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

by Matthew Schrier

  Shortly after the screams had faded into silence, the door opened. It was the same group, only now two of the men were holding Theo up by his arms. He was soaking wet below the waist from pissing himself. They threw him violently to the ground, blood from his battered ankles smearing all over the floor of the cell, and then took off the handcuffs. One of the men motioned for me to turn around and put my hands behind my back.

  “Yala,” he said.

  Unlike Theo I didn’t go quietly—I pleaded with them to reconsider and explained again and again that it was all a mistake, even though I knew none of them understood a word I was saying. I was hoping that maybe my insistence would need no translation, and I kept it up all the way down the hallway, right up until we entered the boiler room. The room was not big, and from what I could see from under my cap, it was packed. It was obvious that they’d chosen this room to torture people in for a reason: dim and dirty, lit by a single bulb that made the shadows truly haunting, it had all the makings of a nightmare, with the echo of a thousand screams in the air.

  The first two people I noticed were a fourteen-year-old boy, who kicked me (Jesus Christ, they have kids in here! I remember thinking), and a man holding a nightstick. They sat me down on the floor near a hulking black oil tank, with my knees bent so that they almost touched my chin. A second later a tire was forced around my knees and locked into place with a steel bar that they slid into the crook between my knees and the tire, making it impossible to move my legs. The man holding the nightstick placed it under my chin and used it to lift my head so that we could make eye contact from under my cap. We stared at each other for a few intense moments, and I noticed that what he was holding was not a nightstick after all, but a black cable just as thick. Then someone flipped me over so that I was face down with my feet in the air. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Buddha Man sitting off to my right.

  “I’m just a photographer!” I yelled in Arabic.

  “Give him one fifteen,” the Buddha Man said—in English.

  “No, wait, wait!”

  “What?” he asked, impatiently.

  I racked my brain for something to say, anything that would make them change their minds. I had nothing.

  “I love the Syrian people?” I tried, sounding truly pathetic.

  “Shuuuuuut up,” the Buddha Man said. “Yala!”

  I took a breath so deep I felt my nostrils suck all the way in.

  “Here we go! Get ready to scream!” I whispered to myself.

  Whack!

  When the cable made contact with the bottoms of my feet I let out a yell that must have been heard by everyone on the floor.

  Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack!

  It was like two sledgehammers were being brought down on the centers of both feet simultaneously, over and over again without mercy. The pain was somehow sharp and blunt at the same time, focused and all consuming. With my hands cuffed behind my back, and my legs restrained the way they were, I felt like a roped calf in a rodeo.

  Whack! Whack! Whack!

  There was nothing I could do but try to bury my face into the concrete floor, that and scream at the top of my lungs.

  “God help me! God help me,” I yelled over and over in English— and, in Arabic, “I’m just a photographer!” Through the pain, I focused my thoughts on watching my language in order to keep from earning more licks, and calling on God in an attempt to relate to them. My pleading changed nothing, of course, and the suffering continued. They took turns whacking me in sets, passing the cable around like I was a piñata. About halfway through they stopped so that one of them could empty a bottle of water onto my feet to enhance the pain.

  When they finally reached 115, I heard the Buddha Man instruct them to stop. A second later I was flipped over and the tire was removed. Pretending to be barely conscious, I was hoisted up from under my arms by two men, but as soon as I tried to put any weight on my feet my knees buckled. If it hadn’t been for the thugs holding me I would have dropped to the floor like a tree struck by lightning. My feet were throbbing with a constant heartbeat but were completely numb; it felt like they didn’t even exist anymore and I was trying to balance myself on stumps. The two men supported me back to my cell while a few more followed behind. My feet just dragged along the ground. At the door to my cell, one of my escorts looked me deep in the eyes and said something to me in Arabic that Theo would translate later.

  “Have you heard of Guantanamo Bay?” he asked.

