by Theo Padnos
Ali had hoped to marry. He had begun a course in French at a private institute in Homs. He hoped to try German, too. His dream was to become a computer scientist. Now the Jebhat al-Nusra commanders were threatening to hang him because the Alawites were fire worshipers, who had come down from Iran nine hundred years ago in order to make war on Islam.
In conversation with me, he wondered why had he known nothing of the fanaticism in his own country. He had read about it, of course, and seen it on television, but he never imagined that actual al Qaeda terrorists would surround a Syrian government armory, starve the cadets within, kill some, and take everyone else hostage. All of a sudden, the fiery-eyed zealots on television were at his throat.
Ali was twenty-eight years old. He felt his time had gone by in the blink of an eye. Unlike many of the officers, he didn’t believe much in paradise. He was ashamed that Jebhat al-Nusra—or their friends, or a coalition of al-Nusra and friends—had triumphed over the academy, half of Aleppo, and now appeared to control all of the countryside beyond. “We’re very sorry for this,” he used to say smiling in embarrassment. He shook his head in disappointment, as if we were all tourists on an excursion into the countryside that had gone awry. As a Syrian citizen, he had believed in the essential decency of the nation, at least a little bit. And now this. Now the people he had once admired—colonels and generals—were covered in lice. They had only rags for clothes. All of us were desperate for the tiniest scraps of food.
“Tell me about America,” he used to say when we had eaten the bits of bread Jebhat al-Nusra had given us for dinner. He wanted to know how much a typical family in America could expect to make in a week, how the siblings got along, what kind of a car a normal, everyday American family might drive, and if, were he to travel to America, he would more easily find a job in Chicago or in California. Was France maybe a better bet for him in the future or would Germany, which had a better economy, hold more promise?
Of all the prisoners in our cell, Matt Schrier was the least inclined to regrets. He didn’t feel he had made any mistakes at all. He blamed the taxi driver in whose car he was riding when Jebhat al-Nusra arrested him. He felt he had endeared himself to the Jebhat al-Nusra command by converting to Islam, that they appreciated his zany sense of humor, and that while the rest of us had made grave miscalculations, he, being well liked, would soon be let go. But he had been arrested in January. By April, it was becoming clear that he had misread the situation. He didn’t know who to blame. His regrets came to him almost against his will, like epileptic seizures. They took hold of him totally, lasted for a few hours, then disappeared without a trace.
When he reflected on the course of his life, he regretted that in his thirty-six years he hadn’t accomplished anything in which he could take pride. He was proud of a website he had built to house his photos. But at the moment, it was merely a shell. The reason he had come to Syria was to fill the site with photographs. He meant for the website to be his showcase. It would show the world all he could do with a camera. But Jebhat al-Nusra had stolen the three cameras he had brought with him. All of the pictures he had accumulated in the weeks before his arrest were now in Jebhat al-Nusra’s hands. The thought of their thievery enraged him. The way they had derailed his career just as it was taking off enraged him. Their refusal to tell him anything about why they had locked him up, what had become of his cameras, and what they meant to do with him brought the blood into his eyes.
For Matt, Jebhat al-Nusra’s irrationality recalled the irrationality of the institutions that had hemmed him in as a child. Understanding nothing and unable to make himself understood, he felt himself locked up in an evil, Koran-heavy version of reform school.
The Jebhat al-Nusra prison system was hardly the first institution with which he had clashed. In high school on Long Island, there had been fights with the teachers, a series of expulsions, and, finally, jail. His father, a basketball coach, had dismissed his abilities as a basketball player. In order to make money, and because he was bored, he and a band of friends used to drive to the suburb next to the one in which he’d grown up, break into prosperous-looking houses, case the bedrooms for jewelry and guns, then sell the loot to high school friends. Eventually, one of the members of his burglary ring was caught. The friend confessed. When the police confronted Matt, he also confessed. In the end, he took a plea. The plea required him to spend several months in jail.
Photojournalism was supposed to have allowed him the freedom he had sought as a younger man. He would document other people’s problems. He would step out of his own. Before his trip to Syria, he had taken photos of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, had sent these to editors, but no one had been willing to hire him. He wasn’t bothered because in Syria, he felt, his physical courage would win the day. He was willing to put himself into situations no sane photographer would approach. He would succeed, he hoped, because he had nerves of steel. As the buildings nearby went up in clouds of smoke, he would point the lens, then shoot. Career success would ensue.
He had also meant to do good. His plan had been to direct some of his attention to the plight of Syrian refugees. In fact, he did manage to tour one of the refugee camps before his arrest. When Jebhat al-Nusra brought him to their interrogation room in the eye hospital basement, their investigators examined these photographs. To his surprise, the photographs produced rounds of laughter. The interrogators laughed at the refugees for their bedraggled clothing and at the photographer for having gone to the trouble of photographing such decrepit people.
In those moments, as they were snickering, Matt decided that the Syrian people ought to draw the world’s attention to their plight on their own. His subsequent weeks with Jebhat al-Nusra convinced him that the Syrian people had problems no amount of attention-drawing newspaper photography could solve.
