One day, Omar One stumbled past us looking terrible. Clearly he was going loin, and he was away a long time. He stopped by our tree on his way back, ashen faced and worried. “Have you ever known a situation in which you have to vomit while passing bloody stools?” he asked. That afternoon, looking worse, he came by to say he was off to see a traditional healer but expected to be back in a few days. In fact, we did not see him for more than three weeks. When he returned, looking fit, he explained that three “old women” had managed to suspend him from a frame made of sticks and he had spent hour after hour hanging upside down while they periodically beat the soles of his feet in order to cure his stomach ailment.
Our relationship with Omar One was complex. He was our original abductor, with whom we had descended into our own hell. Yet he was one of the few who ever stopped by just to chat, seemingly to pass the time. Ostensibly, he came to proselytize—and that he did, with passion and zeal—but, uniquely among our abductors, he seemed genuinely interested in our well-being, beyond, that is, the maintenance of valuable assets. He desperately wanted us to convert because he believed it would save us from the fires of hell and, yes, make his own place in paradise a little more secure. But he was never much interested in learning about life outside of the seventh-century bubble in which these soldiers of Allah lived. In military-speak, he was always on “send,” never on “receive.”
Our biggest concern in seeing Omar One leave us at Camp Canada was less that we would lose our entertaining preacher and conversationalist and more that we would be deprived of what we took to be a reasonably well-intentioned interpreter, thereby abandoning us to the manifestly ill-disposed mercies of either Hassan or Omar Two. Not a happy prospect.
We were to learn just how unhappy during one of our rare meetings with the camp commander, Abdul Rahman. That bizarre discussion among AR, Louis, and me, with Hassan interpreting, was conducted in pitch-black darkness so we were without visible gestures or facial clues. At one point, risking his ire, I asked Abdul Rahman what he could tell us of whatever negotiations might be underway. When this was interpreted by Hassan, to our surprise and excitement, AR replied dispassionately and at great length, perhaps three minutes’ worth, following which we turned expectantly toward Hassan, who flatly offered, “They are proceeding.” Louis and I sat, holding our breath, desperate for more, but no more was forthcoming.
There followed a short, sharp exchange between AR and Hassan, which we could only assume was about what Hassan had not interpreted. We had the impression that the camp emir was instructing Hassan to tell us what he had said but that the latter refused, insisting we had no right to such information. However tempting, Louis and I decided that there was nothing to be gained by entering this discussion and demanding a fuller or better interpretation. Had we done so, somebody would have lost a lot of face, which would have boded ill for us, and even if AR prevailed, there was still no guarantee that Hassan would say anything he did not want to say. AR seemed to understand this as well and, with evident frustration, let it go. There was no way, though, that we could take any of this as an indication that an early resolution of our situation was in the offing.
Omar Two, the curly-haired, bearded, dark-eyed jihadi warrior, was by any definition handsome: a harder, bigger, lankier, more tightly wound, mid-thirties version of Omar Sharif. I once told him that he seemed to me to be from the same mould as the great warrior-prince Saladin, an image he clearly enjoyed, although in painting it I was seeking to remind him of Saladin’s well-established reputation for chivalry in battle and toward prisoners, including Christians.
In the middle of the desert, Omar Two used cologne and applied kohl to highlight his large, wide-set, and menacing eyes. Both were sanctioned, even encouraged, he assured us, by the Qur’an. He was the one who decreed that we must not cut our beards and periodically provided us with a shard of mirror and tiny scissors to allow us to trim our moustaches (which was permitted—for sanitary purposes) and, on too rare occasions, nail clippers. He was also the one who would sometimes (and sometimes not) lend Louis needles and thread to repair our shoes, clothing, and much-torn blue plastic tarp.
He was much intrigued by dreams and constantly inquired about ours in order to exercise his training in interpretation. Strangely, we never seemed to have had any—neither of us wanting to have Omar Two playing around in the dream spaces inside our heads.
