The Dawn Prayer_Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison

by Matthew Schrier

  It was during this time that I got to know Yassine. He had been put in charge of me, and would come to my room several times a day to ask if I needed anything. He seemed like a good kid, one who had yet to be transformed into a monster despite the monstrosities surrounding him.

  “Good morning,” he would say pleasantly as he dropped off my breakfast. “I have something very delicious for you.”

  Actually, the food was always the same crap, but Yassine liked practicing his English with me and for my part company was company, even if that company was a terrorist. At night the door opened and he repeated the same ritual with my dinner.

  “Good morning,” he would say.

  “No, no, no: you mean good evening,” I’d correct him.

  I tried to Americanize him as much as possible without him really knowing it. For example, every time he entered the room I’d walk over with a clenched fist extended and give him a pound. He loved stuff like this, and to further build our rapport I’d teach him words like “brother” and “homie.” It didn’t take him long to develop a genuine affection for me, one that came complete with privileges forbidden to other prisoners.

  One time I had a dream about this girl who I’d picked up when I was in Europe a few years earlier. The dream was the messy kind, and when it ended it was a real inconvenience, because I wasn’t wearing any underwear. I had taken off my boxer shorts five days earlier to wash them in the sink, but it was so cold in the room that it had taken them this long to dry. Now I put them on, wrapped the quilt around my waist like a towel, and knocked on the door, holding my soiled pants. Yassine opened it a few seconds later.

  “Yes, Jumu’ah?”

  “Yassine, I need to wash my pants,” I said, and I rubbed the fabric together like I was scrubbing laundry while showing him the stain. “I spilled some piss on them.”

  “Ohhh—Okay, Jumu’ah, one second,” he said, with a knowing expression. I don’t know why I tried to fool him. The kid was a twenty-year-old virgin; of course he knew what the stain was.

  He left, but a little later the door opened again and Yassine took me down the hall to the bathroom. It was still early, and the building was dead silent. We were the only ones awake.

  “You may see,” he said.

  When I lifted my hat, there was a huge pot of steaming water in the middle of the floor. He had prepared a bath for me.

  “I will lock you in here and you can bathe.”

  I hadn’t washed since I was with the soldiers, and a hot bath was just what I needed. I grabbed the soap, stripped down, and crawled into the pot, using a cup to pour water over my body. As amazing as the hot water felt, I knew I had to hurry or I’d risk getting sick due to the frigid temperature in the room. I was also motivated not to soak too long by the need to keep my tattoos hidden—I was never sure if Mohammad had noticed the one in the photograph of me at Carnival, seeing as the transvestites were pretty distracting. After I’d finished up and washed my cargos I knocked on the door, and Yassine came at once to return me through the silent halls to my cell.

  It was the twenty-third of January when I met him. I had been back in solitary for thirteen days by then, and had gotten strangely used to the shells falling right outside my window during the day and the fighting that raged all night. I was sitting wrapped in my quilt, still waiting for my pants to dry even though it had been days since I washed them. Abruptly, the door opened and I was ordered from the room. I grabbed my pants and moved.

  An endless stream of rebels marched past me in the hallway, all wearing the same desert camouflage pants. One of them stepped out in front of me, blocking my path. He lifted my chin until we made eye contact from under my cap; he was letting me know that he knew I had my eyes open. The jihadi then pulled the cap down to completely cover my face until I could see nothing at all. A second later I was locked in another room. When I uncovered my eyes I saw I was back with the POWs. The Shabiha were all gone. Ali and Rias were the first to come forward and greet me. They were both wearing huge smiles and Rias kept rubbing my shoulder in an endearing way.

  “We are so happy to see you again,” said Ali. “You make everyone so happy. This time you can sleep and eat with us.”

  I told him I was glad to be back. He took my damp pants to hang up and I went over to greet Oqba, but he was asleep. All at once, the door opened, and everyone turned to the wall. Since I didn’t have any blankets to crash on I just stood with my face to a pillar. A crowd entered the room with flashlights that cut through the darkness and then I heard Mohammad’s voice.

  “Jumu’ahhhh!” he said. “What is this?”

  I turned to see him motioning to the quilt I was wearing. Standing all around him were men I had never seen before, armed to the teeth with Uzis and AKs. They looked around at the prisoners like animals in a zoo as I began to explain about my pants. Mohammad cut me off impatiently.

  “Jumu’ah, come, come!” he said, beckoning me to follow him out into the hallway.

  He was excited, like a puppy that could barely contain itself before being let outside; I didn’t even have to cover my eyes as he led me to the room next door. The rebels with the Uzis surrounded me as he turned the key, waiting to get a look as well.

  “Mohammad, can I go get my blankets? Can I go get my blankets?” I kept asking desperately.

  “Yes, yes, but you have to see!” he replied. Then he opened the door, launching himself inside to land in a crouch at the feet of the room’s inmate.

  “Ahhhhhh!” screamed General Mohammad, practical joker.

  A man shot up with his hands raised against the flashlights shining in his eyes, babbling something in Arabic. He was filthy, with a long gray beard, and a yellow scarf wrapped around his head. His face was a mask of terror as he jabbered at Mohammad, and the jihadis all laughed. I had never seen someone so clearly traumatized in my life.