He first encountered Abu Sofiane in February in the eye hospital basement. Right away, during the first hours of their meeting, Abu Sofiane persuaded Matt to convert to Islam. A conversion to Islam turned out to entail, as an opening bid, a new name, complicated ablutions before the prayers, five prayers per day, and regular tutorials in how to recite the seven-line opening chapter of the Koran. Meanwhile, it didn’t affect Jebhat al-Nusra’s attitude toward him in the least.
He felt he had been conned into the conversion. Since the punishment for apostasy in Islam is death and since Abu Sofiane had trumpeted news of Matt’s awakening to God to every commander in the eye hospital (they had wanted to watch with their own eyes as Matt recited the testament of faith), Matt couldn’t very well renounce Islam. So he had fallen into a trap, and now the trap enraged him. He felt that as he was falling for this con I sat by, smirking. The smirking enraged him.
In his opinion, Jebhat al-Nusra would believe in the sincerity of his conversion, but only if I converted, too. I’m not sure why he thought this. Perhaps he didn’t believe much in his own conversion. A second, reinforcing conversion might have made his own seem more plausible, at least to him. Perhaps he felt that my refusal to convert gave the lie to his too-willing acceptance of Islam. In any case, my refusal, for him, amounted to my collaborating with his killers. As the killers sharpened up their knives for both of us, he believed, I refused to lift a finger. So I was going to get us both killed out of loyalty to some insane scruple. Whenever the subject of my refusal to convert came up, he would clutch both hands to his head. Under his breath, he would seethe. His lips filled with spittle. “You’re driving me crazy!” he would whisper as the saliva dribbled from his mouth. “What’s a matter with you? Prick. You fuck. Do it!”
There were times when Matt knew that this much rage, in such a tiny cell, when all of our lives were hanging in the balance, was a moral failure. He didn’t want to be remembered for bitterness. He liked to think of himself as a Randle Patrick McMurphy type who battled the Nurse Ratcheds of the world. He felt his truest talent was in screenwriting. In screenwriting, he brought his insouciance to life, his understanding of teenage drug consum
ption on Long Island, and his affection for Quentin Tarantino.
During his seizures of regret, he saw the child he had been. He understood how implacable the schools and prisons he had confronted as a kid were, and regretted that this child had butted his head against such unappeasable foes. He ought to have given in and gotten along, he said. He regretted the fights he had had with his teachers. He especially regretted fighting with his father. “He’s a dick,” Matt said of his father, “but I knew that. It wasn’t worth fighting with him over everything.” When the despair took over Matt totally, he sank his face into his palms. Uncontrollable tears seized him. “I should have been a better son,” he would say, clutching his head. “I should have been more respectful. I shouldn’t have argued so much.” He apologized for the fits of rage that overtook him in the cell.
When he finally got home, he used to say, he would rent a new apartment, this one close to his mother, on Long Island. He would dredge up his old screenplays. He would buy a small bag of pot, smoke a bit, not too much, then plunge himself into weeks of productive writing.
* * *
The God the officers addressed in their prayers was a warmer figure than the one I had heard evoked in earlier visits to mosques in Syria. He took a personal interest in the community’s welfare. He took no notice of Matt’s errant youth, accepted his conversion without question, and wasn’t at all resentful over my refusal to convert to Islam. He could be spoken to in a calm, reasonable tone of voice as if he were a wealthy old uncle who had betrayed his family, moved away, stopped returning phone calls, but hadn’t meant to do anything evil and anyway could be brought around to reason in the fullness of time.
A radar technician called Abu Ayoub who had memorized more of the Koran than anyone else in the cell and so was often chosen to lead the noontime Friday prayer used to address this God. He would speak to him quietly, as if God were ambling around in the garden outside our cell. As the prayer leader, it was his job to divine the community’s most heartfelt wishes and to communicate these to God.
Abu Ayoub was a considerate prayer leader. He made an effort to express polite wishes to which no one could object. In Abu Ayoub’s understanding of things, our community wished first of all that all martyrs be accepted into heaven. He didn’t say which side’s martyrs he had in mind. Next, it wished for protection for the families of the martyrs, and then for protection for all innocents, everywhere in Syria. Eventually, Abu Ayoub would ask God to consider our plight. “May this be our last week, O Lord, our last week, our last week,” Abu Ayoub would say, in an even tone, at conversational volume, as if the uncle were listening through a clear, well-working cell phone connection. Abu Ayoub wanted God to forgive us our sins and for him to keep our moms and dads safe.
A fraction of a second after Abu Ayoub spoke, the Muslims in the room who could speak Arabic would whisper these wishes into their cupped palms. The Muslim who could not speak Arabic, Matt, would mumble. “May he send all of us back to our families, every one of us, each of us safe, each of us sound,” Abu Ayoub would say. “Oh, please, my lord. Lord, my lord. Oh, please.” The Arabic speakers would repeat these words.
I enjoyed listening to these prayers at first, but over time, they came to exasperate me. Any reasonable uncle, it seemed to me, even a reprobate one who had moved away and turned off his cell phone, would have done something for us by now. If the uncle were listening, I would think, he wasn’t reasonable. Probably he wasn’t listening.