  A moment later I was softly placed on the floor and my handcuffs, very gently, were removed. I lay on my side with my eyes closed, feigning unconsciousness, feeling my heart slow, the cool ground against me. The men left.

  At that moment, I thought our punishment had ended. Really, it had only just begun.

  Maybe a half hour after being returned to the cell the door was opened by one of the guards. To our dismay, he was not there to give us back our beds.

  “Yala,” he said.

  As soon as I stood up, pain shot through my feet, but this time there was no one to carry me so I took it and limped out into the hallway with my cap pulled over my eyes. The guard stepped behind me and tied a ribbon around the hat to secure it tightly, although I could still see slightly from the bottom. A man I did not know led me slowly up the stairs, and then I was outside and breathing fresh air for the first time in thirty-seven days. It was raining hard as I was led hobbling barefoot toward an SUV. I was placed on my knees on the wet ground. A jihadi came up from behind me and I heard him slide the action of his AK back as if they were going to execute me on the spot. I didn’t say a word and held my chin high, waiting for the end; not wanting to give them the satisfaction of begging. A second later someone twisted my arm until I let out a horrific scream. Then I was up again, and placed in the trunk space of the SUV where another prisoner was awaiting me.

  “Is that you? Is that you?” I heard Theo whisper.

  “Yeah,” I whispered back.

  We were laid head to toe with our hands cuffed in front, my handcuffs fastened through Theo’s and a vinyl cover pulled over both of us. As soon as the trunk closed I lifted my cap and saw that there were air holes poked in the vinyl. Theo lifted his blindfold too, but as soon as we heard someone get in the front we covered up again. We lay there for a while, waiting to see what they had in store for us next. There were three possibilities running through my head. Either they were going to kill us, they were taking us to some kind of torture expert, or they were going to drive around in circles, maybe do a mock execution to scare us, and have us right back in our cell by the evening prayer, just to show us what would happen if we ever tried to escape again.

  More men piled into the SUV, and we started moving. Some crazy jihadi song came blasting from the speakers—it began with the terrifying neighing of a horse and the sounds of hooves clopping on a hard surface. The song was a favorite, almost like an anthem; it got them all amped up and we could hear General Mohammad singing along. Their adrenaline was flowing, which couldn’t be good for us. I grabbed Theo’s hand and gave it a squeeze, kind of a combined let’s do this and if this is the end, it was nice knowing you. The car bumped along the road.

  We didn’t know it yet, but we were heading straight toward hell.

  THE ELECTRICAL INSTITUTE

  FEBRUARY 6, 2013

  It was about an hour’s drive to the dark side of hell. It was located northeast of Aleppo, in an electrical institute abandoned after God knows how many battles by the regime. Unbeknownst to me, we were in Hraytan—the same town in which I’d stayed during most of my eighteen days in Syria. When we finally stopped, the rain was still falling hard. My back and head were killing me. Every time the SUV hit a bump I’d cracked my head on the side of the trunk, and my lower spine felt like someone was drilling into it. The men got out of the car and Theo and I lay there for a while longer, listening to them talking and joking before they opened the trunk and took us out. We were still barefoot, and as soon as my battered feet hit the
pavement pain shot through them. A second later someone dropped a pair of orange rubber slippers at my feet and nudged me to put them on. The slippers were the kind with textured, grippy insoles; I stepped into them and onto what felt like hundreds of rubber spikes digging into raw flesh. I was led inside a building and down a staircase.

  We were in a basement; everything I could see from beneath my cap was concrete, except for the door, which was steel and painted gray. Inside, I was set down on a blanket, and as soon as my escort left I lifted my cap. I was alone in this huge, empty cell. The ceilings had to be twenty feet high. All the windows were broken, and thick shards of glass littered the floor. After a few seconds I heard footsteps and covered my eyes again before the door opened. Theo was placed next to me and we were instructed to remove our blindfolds. Kneeling before us was Jamal, General Mohammad’s right-hand man.