  “American,” Mohammad said to me, gesturing at the man.

  “Yeah right,” I replied. “Can I get my blankets now and go back in the other room?”

  “No, no—American! You can stay in here now, and talk.”

  And that’s when I looked more closely and saw that Mohammad wasn’t joking. This guy really was an American.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered to myself.

  He looked like he’d been there for a hundred years. After retrieving my blankets from solitary and sending someone to retrieve my pants from the other cell, they locked the two of us in the darkness together.

  “You’re American?” I said, “Jesus Christ, they’re collecting us! Who are you? How long have you been here?”

  “Three months.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “They think I’m a fucking CIA agent. I can’t believe you’re really here.”

  “Yeah, well, believe it. What’s your name?”

  “Theo.”

  And that was it—the worst moment of my entire life, because now I knew they weren’t letting me go. They’d had me for three weeks and never let me see or hear him, this suspected CIA agent, which meant they’d been thinking about releasing me—but now that they knew I wasn’t going anywhere, it no longer mattered if I saw him, because there would be nobody I could tell.

  Theo kept saying how happy he was that I had joined him, which kind of pissed me off because I was a little bummed out to be there. On the other hand, I can’t say I blamed him, especially after learning he’d been locked up for almost the whole three months by himself. Then he said he hoped they threw some more Westerners in with us so that he would have even more people to talk to.

  “Why not just hope that they let you out, man?” I said, frustrated. “Wouldn’t that be better than wishing this upon people?”

  “No, no, that’s not what I meant,” he said in his soft voice.

  It felt like we were getting off to a bad start, so I changed the subject.

  “All right, man, look: let’s get some important shit outta the way,” I said, mock serious. “Are you a fag?”

&nb
sp; “No,” he replied.

  “If you are it’s cool with me, man,” I said sincerely. “I have nothing against you. It’s just that if I wanna jerk off, you can’t watch. If you watch we’re gonna have a problem.”

  I’d been trying to break the ice, get him to laugh, but Theo didn’t catch the humor and instead assured me seriously that he wouldn’t watch me beat off if the mood struck, so I changed the subject again—to how he’d landed in that room.

  His story was definitely a unique one and I remember thinking all through it, What the fuck did I do to get locked in a room with a guy like this? If ever someone deserved the Darwin Award, it was him—he was to journalists basically what Gomer Pyle was to the marines in Full Metal Jacket. Theo’s journey began in Antakya, Turkey, a city on the Syrian border. He’d rented a room in some ten-dollar-a-night hotel where Syrian refugees were known to congregate, in the hopes of making some contacts for his next story—which, ironically, he was hoping to write about Austin Tice, the first American journalist to go missing inside Syria. He even told me that he’d emailed Tice’s editor before he left, asking the guy if he’d be interested in helping him finance an article about his missing colleague (something I later confirmed).

  So anyway, he’s at this cheap little hotel when he meets a seemingly nice Syrian boy of about twenty named Osama, with blonde highlights running through his black hair. Osama said he could hook Theo up with tour guides for his trip into Northern Syria. There were three of them, and they convinced Theo to cross the border illegally at night rather than use his valid passport. The next day, after they were across and spending the night at a remote location somewhere outside the city of Idlib, these tour guides beat the shit out of him, and then broke out the handcuffs.

  “So you basically hired your kidnappers?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “So wait, you got kidnapped before you even entered Syria, and you didn’t even know it?”

  “No, they kidnapped me the next day.”

  “No, they let you in on it the next day.”

  My memory gets a little fuzzy here, but I remember him saying that after they had him, the kidnappers didn’t know what to do. They discussed asking for four hundred thousand in ransom, but they didn’t know how to collect it, so instead Theo was passed around from group to group like a puppy nobody wanted to keep. He was tortured several times during this period and didn’t think he was going to last long.

  “First they tried to waterboard me, but they didn’t know how to do it,” he told me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They cuffed me to a ladder in an empty pool and kept pouring buckets of water on me. Then they laid me down in a ditch that they dug and started covering me with dirt.”

  At one point, he actually managed to escape. It was the middle of the night—he slipped out of the handcuffs with one of his kidnappers on the other end. Barefoot, he ran from the apartment where he was being kept out onto the street and flagged down a friendly vehicle. This Good Samaritan drove Theo directly to an FSA headquarters, where he was given a hot shower, a hot meal, brand-new clothes, and an apartment they kept especially for journalists. The next day they asked him whether he wanted to go home or go looking for the guys who’d taken him, and Theo chose option number two.

  Theo should’ve remembered those old Taco Bell commercials and run straight for the border, but instead he was crammed into a car full of armed jihadis, looking for his kidnappers. After a while he actually spotted the car and pointed out one of the criminals. The FSA immediately pulled the car over and confronted the man, who claimed that he hadn’t kidnapped Theo, he’d arrested him because he was a CIA agent. Whatever the kidnapper said must have been pretty convincing, because the FSA went from eager to help Theo to: “Well, you want him back?”