As far as I could tell, God’s silence brought frustration only to the Westerners in the room. The Syrians with whom I discussed the matter seemed to feel that for the time being, God was asking us to be patient. Perhaps he was busy with other things. Certainly Abu Ayoub felt that the best thing for it was to make further pleas in the same tone of voice at the following Friday prayers.
Nowadays, I regret my exasperation. Nowadays, I recall how Abu Ayoub used to make a point of including Matt and me in his remarks to God. He wished for God to keep us safe, and to lead us home. He wished this for the unjustly imprisoned everywhere. As he spoke, the prisoners at his back would furrow their brows. They would wait a fraction of a second, then whisper exactly the words he had spoken, in unison, as if more perfect synchrony in their whispering would at last move God to set us free.
* * *
Toward the end of April, a youthful cleric in bare feet and long, stringy hair came to us to announce that we were all going to hell. God, he said, had reserved a special stratum in his hell for the exclusive use of Alawites. Here, the intensity of the heat, he said, would reduce the bodies of the Alawites into a kind of ashy powder. No amount of penance, in this person’s opinion, could save the Alawites from the torments that awaited them. The rest of us, by this cleric’s way of figuring, had aided the Alawites in their war against Islam. We were therefore as wicked as they and condemned to the same tortures in the afterlife.
My discussions with the younger fighters in the eye hospital in Aleppo had given me the impression that in their view, my refusal to convert to Islam was a matter between me and God. God would punish me, they seemed to feel, when he saw fit—possibly right away but possibly also at the end of time. According to this stringy-haired sheikh, matters had changed. Now God had decided to eliminate all unbelievers from the face of the Earth and to dispatch them all to hell. “Whether you live now or die now, it’s not up to me,” he said. It was up to God. But God, in his view, had already determined that we had not kept the faith. Some of us, he said, had mocked it openly. He didn’t tell us when we would die exactly or how we would be killed, but that it was Jebhat al-Nusra’s job to do all of us in he did not doubt. He pretended to have been saddened by the situation. Perhaps when we met God in the sky, he said, God would forgive us. He himself had come out (his expression) to bring the law. Having come out, he was merely a slave of God. He was certainly in no position to hand out personal exemptions.
* * *
One afternoon at about this time, a pair of commanders appeared before us with cell phones in their hands. They had come to announce a new Jebhat al-Nusra initiative: The officers and the member of Parliament were to be given three minutes each of unsupervised cell phone conversation with their families. If it should happen that, as a result of these conversations, the prisoners’ families pressured the Syrian government into accepting Jebhat al-Nusra’s terms, the officers and the member of Parliament could go home within the week. If, however, the families could not persuade the government to act, the prisoners’ fates would be in the hands of God. The commanders made a point of stressing how serenely indifferent they were to the result of these phone calls. The Syrian government could save the lives of its officers if it liked, a leader among them said. Or not. Anyway, the matter was no longer in his hands.
The phone calls were to begin the following day. After the commanders left the room, a minor windstorm of whispering swept over the cell. Lieutenants huddled with lieutenants. A colonel, a captain, and a general huddled in a different corner. The member of Parliament sequestered himself in his spot at the base of a wall with a Koran, as he had taken to doing in recent days.
As the other prisoners whose fates were hanging in the balance whispered among themselves, he read to himself. He kept at it for hours. Now and then, he set his Koran on a ledge beneath a window (to keep it from touching our lice-ridden blankets), rose without a word, made two private bows to God, as the Sunnah—literally, the Traditions—say Mohammed himself often did, then returned to his reading.
In the evening, the collective prayers were carried out in the normal mood of solemnity, but afterward, during the interlude of handshaking and well-wishing that occurred as the officers were rising from their knees, hands seemed to linger in hands much longer than they normally did. There was much kissing on the cheek and many teary-eyed smiles. The moments after the prayers felt vaguely like a departure ceremony, as if news of an agreement in principle had come during the prayers.
On the following afternoon, some o
f the officers were indeed able to raise their moms and dads on the phone. During the course of their conversations, they discovered that the government didn’t intend to concede so much as twenty-five Syrian pounds—less than a dollar—to Jebhat al-Nusra. Nor had Jebhat al-Nusra presented anything like a set of demands to the government. Various Jebhat al-Nusra commanders had made various demands of some of the families. One of the callers insisted on the regime’s total and unconditional surrender. Another wanted the equivalent of $100,000 for one of the officers—the fisherman, as it happened.
But when the families tried to pursue the negotiations, the parties at the phone numbers they had been given did not pick up. Or the person who answered the phone call issued general threats of the “we’ll be coming for you all” variety, then hung up.
According to the officers with whom I spoke, their families were at their wits’ end. There were no demands to force onto the Syrian government. There were no Jebhat al-Nusra negotiators. There were rather random Skype names and cell phone numbers of people who called once but did not call again. Meanwhile, the bureaucrats in Damascus didn’t want to get involved. Apparently, they were moving on.