On one occasion I was sandwiched between Omar Two, at the wheel, and Abdul Rahman, when the latter was giving driving lessons to the former. Clearly these were early days in this seasoned warrior’s driving career and he seemed to possess no aptitude for it and no appreciation of the mechanics involved. Omar Two sat hunched around the wheel staring fixedly ahead as, time after time, he popped the clutch and stalled while three other vehicles waited for him to lead off. The others seemed to enjoy his humiliation. He appeared to be particularly embarrassed that I had been assigned to act as the primary witness and I feared there would be a price to pay for observing this spectacle, which I never saw repeated.
He was an odd creature, very detached and darkly mystical. The others gave him a fairly wide berth. Both he and they spoke to us about his large hoard of religious texts, which he would consult for hours on end. On one occasion, we were speaking with Hassan when Omar Two’s name came up and Hassan, not a little dismissively, referred to him as “old school.” Hassan then wryly allowed, “They don’t make them like that any more.” You could almost hear the “thanks be to Allah” he was thinking.
Ibrahim, “le Sénégalais,” was, of course, one of our original abductors. Most memorably, he had given me the news that we had been taken by Al Qaeda and then, some hours later, confided in a hushed whisper how much he admired Céline Dion. He was a tall, rangy, good-looking young man, full of barely controlled energy. He was the only one among our captors who seemed to be naturally, irrepressibly gregarious, indeed mischievous, and whenever he was in camp he usually dropped by for a chat. He spent a few days at Camp Canada with us following our arrival but then disappeared with Jack and seemed to be a permanent fixture on Jack’s immediate staff.
He never explained what had caused him to take up the path of jihad, but at one point I was in a truck with him when out of the blue he told me he had a sister in Montreal who had been continually after him to immigrate to Canada to join her. He then turned to me, guilelessly, and asked, “I guess it’s a little late now?” I was hard put to tell him otherwise but then, if we didn’t return, maybe it wouldn’t be.
Ibrahim had a sense of fun and impish humour, but he had an equally evident mean streak and from our point of view, he was unpredictable and utterly untrustworthy.
Al Jabbar was perhaps the most genuinely sympathetic among our jailers. He said he was thirty-four, but looked older with his rich, long black beard. He too was tall and fit and, demonstrating unique immodesty, pulled open his tunic one day to show us the two bullet wounds (one in the upper chest and the other in the lower back) he had acquired in fifteen years of jihad. He had been brought up in a middle-class family in Algiers but, surprisingly, spoke almost no French. He was a machine gunner and never very far from his cherished PK weapon. Eventually, he too was assigned to Jack’s staff.
On occasion, when Omar One or Omar Two was chatting with us, Al Jabbar would drop by, plunk himself down and just listen for twenty or thirty minutes before nodding to us all and leaving. From time to time he brought us little things (matches, a candy) on his way to sentry duty.
He took the “proof-of-life” photos of Louis and me together and separately with his Nokia cellphone, explaining, largely with sign language, what he wanted to do and where he wanted us to sit. As for why, he said, “famille, famille” and then mimed the tracks of tears, adding crying sounds, “waah, waah,” before he took the pictures.
On the same phone he regularly showed us photos of his nineteen-year-old wife, Miriam, who had died in childbirth in early January just after we were taken. The daughter, their second child
, had survived and been named Aisha. On one occasion, as he walked by our position late at night, he awakened Louis, with whom he had a particular bond, and wordlessly showed him the photos and then moved on into the night. Through Omar One—who evidently did not want to transmit such information—Al Jabbar explained the whole story of Miriam’s death and told us of his dreams in which she had appeared to him from paradise, where, she said, she was preparing the “mujahideen house” for them all.
We knew Omar Three first as “Big Guy” when we saw him in the distance after a few weeks at Camp Canada. He was different from the others. He was rotund, a little older, and clearly not a warrior. It became evident to us that Big Guy, while not in command, was the senior officer in camp and was probably providing Jack with back-channel reports.
One day, I asked Big Guy for his name and to the evident surprise of Omar One, with whom he had been talking, he replied “Omar.” It was probably one of his many names but to us he then became Omar Three, or “O3.” While he too remained fairly distant (his French was very basic), he invariably sent us positive messages.
