by Theo Padnos
In those moments, I half-wanted to reassure this young man. Jebhat al-Nusra was fun and games, I might have said. It was stolen pickup trucks, conquered villas, and willing brides for all. To confide one’s future to Jebhat al-Nusra hadn’t been a mistake at all, I could have said. Anyway, it was God’s will.
I doubt this young man would have believed me much if I had had a go at speaking like this. I suspect both of us were coming to understand that the will that guided our lives sat in a carpeted sitting room in an upper floor in this villa in front of a flat-screen television. Somewhere up there, a pasha was lounging with a remote-control clicker, an iPad, and high-speed internet. Such men spent their days spitting sunflower seeds across the floor. They clicked between Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, barked out orders over their two-way radios, and did not rise from their couches.
For a few seconds in the hallway, I managed to interest the teenager in a conversation about the car I had in mind for him. Was it more like a tractor with big wheels that crushed the snow, he wanted to know, or like a boat that sailed on its surface? A bit of both, I told him. He wanted to know if I could supply a girlfriend with the car. She had to be a Muslim and had to be the sort of girl who would cherish him, not me. “Would you mind bringing me across to that sort of place?” he asked me. “Go ahead. I’m waiting.”
At least that’s what I thought he said. Perhaps I was only listening to my thoughts.
* * *
Allegedly, we were sinners. Allegedly, Jebhat al-Nusra had arrested us because, in their Islamic state, sin was to be punished. Jebhat al-Nusra didn’t issue indictments. The specifics of our crimes varied according to the mood of the person making the accusation, but nobody in Jebhat al-Nusra doubted that we were in prison because we had strayed from the straight path of God. Similarly, nobody doubted that we could regain the path. Sinners could repent. God could forgive. Even if a sinner were to repent at death’s door, after a lifetime of continuous, egregious sin, everyone in Jebhat al-Nusra, including the preteen children, understood that God would wash the sins from his soul. Transformed by the magic of grace, the sinner would be taken into heaven as if he had lived out his days like a saint.
* * *
Now and then, when spells of optimism overcame me, I sometimes imagined that behind the scenes somewhere, Jebhat al-Nusra was busy negotiating for my release with authorities in the US. Thinking of the US, however, made me despair. I saw a cubicle deep in the bowels of the State Department basement. It was occupied by a bureaucrat. The bureaucrat’s job was to keep an eye on and make occasional notes in a file marked “Theo Padnos, disappeared in Syria.” I supposed that this official resented me for having overlooked the State Department’s many warnings against travel to Syria. Perhaps, now and then, a note from my captors, I imagined, did make its way across the oceans, then through the State Department input charts, to this bureaucrat’s desk. He or she would have sighed, examined the communication, then filed it away in the depths of the department’s disappeared person file. I wasn’t altogether wrong about this, I discovered later. The US government, I found out when I got home, scrutinizes communications from terrorists more carefully than I had imagined and does its best to comfort the kidnap victims’ families. Yet its policy of no concessions of any kind to terrorists allows the bureaucrats only to pretend to negotiate. Actual negotiations are forbidden. Thus, communications from terrorist gangs do indeed make it to bureaucrats’ desks. There they languish. And then they are filed away.
In the villa basement, the details of US hostage policy weren’t much on my mind. I felt I had to negotiate for myself, as indeed I did. So I beseeched the teenagers. This gave them an opportunity for a mini-lecture. I had made the error of placing my trust in fallible, mercurial humans, they said. In this instance, I seemed to believe in negotiators. It would be far more efficacious for me, they thought, if I were to put my faith in God. “When he decides that you shall be free, that’s when you will be free,” they told me.
“And there’s nothing I can do?” I would ask.
I could enter the religion of Islam, they replied. I could pray.
