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

by Matthew Schrier

  “What was that you said to me before about being a man?” I asked.

  “Yo, you were right,” he apologized. “That was no joke!”

  After taking Theo’s water bottle and heading to the back of the room, Abdelatif—still naked and dripping with shit—asked me to help him clean himself up.

  “Does this look like fuckin’ Kiss of the Spider Woman to you, man?” I said, disgusted. “Ask Theo.”

  And just as you can guess, that was exactly what happened, and Theo gladly cleaned the shit off Abdelatif, and later carried his brimming bucket of feces and the piss bottle down the hallway to the bathroom, blindfolded and trailed by Yassine, who was toting an AK-47 and yelling at him the whole way about what would happen to him if he spilled it.

  We went on like this for seven straight days, without a break or any medical attention. I remember thinking it was no longer just a metaphor: we were now literally living in a world of shit.

  When we’d first returned to the hospital the light situation had been better than ever, not just because the window was no longer blocked, but because the electricity was more reliable. Shortly after Abdelatif joined us things went downhill in this department, with the power out more often than it was on. We were in complete darkness from sundown until sunrise for long stretches, once for nine days. Eventually, it got so bad that they put a generator outside and ran lights into every cell through small holes drilled above our doors. We were grateful to have the light even though the switch was outside the door and we no longer controlled it.

  Early one evening we were all just chilling in our own private hell when we heard the piercing shriek of a MiG slice the air above the hospital. I saw a tiny piece of paper lying on the floor shortly after but assumed it was a tag from one of our shirts that had fallen off and didn’t give it a second thought. Later, however, Theo did, and it turned out to be one of the greatest contributions he made the entire time we were locked up together. He’d gotten up to take a piss, and when he bent over and picked up the scrap I saw his face light up; he headed right for me with his hand extended. I took the paper, a little white rectangle smaller than my pinkie nail, and flipped it over. On one side was a circular stamp with two children holding hands inside it; under them were three tiny words, in English: Aleppo Pediatric Hospital.

  “Holy shit!” I said. “We know where we are!”

  “It’s a sign from Allah!” the Moroccan proclaimed.

  For the rest of the night we were all in high spirits. It feels paralyzing, being locked in a room and having absolutely no idea where you are, where you would even be if you somehow escaped. Now we knew, and better still, our captors had no idea that we knew.

  When the torture would get really bad outside our walls I used to say we were God’s messengers, and that it was our job to live so that we could tell the world what went on here. Now “here” had a name.

  The building we were in was part of a large compound consisting of several hospitals with a wall around it. When gunfire and explosions erupted from the south end it was broad daylight; I’d been pacing the cell as my two cellmates slept soundly on the floor.

  “Wake up!” I yelled. “The regime’s attacking!”

  It took the jihadis outside our cell about as long to figure out what was going on as it had taken me, and within seconds I heard them running and yelling, along with the sounds of clips being popped into AKs and the actions being slid back. All of their footsteps faded in the same direction: up the stairs. When I looked out the window I saw a wave of fighters rushing toward the battle with their rifles slung over their shoulders, the twelve-year-old, Abu Jaz, among them.

  “Wake up!” I repeated. “They’re trying to take the hospital!”

  “It’s just another group,” the Moroccan said without opening his eyes.

  “I don’t think so.”

  He went back to sleep. I was in awe at how he and Theo could lie there, in complete denial about what was happening. As the battle continued to rage for well over an hour it became clear that the Moroccan was wrong: this wasn’t just another militia group, this was the government. It also became clear that the entire floor, probably the entire building, was now completely vacant. Guards, emirs, kids—everyone was busy fighting.

  I stared at Theo as he slept, with such intense hatred that I felt both of my hands involuntarily clench into rock-hard fists. This was the moment, the opportunity we would have been ready for if only he had let me perforate the panel in the door months earlier. Now, at this moment we could have kicked it out and walked away, and as long as we headed north we would have had over an hour’s head start before anyone realized we were gone.

  When the gunfire finally died down there was about a minute of silence before I heard the roar of a MiG cutting straight toward us. The Moroccan’s eyes shot open and looked at me. I stared right back at him, my expression saying I told you it was the government. A moment later the plane flew directly over us and dropped a bomb on a neighboring building, the explosion rocking the very foundation of the hospital. That ended the battle, and the compound remained in the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra—as did I, all because Theo refused to follow my plan.

  On March twenty-eighth, the door opened and in walked Mohannad. He had been kidnapped after defecting from the army while posted at the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, where I had been shooting back when I was still free. They’d told him that he would only be with us for a few hours before he was released, but he was a Shia, so I had my doubts.

  With another Arab in our cell it was like the Moroccan took off the mask he had been wearing since he joined us, ignoring me and speaking only in Arabic as if I wasn’t in the room. When I pulled him aside and said something he told me to relax, that he was just gathering information. By nightfall Abdelatif was blaming America for all his woes and Mohannad was still with us. He wasn’t going anywhere that night.

  The next day I decided to make my move and become a fake Muslim.