Suleiman was twenty or twenty-one, a rather simple boy from the Mediterranean coast to the east of Algiers who went with the wind, blowing hot and cold toward us according to the last person he spoke to. Prior to joining up, he had been a honey catcher; that is, he would follow bees to their nests, grab the honey, and sell it in small local markets. He was slow to the point that Jack clearly found him dangerous and eventually he disappeared, leaving the large plastic mat he had lent to us.
At least as important as the mat was the fact that after a few weeks at Camp Canada, we had mentioned to Omar One and also to Suleiman how much we would welcome something to read. We had been refused their Arabic–French edition of the Qur’an—as infidels we could not be allowed to touch the holy book—but hoped for old newspapers, magazines, in fact anything at all. Suddenly one day, Suleiman showed up bearing a large-format paperback history textbook from what appeared to be the final year of the Belgian lycée system. It was about three centimetres thick and was the second in a four-part series on the history of the world and of Belgium (they received about equal treatment), from prehistoric times to the present. The volume Suleiman delivered to us covered the period from the birth of Christ to the year 1000, and the introduction explained that volume three would take students through the Renaissance and Reformation, while the fourth and final volume would cover the seventeenth through twentieth centuries.
The book was well illustrated, with lots of highlighted boxes and seminal quotations. It was precisely what we had hoped for. Immediately Louis began to read it aloud for about forty minutes each afternoon in what came to be a much-anticipated respite from our monotonous daily routine. In addition to being interesting and providing lots of food for thought and discussion, the textbook was well thumbed, with intriguing handwritten marginal notes and carefully highlighted passages, particularly, of course, when we reached the seventh and eighth centuries and the birth and spread of Islam.
As we spent more time with Hassan and became familiar with his manner of thinking and speaking, we were ever more certain that the books were his. We were, though, careful to avoid suggesting to the masked man that we had made that connection, as we suspected that doing so might have caused him to feel less secure in his disguise.
Both Omar One and Hassan aggressively inquired how that book had come into our possession and we saw no reason to prevaricate, allowing that Suleiman had responded to our request for reading material. They were clearly not happy, though not only were we allowed to keep it but when we had finished reading it we were provided with the third volume. We never set eyes on the first or final parts of the series.
At one point Suleiman walked by on one of the rare occasions we were able to wash our clothes. Observing this for a while, and with evident distaste, he asked what in Canada would have been a politically charged question: “At home, do your wives do that?” Even here the truth seemed to make sense and I replied that, yes, that was usually the case, but sometimes we did it ourselves. When he shook his head with a combination of disgust and amazement, we asked in return if his wives (he had said he had two) did his laundry. He reacted with genuine horror. “Of course not!” this honey-hunter spat. “We have slaves for that!” and walked away appalled.
“Socks” was a Tuareg kid of eighteen or nineteen with a big chip on his shoulder. He would sneer at us whenever he deigned to look in our direction, which was not often. He was a loyal disciple of and completely in thrall to Hassan, whom this impressionable kid recognized as the most ruthless and militarily disciplined among them. There is no doubt in my mind that he too would have liked to do us harm. We called him Socks in view of his habit of tucking his pants into whatever fluorescent knee-length green, yellow, or blue socks he was wearing.
There was one other Tuareg in the Belmokhtar group. He was right out of central casting, about seventeen, very surly, tall and thin, neither dark nor light skinned, with classic Tuareg features, nose strong, thin, and straight. We knew him as “the Tuareg Kid.” I don’t think he ever said anything to us but in the early days at Camp Canada he was often the guard designated to accompany me loin and would inevitably come close and forcefully gesture at my wedding ring, and point to himself, signing, “Give it to me.” I would sign that I could not get it off, which failed to satisfy him, and then walk faster.