  “Don’t look at the windows,” Theo translated as Jamal spoke to us in Arabic. “He said if we look at the windows we’ll be shot.”

  “Ask him if we’re goin’ back to the other jail,” I said.

  Theo asked.

  “La,” said Jamal. He left.

  We sat there absorbing our new surroundings. We didn’t know what to think: Were we brought here for punishment or for death? It was freezing in the room and there were only two blankets spread out about twenty feet apart. Theo was shivering in his wet pants and underwear—he said they’d gotten soaked when the jihadis poured water on his feet midtorture, and I didn’t press the issue. We needed blankets and we needed them fast.

  It didn’t take long for Mohammad to pay us a visit, accompanied by what must have been about ten masked men. We hadn’t moved an inch because neither one of us wanted to walk on our ruined feet. He approached us wearing a giant smile with his arms extended, like he was the Dalai Lama.

  “Jumu’ahhhh!” he said.

  “Hey, General,” I responded. “So, what’s goin’ on here?”

  He knelt beside me and made the same twisting hand motion he’d used when fitting the broken piece of concrete into the gouge in the door.

  “You try to make hole?” he said, making a circle with his fingers and holding it up to his eye as if he were looking through a peephole.

  “That was already there, man. I swear,” I said.

  He said something in Arabic, his tone suddenly serious. His smile was completely gone and the expression that remained was unsettling. I didn’t understand a word until the very end, when I heard him say “Israel.”

  Oh shit! I thought. Did he know?

  After this, Mohammad stood and headed for the door, entourage in tow. The last kid to leave, Thug Life, had obviously missed his calling in theater, walking backward toward the door with a hand on his sheathed knife the whole time, never taking his eyes off us. Once Thug Life was out the door it was shut and locked.

  “What’d Mohammad say?” I asked Theo immediately.

  “He called you a Jew.”

  This made what was already a worst-case scenario impossibly worse. Had he known the whole time? Were they saving me for some kind of public execution? I told myself that chances were he was just trying to insult me. Theo agreed.

  Half an hour later we had two armed visitors. One was a young guard and the other a tall man of about thirty, wearing an army-green jumpsuit with “Qatar” stitched on the breast. He welcomed us to his house, calling us guests. They had brought us each three blankets, but when the older one asked if there was anything else we needed, Theo requested more. The man just laughed and left the room, with the guard behind him. Three sentries were stationed outside our door, and every time it opened they stood at the entrance, staring at us while smiling and dragging their fingers across their throats.

  Once the door was locked we got up and hobbled over to the other blanket, spread on the floor against the wall, to make our bed. It was so cold we’d decided to sleep side by side on two blankets and then stack the rest on top of us.

  “I’m freezing,” said Theo. “I have to take off my underwear or I’m gonna get sick.”

  I turned around so he could take them off. His underwear was repugnant; all discolored and stained. After he put his pants back on, he crawled under the covers next to me.

  “All right, I guess we can use body heat to raise your temperature,” I said, turning on my side so that my back was to him. “Here, put your arm around me.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Yeah, well this is supposed to be done naked, but that shit ain’t happenin’, so—”

  Theo laughed and I laughed along with him. It was weird, how close we suddenly were, hating each other yet knowing that we were all we had—and that there was a very good chance we would die together like this one day.

  We called our new cell the Room of Broken Glass, and I know it’s hard to believe, but we were both actually pleased with our new surroundings. The room was huge and full of light. The broken windows were too high to reach, but through them we could see a grassy hill and even a tree. Once we warmed up under the blankets we were much more comfortable than we’d ever been at the hospital.

  Aside from the glass and the blankets, the only other thing in the room was a sheet of paper on the floor. I hobbled over to it and then handed it to Theo to read since it was all in Arabic.

  “It says the Hraytan Police Station as the first number,” said Theo, examining it.

  That was how we found out where we were.