Several teenagers used to urge me to fast. Jebhat al-Nusra sustained its prisoners on two rounds of bread, one in the morning, one in the evening; handfuls of olives; and, occasionally, in place of the olives, a single falafel ball. The prisoners were hungry all the time, especially after having eaten. Nevertheless, the younger, more ingenuous Jebhat al-Nusra fighters felt the wisest thing we could do was to abjure the bread and the olives we got in the morning. They felt that all the prisoners ought to busy themselves with penance, which is to say, with fasting, prayer, and the recitation of the Koran. By these means, and by no other, they seemed to believe, could we bring ourselves into harmony with God. As soon as we brought ourselves into harmony with God, God, they assured us, would take note, then deliver us to our families. The fact that God had yet to deliver us was, for these young men, proof of the insincerity of our penance. They felt the sincerity would come through a more total commitment to prayer and recitation. “We are reciting. Of course, we pray,” the officers would protest, under their breaths, whenever a teenager tossed a round of religious counsel into the cell.
“Yes?” the teenagers would reply, innocently enough. The officers who were holding our cell copies of the Koran in their hands would raise their books into the air—proof positive, it seemed to me, of active reading.
The teenagers would shrug. Perhaps they had been told that Alawites are incapable of prayer—a libel common enough among hardline Sunnis in Syria. When Alawites pray, it is sometimes alleged, they are only shamming. Some of the teenagers appeared to think that while God could, in theory, pardon anyone, he would never pardon us. Our sins were too grave. “It’s no use praying now,” the most well-programmed young men would whisper to us, “since God has already decided that you are going to hell.
Such was the logic around which discussions with our guards often turned. To me it seemed that somewhere beneath their carapace there lived wondering, curious, amicable young men. We had no way to crack the shell. Probably the teenagers themselves couldn’t crack it. Whenever this exoskeleton of religious wisdom spoke to us, we murmured before its superior understanding. “Very well,” we told it. “In that case, we will pray.”
My case was slightly more complicated than the other prisoners’ cases, since I was the only non-Muslim in the cell (the Jebhat al-Nusra authorities did not question the sincerity of Matt’s conversion). It was presumed that, knowing God only through the Christian Bible, I couldn’t be expected to know how or whom to worship. Yet Islam, as every Sunni in Syria knows, is no secret. Nor does it consist of recondite dogmas. It requires only the will to believe. Any human who wishes to learn to make a proper Islamic prayer may learn in a quarter of an hour. Neither do fasting nor memorizing a sampling of the most well-known Koranic verses present unusual difficulties. “God made Islam simple for you,” the fighters used to tell me when milder, friendlier moods overcame them. Islam would not complicate my life but simplify it.
To the more credulous fighters in Jebhat al-Nusra, our path out of jail was an open road. We could walk the road any day we liked. We had to resolve to hew to that which God had ordained for Muslims, to eschew that which he has prohibited, as tens of thousands of normal citizens in Aleppo did every day, to pray and to repent. If we were to live in this manner, even for a single day, the fighters used to tell us, we would bring ourselves closer to God. If we were genuinely penitent and if God accepted our penance, no judge on Earth, they believed—or prison or coil of chains—could keep God from sending us home to our families.
It wasn’t as if we had difficulty being penitent. We had all made catastrophic errors. Our errors had brought us, if not to the brink of death, then certainly to a place from which we could discern a gaping darkness in the territory ahead. Meanwhile, apart from reading the Koran, we had nothing to do with our time but reflect on how we had worked our lives into this fix.
Abu Sofiane was thirty-two. In his twenties, he had had a go at immigration to America. Settling in Falls Church, Virginia, he turned to drug dealing, then insurance fraud. He married and had kids, but the marriage fell apart.
Eventually, the US authorities deported him back to Casablanca. At home in Morocco, he fought with his father. “A loser is what you are,” his father had told him. How could he prove to his father that he was no loser? He rather saw himself as a hero—or felt, at least, that heroic qualities he’d never been allowed to express lived inside him. Yet his father, the American immigration authorities, his wife in America, who was herself an immigrant, the officials in the mosques in America and Morocco—all such people had stifled him.
After his deportation, he took a series of menial jobs in Casablanca. He felt that his supervisors paid him little and mistreated him. The pointlessness of the tasks they made him do, and their habit of firing him every few weeks, made him lose interest in work.