  We were sitting on my blankets listening to Mohannad run down all the names of the Prophet when Abdelatif brought up conversion for the hundredth time. I didn’t want to fold too quickly so we went back and forth a little like usual. Then I expressed apprehension about the guards thinking I was faking it and giving me shit, and the Moroccan made a good point.

  “If you’re a Muslim then you don’t care what the guards think,” he said. “Only Allah.”

  “That’s true,” I said thoughtfully. “All right, let’s do it! I’m down!”

  “But you can’t fake it,” Abdelatif warned. “You have to promise me that you will stay a Muslim when you go home.”

  Naturally I made the promise, lying my ass off, and with that out of the way Abdelatif led me in reciting a few poorly pronounced Arabic words and—wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am—just like that, I was a Muslim, kind of. I didn’t have even the slightest idea what the fuck I’d said, but it was a very proud moment for Abdelatif and Mohannad, both thinking they’d scored big points with Allah for bringing over a nonbeliever.

  Theo would have nothing to do with converting. He’d found out just how dangerous fake conversion was after writing his Undercover Muslim book, but of course I knew nothing about that, and he didn’t tell me. I tried to talk him into it one day when we were locked in the bathroom and I had him all to myself.

  “I’m not changing my religion,” he insisted in his soft voice.

  “Who gives a fuck, man! None of this is even real!” I hissed in a whisper.

  “It doesn’t matter how much you yell. I’m not doing it.”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re a fuckin’ atheist, man, and you don’t wanna change your religion?”

  “I don’t want to lie,” he had the balls to say to me.

  And that was the end of it. Theo let me convert, knowing the danger it put me in, and the almost certain death sentence I’d be facing if they ever discovered his true identity. I had just converted while locked up with the self-proclaimed “Undercover Muslim.” There was
no way that the most paranoid and irrational people on earth would ever believe I hadn’t known who Theo was—though I hadn’t—or that he didn’t tutor me on how to successfully deceive them—though of course he never did. If Theo was discovered, we would likely have been separated and I would have been tortured for months, interrogated with questions I had no hope of answering about someone who was supposed to be my brother in arms, but who in reality I knew almost nothing about. And after that they would have sawed my head off online, to show the world what happens to “Undercover Muslims” in Syria.

  Sometime after the lights went out for the night, Abu Dejana opened the door and took Mohannad from the room. He said Mohannad was going to court, and the word in the other rooms the Moroccan had been in before joining us was that this meant he was probably going home, but we’d never really know. There were gunshots outside all the time—only God and the jihadis knew how many were executions and how many were just target practice.

  Once it was just the three of us again I got a glimpse into the soul of the Moroccan, and what I saw was a roiling, bottomless pit of rage and hatred. Being in a room with another Muslim for only twenty-four hours had transformed him. Before, he’d rhapsodized about how much he loved the US and longed to return. Now, “the Jewish state of America” was his enemy. He even tried to convince me that Kawa and the rest of the jihadis who were literally holding me prisoner were actually my brothers. Because I was a Muslim he expected me to share his opinions, which was especially hard to take once he started in on Israel.

  “If I don’t die here in Syria on the battlefield I’ll just go to Israel and blow myself up in a restaurant,” he said nonchalantly.

  I couldn’t believe I was hearing this from a man who was sharing my blankets. As a Jew, it was hard to remain composed, but I fought to suppress any reaction that might invite suspicion as to my true faith.

  All night we argued about these things while Theo hid under the covers, but in the morning, after a few hours’ sleep, Abdelatif was back to his old self. He would later justify these incidents by claiming he was “a bipolar.”

  Now that there were three of us in the room we started playing games. The first was checkers—I carved a board into the tile floor with a screw, and Theo made pieces out of an orange peel—but during the very first game between me and the Moroccan I pulled off a sick triple jump that sent him into a rage, claiming that they didn’t play like that in the Arab world, and while in Syria I had to follow their rules. Then he just quit.

  The next game we attempted was hacky sack. I made a ball out of the same orange peel—shredded it, placed it in the corner of a plastic bread bag, wrapped it inside a piece of fabric, and then tied a shoelace tightly around the whole thing. Naturally the Moroccan could not play, and he’d pout as Theo and I kicked the poorly made ball back and forth, though it kept unwinding in the air.

  The third and best game was baseball. Abdelatif’s leg had improved to the point where he could hobble around, and I managed to get a broom back to our cell and kept it hidden by leaning it against the part of the wall covered by the door when it was open. Once we unscrewed the handle we had a bat, and once I made a more solid ball we had a game. The batter would stand by the door so he could hide the stick if a guard approached, and the pitcher stood on the far side of the cell. If the batter hit the lower part of the wall it was a single, the middle was a double, and the top was a triple. To get a home run you had to knock it into the window. We had fun and killed a lot of time this way, and even got some laughs whenever a foul tip hit the door and one of the guards came to see what we were knocking for. But the best way to kill time, the activity that became crucial to our way of life, would not be discovered until I was pacing the room one day and asked the Moroccan a seemingly arbitrary question about a seemingly random movie.

  “Yo, you ever see The Beach?”

  The Moroccan said he had.

