a gorgeous utopia, only for Muslims, rising up from the Aleppo ruins. In March of 2013, they were busy making their dreams come true. Did a tour around the hospital’s first floor reveal nothing at all of this coming to life? Perhaps this reporter was especially blind? In the years since my release, I’ve often pondered such questions. I’m inclined to think that this reporter was no more blind than any other. The coming of a caliphate, I know now, is above all a spiritual phenomenon. It occurs within the collective psyche. It’s not the sort of thing one could take a picture of. Still less could one interview it. It might be that the best way to report on such an event is to lock oneself into an underground room, to listen to the prayers, and to feel the terror in the air. In this way, over time, the thing that’s happening to the city’s psyche is bound to happen to yours.
Over time, Jebhat al-Nusra developed a news apparatus of its own. Because its reporters were Muslims, the news they produced was thought to be immune to the Jewish hoodwinking.
Their productions addressed the general news consumer, as the news-like videos the ISIS hostage John Cantlie made for ISIS did. At it happened, these videos covered more or less the ground the Washington Post correspondent covered during her Aleppo trip. The news in these reports was that in the ruins of the old institutions citizens, assisted by the principles of their faith, were cobbling together a new civic order. When prisons were referred to, they were said to be for leading wayward citizens back to God. There was no torture. In the civilian population, there was despair and deepening piety. Among the rebel leaders, there was serene conviction. Such is the al Qaeda news. It never changes.
CHAPTER 6 THE VILLA BASEMENT
One morning in April, the prison manager, Yassin, and two prison guards I did not know opened the door to my cell. Yassin held a handful of plastic zip ties in one hand and strips of light blue fabric, to be used as blindfolds, apparently, in the other. I said that I had my own blindfold. “Fine,” Yassin said. “Blindfold yourself, then give me your hands.” When I had completed this operation, he had me step into the corridor. Out there, I could hear that other prisoners up and down the corridor were also being blindfolded, handcuffed, then made to step into the corridor. The guards were in the mood for jokes, it seemed. One of them leaned a hand on my shoulder, then spoke as if he were a tourist guide, in bright, foreigner-appropriate Arabic. “Have a pleasant journey,” he said. “We thank you for your visit!”
That morning, the Jebhat al-Nusra administration escorted twenty-eight prisoners out of their cells in the eye hospital basement, walked us up a flight of stairs, then herded us into the backs of waiting trucks.
Outside, in the hospital parking lot, I was made to lie in the bed of a pickup with two other prisoners. A Jebhat al-Nusra fighter who might have been in the bed with us but also might have been sitting in the pickup cab murmured threats at us. We were not to say a word. We were not to move. If we moved or spoke we would be shot.
I waited for the truck driver to turn on its engine, then nestled myself against a wheel well. A few minutes later, we were rolling. It was easy enough to nudge my blindfold upward a bit. I could see that we were rolling down a broad city boulevard. A little knot of commuters waited at a bus stop. By the side of the road, children sold vegetables from the backs of upturned plastic crates. There was a traffic roundabout and, beyond this, a district of junkyards and cement shacks, which dwindled away, after about fifteen minutes, into dandelion fields.
Nestled against the wheel well, I watched the road signs rolling by: Kafr Hamra, Babis, Anadan. We were in the northwestern Aleppo countryside, apparently, heading north. An hour and a half of driving along meandering country roads brought us to the service entrance of a stately villa. There was a line of cedars, an entry gate, a guardhouse, and a flight of stairs under an eave, which led downward, into a basement. Under the blows of the Jebhat al-Nusra guards, the twenty-eight prisoners were hurried down this stairway, through a corridor, then into a basement cell. We were told to sit in rows, to face the back of the room, to keep our mouths shut, and not to move.
I didn’t know this then but found out later that about half the prisoners made this voyage in the body of a fuel transport truck. Their clothing stank of diesel fuel. By this point in our travels, most of our blindfolds had fallen away. Some of the prisoners had wriggled their wrists out of their plastic zip tie handcuffs. As we sat with our backs to the door of the cell, we snuck glances at one another but did not speak. In this cell, a bank of boarded-up windows on one of the walls admitted a gray, milky light. We could make out faces by this light but wouldn’t have been able to read. In the silence our captors had ordained, we peeked at the windows, smelled the diesel fuel in the air, and did not glance over our shoulders.
From somewhere behind us—the doorway, no doubt—came the sound of men fussing with their Kalashnikovs. They clicked their magazines into place and hoisted their shoulder straps over their shoulders. They murmured among themselves but did not speak to us.
In those moments, I’m sure all the prisoners felt that Jebhat al-Nusra had brought us here to shoot us or to light us on fire. What could we do? I, for one, was too afraid to speak.
After several tense minutes, the captors slammed the cell door shut.
I happened to be sitting next to a prisoner whose ability to read the religious codes in Syria was sharper than mine. He eavesdropped for a moment on our fellow prisoners, then turned to me with a look of terror in his eyes. “They’re all Alawites,” he whispered.
I glanced at my fellow inmates. Many were wearing combat fatigues. By this point, the Jebhat al-Nusra psychology had worked its way into my own. In a flash, I saw what had happened at the eye hospital. I had been picked out as a political enemy. The other prisoners had been deemed religious enemies. Now we had been brought into the quiet of the countryside. Soon we would be shot as the Nazis shot Jews in Poland in the early part of their war: in the darkness, in the basements of abandoned buildings in the countryside. Afterward, our bodies would be incinerated.
* * *
In fact, a group of three captors returned to our cell within minutes to snip away the zip ties. The prisoners who were still wearing their blindfolds were allowed to untie them. Without speaking, the captors handed us bottles of fresh water. They went away without a word but returned an hour later carrying piles of woolen army blankets.