In the wake of an argument with his father he resolved to give his life to the jihad. He flew to Istanbul, then took a bus to the border. He crossed into Syria as I did, with about $50 in his pocket. His idea had been to make friends with a shadowy rebel group he had heard about in the news, Jebhat al-Nusra. When he presented himself at a Jebhat al-Nusra headquarters, outside of Aleppo, the men there had appeared to welcome him, but things had quickly gone wrong. Later, after the shooting, there had been a month of unspeakable agony. There had been no treatment for his wound. There had rather been insults and little food. Nor had anyone in Jebhat al-Nusra bothered to explain to him why the organization had shot him, packed him into the trunk of a car, then chained him to a bed frame.
This shooting had occurred in January. By April, he could hobble. He had stopped obsessing over the proximate causes of his misfortune. When he was feeling close to God, he understood that the primary cause was God. God was testing his faith. He felt he had passed through the worst of it and that when he returned to the field of battle he would be fighting out of love of God rather than out of a wish to make himself great—or heroic or worthy—which had been his original motive. During the long, sleepy afternoons, he often managed to persuade himself that the Jebhat al-Nusra commanders had arranged this ordeal for him after all. They meant to try his spirit. They meant to try his body. In those moments, as he daydreamed, Abu Sofiane’s face filled with pride. He felt he was passing the tests with flying colors. He felt he was astonishing everyone, including himself.
Abu Sofiane had a flare for the dramatic. He was capable of bowing his head over the holy book, reading out a line in an even, conversational tone of voice, pausing to master his emotions, giving in to a tear, then carrying on half-sobbing, half-shouting, as if, in those moments, his encounter with the Koran was wracking his soul. It was obvious to everyone within hearing range that he was putting on a display. But a display isn’t necessarily a lie. Anyway, his emotions when reading the Koran were a matter between him and God. By Jebhat al-Nusra’s lights, which were the lights that guided all the thinking pertaining to Islam in our cell, no human being could doubt him.
As for the brutes who had shot him in the leg, on reflection he had decided that they had nothing to do with Jebhat al-Nusra. Perhaps they had been regime spies posing as Jebhat al-Nusra men. Perhaps they had been rogue Jebhat al-Nusra fighters—criminals, rather than men of the jihad who fought on the path of God.
Anyway, if, on his release, it turned out that they were authentic Jebhat al-Nusra men, he would forgive them. His ordeal in prison had taught him that he ought to forget petty disputes. Now he understood that the highest, most beautiful thing he could do with his life was to run forward, in joy and self-awareness, toward martyrdom.
So he said. He spoke this way in his penitent moods, when he was in direct conversation with the Jebhat al-Nusra men, or when they might have been able to overhear him, and when he was speaking in Arabic.
When he spoke to Matt Schrier, he spoke in English. His conversations then were about movies and drugs and sex. When he wanted to speak without being understood by the Arabs in our cell or by Schrier, he and I spoke in French. He spoke a ghetto French. In his ghetto French, he sometimes daydreamed about working in a hotel on the Moroccan beaches, making mountains of money in tips, drinking during the daytime, and buying himself expensive clothes. In French, he confessed to having had gay experiences in America. Maybe he wondered this was the true and hidden reason for his imprisonment? God was punishing him for past episodes of gay sex.
During the long afternoon hours, as we waited for the Jebhat al-Nusra men to bring us our bits of bread and our handfuls of olives, Abu Sofiane and I would have quiet conversations about such matters. We whispered, usually in English. We spoke about the past, speculated about what life would bring us when we were released, and promised to help each other find work—some day. If my journalism career were to prosper, which probably it would do, I said, I could employ him as a helper and a guide or pay him to introduce me to friends of his high in the Jebhat al-Nusra command structure. If he were to find work in a hotel on the beach in Morocco, he said, he could find work for me in the same place.
We would chatter in this way for hours and then, as the sunset prayer approached, a key would rattle in the cell door, the lock would turn, and a phalanx of commanders would be standing before us in black robes, covered in guns. These men liked to hold their Kalashnikovs in one hand, with their fists wrapped around the barrels, as if they were shoppers in a marketplace clutching baguettes. They showed off their handguns by tucking them into their belts or by allowing them to swing from their shoulder harnesses. It wasn’t at all uncommon for the younger fighters to appear before us with three guns somehow attached to their persons, a line of grenades stuffed into vest pockets, knives in their belts, and bandoliers slung over their shoulders. They were like children on Christmas morning who, astounded by the abundance before them, make up their minds to wear all their presents at once.