  “Yeah, I keep thinking of that place. It’s the most beautiful place in the world. I gotta go there one day if I get outta this alive.”

  And then the Moroccan and I were off, talking about the movie in such detail that before I knew it I was spinning the whole thing out from the beginning by memory. Theo, of course, crawled under the covers immediately, as if the sound of my voice was toxic to his ears. I don’t think he ever blazed up in his life so he probably wouldn’t have appreciated it anyway.

  And from that moment until the day we were transferred, we would “watch movies” like this every night after the sun went down. I would retell everything from A Clockwork Orange to Platoon, The Big Lebowski to The Goonies. My fondest memory of this activity was made one night when we were watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and I got a little too into character while describing the fight between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched over the World Series.

  “I want that television set turned on!” I screamed, standing over the Moroccan, red in the face. “Right now!”

  “SHUT UP!” a guard yelled suddenly from the hallway, smashing the door in a rage.

  I leapt into the air, legs kicking like a cartoon character, and sat my ass down beside Abdelatif. We all stared at the door in silence, waiting to see if it was going to open, and then the Moroccan turned to look at me.

  “Man, I’d give anything for a fuckin’ wiener right now!” I said, breaking into a huge smile.

  Once we realized nobody was coming, I was back on my feet, reciting the rest of the movie.

  It was cathartic, having to rely on my memory to entertain us like that, and it always reminded me of when I was a little kid, and my dad heard me recite the entire first twenty minutes of Spaceballs.

  “You can remember all this, but you can’t remember your school-work?” he’d asked, shaking his head in disappointment.

  We would do this for hours every night and it always seemed to relieve whatever tensions had built up during the day between the Moroccan and me. Honestly, “watching movies” was probably the one thing that kept us from killing each other; it helped preserve the little friendship that still remained between us. Sometimes when reciting I would have to speak up, louder and louder, to drown out the screams of men being tortured a few doors down. Other nights, the screams would force me to stop.

  It didn’t take long for word of my conversion to spread. I’d worried that some of the guards might give me a hard time, but they all dug the fact that I’d become a Muslim, and while I can’t say that it made my treatment any better right away, I can say that it definitely made Theo’s worse.

  “You good,” the guards would say to me. Then they’d turn to Theo. “You not good. You dog!” Once, Thug Life even spit on the floor after his insult and then slammed the door.

  When it came time to choose my Muslim name, I’d taken Nassir, although the guards still called me Jumu’ah. The Moroccan explained that this was a serious part of the conversion, so when he grilled me as to why I’d picked that name I said it was after a great man I stayed with in Aleppo, but that was bullshit. I picked it because I’m a huge Nas fan, and I figured it was a great way to mock my captors and the entire ritual. I remember strutting down the hallway once, right after I became Nassir, hat pulled down, hearing one guard call out, “Jumu’ah Muslim!” as I high-fived another, all while kickin’ track three of Illmatic in my head with a big smile on my face:

  Life’s a bitch and then you die; that’s why we get high

  ’Cause you never know when you’re gonna go

  I had to mumble a few of the lines in the second verse, because it had been a while, but I had the important ones down cold—“Life’s a bitch, and then you die.”

  Now that I was a Muslim I had to play the part, and I have to admit I was a little touched when they brought me my Koran. A kid of about fourteen and another jihadi with a black scarf wrapped around his face entered our room holding the massive book.

  “Is that for me?” I asked, confused.

  “Nam,” said the one in the scarf, handing it over.

  Af
ter I’d shaken their hands and thanked them, they left. The Moroccan was very pleased with this addition to our room—all he had was a tiny pocket-sized version that was falling apart. Now we had a metallic-blue, 2,000-page hardcover edition that had been funded by the king of Saudi Arabia, the pages split with Arabic on the right side, English on the left, and usually about a quarter to a half a page of footnotes—the hands-down nicest copy in the whole prison. When I sat down and opened it up, I felt true excitement at finally getting my hands on a book, any book. I read it carefully, always looking for passages that spoke to my current situation, so I could hurl them at the guards. The one I used the most came from Surah al-Baqarah, and I never stopped shoving it in all of their faces:

  And we will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient.

  THE VILLA

  APRIL 13, 2013

  When the door opened that day, Yassine and Abu Dejana were on the other side, the latter holding thick plastic hand ties. I knew we were being transferred, and I immediately grabbed my Koran and ran up to Yassine, laying it on thick to convince him of my newfound love for Islam. He accepted the book from me and promised to return it when we reached our destination. I then held out my hands and he secured the ties loosely around my wrists so I would be comfortable during the ride. A few seconds later we were lined up by the door, blind and bound, holding our blankets with our clothes wrapped inside them and awaiting instructions. There was a lot of commotion coming from the hallway, as if the entire organization was moving out along with us.

  I hadn’t been outside since we’d returned from the electrical institute, thirty-four days before, so when at last I stepped into the sunlight and warm air I felt like Dorothy landing in Oz. We were loaded into the back of a work van, the kind with two doors that opened out and a low roof, like exterminators and locksmiths use in the States.