He too was part of Hassan’s adoring posse, and eventually Hassan approached Louis and me and demanded our wedding rings. We had the impression that this was more in order to show his entourage that he could deliver than to acquire more booty of war for himself. Each of us made an effort to remove our rings. Hassan produced soap, but they would not budge, even in our increasingly emaciated state. Eventually, Hassan just threw up his hands and stomped off, a rather happy outcome, given the alternatives.
The most prominent among the children was, without a doubt, the infelicitously named Al Zarqawi, a small, very European-looking boy of twelve or thirteen. He was something of a mascot for the group, which loved to encourage his aggressive swagger and preposterous, macho posturing. Initially this mini-mujahid seemed to represent a volatile, classic child-soldier package of viciousness and invulnerability, combined with an urge to please his seniors. Al Zarqawi spoke French well but, aside from a high-pitched attempt at a growl, in the first couple of months he rarely spoke to us. But he never failed to walk across our bedding, kick sand at us at night, and otherwise keep us awake as much as possible when he was on sentry duty.
The others made no attempt to stop such conduct. For some reason he was allowed to get away with any sort of behaviour while the others were not. One night Louis got up for a pee in the middle of the night to find Al Zarqawi and Suleiman sitting four metres away, dry-firing into our position as they laughed hysterically. Al Zarqawi was so small that when he trudged by on the way to sentry duty with his Kalash on a sling over his thin shoulder, the butt would leave a shallow trench behind him as it dragged through the sand.
Eventually, Al Zarqawi started to thaw toward us, even dropping by for chats (the only child permitted to do so, and brave enough to want to).
Another prepubescent teenager, young Abdul Rahman, or “AR2,” was a more complex case. From around the fire he had picked up that his seniors wanted us to convert, so one day he grabbed the venerated Qur’an, plunked himself down on our blanket, and began to read, in what language we could hardly tell. It was some version of what he thought was French, but we had no idea what he was saying. After a good bit of this, he snapped the holy book closed and asked, “Are you ready now to submit to Allah?” As soon as we began our elaborate and well-practised explanation of why not, he stomped away without a backward glance.
We told Omar One of AR2’s efforts, believing he would be pleased by the zeal and initiative the kid had shown, but instead AR2 got in serious trouble. Not only had he sought to assume the role of religious instructor, for which he was dramatically unqualified
, but this upstart had also presumed to usurp Omar’s privileged position as converter-in-chief. As a result we earned AR2’s implacable enmity.
We had limited interaction with most of our captors, either because—like Abdul Rahman, Jaffer, Abou Isaac, Abou Mujahid, or even more markedly, Socks, Ahmed, Abdallah, and “Sideburns”—they simply wanted as little to do with us as possible or because, like Obeida, Ali, Harissa, and AR2, they were actively discouraged from doing so. But even among those who hated us and everything we stood for with an abiding passion, some engagement was unavoidable.
Moussa, “the Veteran,” was a bomb maker who’d had a bad day. He was blind and had lost his right hand but he was treated with respect and sensitivity most of the time. He required a great deal of care, however, and the decision to keep him with an active fighting unit in the field was remarkable given the enormous price in operational efficiency they had to pay. They seemed quite prepared to do so, and I can only assume they felt he was owed. His only contact with us was a single attempt to preach the joys of Islam, which he did as a duty in the hope that it would improve his chances of getting into heaven.
We didn’t see much of Imam Abdallah, but we heard his soft, lilting, velvety voice many times each day as he led the brothers in prayer. In truth, it was a soothing and comforting sound. He was a good-looking young man in his mid-twenties. Omar One explained to us that imams were selected on the basis of their superior knowledge of the holy texts. Abdallah spoke little French and was not much interested in us. He was Moussa’s prime caregiver, and ensured that this ambulatory charity case received the help and attention he required.
Obeida was a quiet twenty-year-old from Kano, in northern Nigeria. He was shyly friendly toward us and spoke some English, but the brothers discouraged any contact. He would sit for hours in the open sun chanting verses from the Qur’an, but he seemed to us to be lonely, and despite sporadic efforts from Omar One, who incongruously shouted “Go, Nigeria” whenever he saw Obeida, the lad seemed not to belong.
A Season in Hell Page 14