After they had locked the door again, we laid the blankets out over the floor in order to make a sort of patchwork carpet. Our cell was a narrow, rectangular room. There was just enough space in it for each of the prisoners to claim a spot at the base of a wall, to tuck his left shoulder into the flank of the neighbor on his left, to do the same with the neighbor on his right, and to stretch out his legs. Sitting in this way, our toes overlapped with the toes of the prisoners who sat on the opposite wall. We were packed in tightly, in other words, but the conditions were not unbearable. From the eye hospital many of us had brought plastic shopping bags in which we carried extra T-shirts and underpants. Some of the prisoners managed to bring their winter coats. One of them carried a bundle of cloth that, when unwrapped, turned out to contain three door-stopper-sized editions of the Koran.
The military men in this group had been held, it turned out, in the cell next to mine in the eye hospital basement. They knew one another well enough. Now they turned their eyes on the eleven civilians they did not know. Gradually, the air filled with questions: “Where from?” “Who caught you?” “Where?” “How long have you been in prison?”
I’m sure the day’s events had shaken us all. I found out later that one of the half-dozen soldiers who made the voyage in the bowels of the fuel truck had lost consciousness in the darkness, as the fuel sloshed over his clothing. He had felt himself suffocating to death.
At one point during the morning voyage, our convoy had bumbled into a confrontation at a highway checkpoint. During this contretemps, the prisoners in the pickup beds watched from under their blindfolds as the Jebhat al-Nusra warriors alighted from the trucks, then ran screaming toward a foe at the head of the convoy, beyond our field of vision. Many large, exotic, expensive-seeming rifles were brandished. There was much shouting. Bursts of gunfire erupted. At the height of this drama, the driver of the fuel truck emerged from his cab, shouted something unintelligible, then reached his hands into the suicide belt at his waist. Withdrawing a pair of wires, he clutched one in each hand, then walked forward through the stalled traffic, waving his wires in the air, screaming.
It took ten minutes for this checkpoint confrontation to resolve itself into a squabble and another ten minutes for the squabble to de-escalate into a discussion. Something must have gone right during the discussion. Soon we were again rolling through the dandelion fields.
* * *
Because a Jebhat al-Nusra warrior cannot lay eyes on a prisoner without screaming curses at him and because no prisoner likes to sit on a floor in a pair of cuffs and a blindfold as Jebhat al-Nusra men point their rifles at his back, our first minutes in this basement occurred in an atmosphere of blank terror. The terror dissipated, of course, as it had always done in the past, and within an hour a warm conversational hum, as in a movie theater before a show, hovered over our cell.
Seventeen of the prisoners, I discovered, were indeed Alawite officers in the Syrian Arab Army. They had been wounded on the battlefield, or ambushed or put to siege, then dragged away behind enemy lines. There was an Alawite member of Parliament among us, and seven Palestinian Syrians who stood accused of working as irregulars in pro-regime militias. There were three foreign prisoners: the jihadi from Casablanca, Abu Sofiane; Matt Schrier, the photojournalist, originally from Long Island; and me.
Even in the best of times, army officers in Syria can be counted on to regard people who sneak into Syria without visas, as the three foreigners had done, as plotters, sent by the CIA, to slit the throats of the Assad loyalists. In fact, Abu Sofiane really had come to Syria with some such purpose in view. It would not have taken long for the officers to deduce that a wounded Moroccan in Aleppo who made noises about having come on a humanitarian mission, as Abu Sofiane did that night, was a genuine terrorist. If they had met him under other circumstances, these officers would have put some perfunctory questions to Abu Sofiane, or not, then shot him on the spot. Though they were too polite to say so, the officers suspected that Matt Schrier and I had snuck into Syria to provide money and knives to the Abu Sofianes of the world.
That night, inside our cell, our instinct was to make peace, not war. We were aware that the occasion required cover stories. We indulged one another. I introduced myself as an English teacher speci
alizing in poetry. I had studied Arabic in Damascus before the war and had returned in the hopes of helping teacherless children in the war-torn areas. Abu Sofiane declared himself to be a doctor who, after training in America, had come out to Syria to aid the victims of the war. Matt Schrier was a photographer from Los Angeles. Our stories were lies or partial lies. “Welcome to Syria,” the officers said to us, smiling as we relayed our cover stories. They did not probe. Doubtless, they too had secrets they wished to preserve. Nobody wanted to pry.
By this point Matt Schrier, following Abu Sofiane’s instruction, had decided to convert to Islam. Matt had taken a Muslim name: Nasser. He introduced himself as Matt. Abu Sofiane corrected him. Matt gave out the religiously correct name, Nasser. “Welcome, Nasser,” the officers said. They wanted a Syria-appropriate nickname for me. In order to dilute my Americanness, I had introduced myself as half-French. On the universally-known-in-Syria sitcom Bab al-Hara, which is set in Damascus in the 1920s, in the time of the French mandate, the neighborhood spy-collaborator is called Abu Steyf. He is a comical figure, liked but not trusted. One of the officers proposed the name for me. Twenty-odd faces turned to me, smiling and winking. “Welcome, Abu Steyf,” they whispered.
At one point that evening, a Jebhat al-Nusra commander came to our cell to denounce the seven Palestinian Syrians among us. He made them raise their hands, state their names and the names of the places they were from. By agreeing to serve in pro-regime militias, according to this commander, the Palestinians, who were Sunni Muslims, had turned against their families, their villages, and God himself. If matters had been left up to this commander, all those who had betrayed Islam in this manner, he said, would be taken into the yard this evening, then shot.