Inevitably, the sight of these men would send waves of happiness washing over Abu Sofiane. When the Jebhat al-Nusra men finally turned their eyes to him, he would beam: “Peace upon you, brothers,” he would say. “I am from Jebhat al-Nusra!”
Because he hoped to be taken for an important person, and possibly also because he believed it, at least a little bit, he would announce that he had studied medicine in America. “Yes, for eleven years,” he would say. “A Sunni since the day I was born. My medical specialty is the heart. My profession is the jihad.” He had to ask me for the name of the bone—the femur—through which he had been shot. He wouldn’t have been able to pass a class in remedial English in a US college. But the other prisoners didn’t know any better, the men of the jihad certainly didn’t, and so in those moments Abu Sofiane was our cell’s broken-legged terrorist-cardiologist-hero. The men of the jihad were his kin. Had they come to carry him away to a comfortable hospital bed and a future of hot, hearty meals? He hoped so. “I am from you, like me like you, may God send you many victories, brothers!” he would call out.
As the commanders stood in the doorway, they would smell the air. They would survey our rags and our disorderly beards. The officers would stare into the floor. Abu Sofiane would point to his leg. He would explain that he had been wounded in battle. He was mending up here. He would be out soon. Often, he would mention the Aleppo suburb Anadan, in which he had been shot. Here, he felt, he was widely known. All the important citizens, and especially those who occupied high positions in the jihad, loved him well. “Will you be going to Anadan soon?” he would ask. “You will ask about me there?”
One afternoon, one of the visitors, humoring him, apparently, said he would be happy to take Abu Sofiane to Anadan. Alas, the visitor only had a motorcycle. Abu Sofiane, being wounded, would require a car.
“No, I don’t! No, I don’t!” he shouted, hobbling to his feet. He leapt forward on one leg, held out both arms to the visitor, then staggered toward him like a mummy in a horror movie. The visito
rs gaped for a moment, then staggered backward, into the corridor. For a moment, they seemed to worry for their safety. When they had directed Abu Sofiane to take his seat again, they mumbled among themselves for a moment, then withdrew.
During our first weeks in this prison, Abu Sofiane must have bragged of his medical expertise and his willingness to give everything he had for Jebhat al-Nusra to a dozen visitors’ delegations. Not one of them offered him so much as a smile. Nevertheless, every time a new line of commanders appeared at the door he grinned at these dour men like a winning child in school, then explained about his eleven years of medical study in America. “Take me with you,” he would tell them. Apparently, at the time, these men didn’t require volunteers. They had too many as it was. “Maybe tomorrow,” they would tell him.
“Okay, my brothers, tomorrow?” he would reply. “Wonderful! I’ll be here. I’m waiting for you. Take care!”
Though I wasn’t much aware of it then, it seems to me now that Abu Sofiane’s desperation wasn’t so different from the desperation we all felt. We lived through this period in our imprisonment in a state of low-level panic, as if we knew the execution party was lumbering its way toward our cell, as if we believed that despite everything, we could persuade our captors to change their minds about us. As we waited for the killers to open the door, we whispered to one another about the lives we had led before jail. Often, those lives seemed like strangers’ lives. We had run about this way and that, filling up our days with trivia and never turning our minds to the important things in life. Why not?
One of the officers, a draftee-cadet at the military academy in Aleppo called Ali, had had a chance to slip away to Beirut at the beginning of the war. Out of laziness, he had instead moped around his family’s house in Safita, at the base of the Krak des Chevaliers, as the date on which he was meant to ship himself off to the academy approached. When it finally came, he got on the bus hoping, vaguely, that a spell in the military would improve his physical fitness. Almost as soon as he arrived in Aleppo, the rebels put his academy to siege. The higher-ranking officers hoarded the food. The plebs starved. Many were killed. When the rebels took the survivors into custody, the Sunni cadets were dispatched into the care of the Free Syrian Army because their crimes, whatever they were, could be adjudicated by the revolution’s secular authorities. The Alawites were sent off to Jebhat al-Nusra, since it was presumed that they had committed crimes against God. It was thought that only in Jebhat al-Nusra were there judges who understood the will of God well enough to punish them as God wished for Alawites to be punished.