  After Theo warmed up we split the blankets in half. A couple of guards entered with a piece of bread for each of us, and a little later someone brought a small container filled with halawa. We ate in small pinches with the bread to conserve what we had in case they didn’t plan on feeding us again later. Soon day turned into night and we were in the darkness again. The clatter of the guards outside our door rarely ceased. It was apparent that we were considered a serious flight risk—and that our captors were doing everything in their power to keep us grounded.

  It was late when we got our first nightly visit. The door opened and flashlights illuminated the cell as footsteps approached us. We were instructed to stare at the wall so that’s exactly what we did, while lying flat with our chins to the floor. I didn’t recognize the voice of the man giving orders but as he and Theo went back and forth in Arabic it was clear they knew each other. Within seconds he was standing over Theo, pulling the blankets down from his back.

  Oh no, I thought. Here it comes.

  Lash! Lash! Lash! Lash! Lash!

  He brought a cord down on Theo’s back about five times, every one of them producing a scream that echoed throughout the room. Then he moved on to me. I stared at the wall as I felt the covers pulled down, bracing myself for what was coming.

  Lash! Lash! Lash! Lash! Lash!

  My screams were no louder than Theo’s and no more effective in securing any mercy. I took my five lashes to the back and then, his job completed, our host left the room.

  “Who was that guy?” I asked.

  “That was Igor.”

  Theo had told me about Igor. Igor had been in charge of taking care of him at the hospital for the first few months, the way Yassine was with me. In Theo’s stories Igor had always been nice, bringing him soda, tea, and even takeout, but here it seemed he only gave out ass whippings. In the morning, when I removed my clothes to perform my daily critter check, I’d find dried blood speckled across the back of my tee shirt. Igor’s lashes had broken the skin and I hadn’t even noticed.

  The next day the door opened and Mohammad entered by himself. His sweatshirt bulged over the suicide belt he was rarely without these days.

  “How you doin’, General?” I asked, extending my hand.

  “Hamdullah,” he answered, accepting it.

  A pause followed while he stared at me as if I were a puzzle he was trying to solve.

  “Jumu’ah, who sent you to Syria?” he asked finally.

  I just dropped my head and shook it.

  “Mohammad, I was invited here,” I sa
id. “You know that.”

  “No, Jumu’ah. Maybe you be in Syria a long time, or maybe I just kill you.”

  Then he turned and left the room, without another word.

  Igor returned to whip us the next few nights to show us how things were done in his house, but Mohammad kept his distance. During the day, jihadis would kneel down outside our windows to peer in, asking us who we were and what we were doing there. One of them, a guy in his midtwenties, seemed genuinely interested in us. After we’d met he appeared at our door late that night with one of the guards and gave us a small bowl filled with pasta. We’d rarely gotten a hot meal at the hospital, so this was a treat. The name I chose for our benefactor was Bubbles: it seemed to fit his chubby, big-eared appearance and friendly nature. However, Bubbles turned out not to be as bubbly on the inside as he was on the outside.

  Bubbles was mostly interested in getting me to confess to being CIA. The next time I saw him he showed up with his sidekick, a kid of about nineteen who just looked evil, with spiky eyebrows and an expression of stone. I decided to name him Sancho, after literature’s most famous sidekick, and after shaking Bubbles’s hand I extended mine to Sancho. He left me hanging and stared at me in disgust. Theo translated as Bubbles spoke to me in Arabic. He told me to choose my words carefully and to be honest. I nodded. The first question he asked was if I spoke Arabic.

  “No,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” Sancho asked, in English. I said I was.

  “Are you CIA?” asked Bubbles through Theo.

  “No,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” Sancho asked again.

  It was obvious that they didn’t believe me, and after a few more minutes of this they left the room, visibly frustrated. Between this visit and the last one from Mohammad, it was clear that my identity was now in question in a way it hadn’t been before—and that I had a serious problem.