  And just like that, Theo was returned to the very men he’d escaped from the night before. That night, the FSA and the thugs all had a party and tortured him together. Eventually—after a “trial” in Bab al-Hawa, on the Turkish/Syrian border, featuring the kidnapper he’d pointed out as the prosecution’s star witness—he found himself first in a toilet stall that had been turned into a prison cell and then in a trunk for two hours on his way to this, his final destination. By the time his story was over I was exhausted.

  Theo didn’t know what year it was or even who the president was anymore, because they’d bagged him before the election. I thought about telling him Mitt Romney’d won, but after hearing his story I realized this guy was lost enough. It was astonishing how brain-dead he’d become—how could he know what day he had been taken in late October, and that he’d been there for three months, and still think it was 2012? I started freaking out on the inside—was this what I would become in another two months?

  At one point I mentioned General Mohammad, saying he seemed to be a good one.

  “No, he’s not good,” Theo said. “He’s bad.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he tortured me.”

  That was the first time I heard about the tire, but I cut him off before he finished telling me all the details. I really wasn’t in the mood.

  Although this room was identical in size and color to the one I’d been in at the beginning, there were a few differences, some good and some not so good. The good news was that nobody had ripped out Theo’s light switch. The bad was that, whether Theo was a spy or not, it was obvious our captors were thoroughly convinced that he was: They had not only ripped the entire radiator from the wall so he couldn’t stand on it to reach the window, they’d torn out all the pipes along the walls. On top of that, even though the window was completely blocked off from the outside with grain bags filled with gravel, they’d electrified the bars as well—though with the electricity out so often it was far from Jurassic Park.

  As soon as I noticed the light switch I flipped it up and asked why it was off in the first place. Theo explained that he never used it, and certain things began to make sense. There were tons of bread crumbs scattered on the floor all around him, where he slept and ate. At first I’d thought this was because he was a slob, but in reality they were there because he was a slob and because he mostly ate in the dark, even when he didn’t have to. He had been lying in the blackness alone for the past three months, vegetating, too scared even to get up and turn on the lights.

  Without the lights on it was practically pitch-black in the room, with the only illumination filtering in through the bags of gravel in tiny cracks. It wasn’t until the lights flashed on that I saw what had been carved into the wall next to the door. It was abstract, but there was still no mistaking it.

  “Is that a Star of David?”

  “Yeah,” he replied.

  “Did you do that?”

  “Yeah, they don’t know what it is.”

  By now I knew that he wasn’t Jewish.

  “Are you fucking stupid? You don’t think any of them have seen an Israeli flag?”

  I could not believe someone could be so ignorant and arrogant at the same time. It was obvious that he didn’t think much of the enemy, which made him a serious liability, and I realized he would have to be watched like a baby fresh out of the womb.

  It was hard not to wring his neck for putting me in the position of having to scratch out my own religious symbol in a place where I needed faith more than ever. I had never been very religious, but had always been proud to be a Jew. I’d been fascinated by our history and had read about it voraciously, absorbing stories about the perseverance of the Jewish people and the challenges we had overcome. Now, I felt like it was my turn to uphold this tradition of grit and determination, surviving the impossible like so many others had in the millennia before me.

  Within a day or two of arriving in my new cell I met the emir for the first time, as he showed us off to some visitors. In Arabic, “emir” means “prince,” and every militia group has one leading it. Here the emir’s name was Muawiyah—he was surprisingly young, in his early thirties. He wore glasses and con
fidence well together, and like Mohammad, carried a pistol in a shoulder holster.

  “Assallam alekum,” I said when he entered, extending my hand.

  He nodded and shook it, a gesture that shocked Theo because they’d never shaken his—they don’t usually extend this courtesy to infidels. Then he handed us a few pieces of cinnamon like those he’d been nibbling on when he entered. He and his visitors didn’t say much, just looked at us. We were the exotics in his zoo and the emir was proud to display us.

  A few days later I asked Yassine if I could have another bath. Theo hadn’t had one at all in the three months since he’d arrived and emitted an odor so foul it was making the paint peel, so I figured this would be a good chance to get him one, too. At first Yassine refused to even consider it.

  “No! He is a criminal!” he’d shouted, but I kept complaining about the stench and eventually he gave in.

  A hot pot was prepared for me and then one for Theo. They also gave us each a brand-new pair of sparkling-white underwear and a clean tee shirt. When Theo walked in he looked refreshed and thanked me.

  “Did Yassine search you after your bath?” he asked.

  “No, why?”

  “Because he searched me.”

  “So what? Did he find anything on you?” I asked, sensing that Theo had done something wrong.

  “Yeah, a piece of paper with writing on it.”

  Apparently, after Theo’s arrival, the emir had given him a red pen and some paper. Minutes after he finished explaining this to me, the Little Judge and Yassine burst into the room.

  “Where’s the red pen!” screamed Yassine, throwing Theo up against the back wall.

  “Hey, Jumu’ah,” said the Little Judge casually, walking by me without so much as a glance. He was holding a 9mm pistol and wearing a Puma baseball cap.