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

by Matthew Schrier

  Inside the truck it was a furnace, and with the ski cap as a blindfold I was sweating like a cold beer. We all kept quiet so the Moroccan and Theo could hear and translate what was being said outside.

  “They’re concerned about the checkpoints,” Theo reported.

  “Is that Mohammad?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  A few minutes later one of the jihadis opened the door to check our restraints and noticed mine were loose. He tightened the tie so viciously that the zipper sound echoed through my head. Before long, huge blisters were filling up around the restraints on my wrists.

  After what felt like forever, Jamal, Mohammad’s right hand, jumped behind the wheel wearing a turquoise jumpsuit jacket. In the passenger seat was a young man I had never seen before. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, with a wavy mop of hair so thick it stood up on its own. I would call him Crop Top.

  When we finally started moving, I leaned back and saw that we were part of a huge and heavily armed procession. Directly behind us was Yassine astride a motorcycle with an AK strapped around his neck, and behind him came several trucks and cars packed out with jihadis and a tractor trailer carrying a huge bright-green shipping container on its back. I had no idea at the time, but inside it were prisoners, including all the Alawite POWs who’d been locked up down the hall from us at the hospital. The captives took up about half the space inside the container; the other half was filled by drums of gasoline, some of which were leaking onto the floor and making the air toxic to breathe. The ventilation was like the light: there wasn’t any.

  It was a long and painful ride. The blisters on my wrists were so sensitive that every bump we hit on the unpaved country roads was agony. The Moroccan and I were seated facing each other with our backs to the walls of the van, but I had placed the blankets under me, which helped a little. We had to keep low or Crop Top would scream at us to get down, but I didn’t mind; I’d slid my cap up just enough to see, leaned back, and stared at the sun and the beautiful blue sky. I hadn’t seen either one in a long time, and had forgotten how incredible simple things that I had taken for granted back home could be. Before long, I started to recognize the scenery outside our window.

  “We’re in Hraytan,” I said.

  “How do you know?” the Moroccan asked—he was still wearing his camouflage blindfold.

  “Because we just passed under the blue walking bridge,” I told him. “We’re on the Gaziantep highway.”

  Then we turned off into the back roads and I lost my way.

  We traveled through one town after another, some with the black flag of Jabhat al-Nusra flying high in the air from flagpoles planted onto rooftops so they could be seen from afar. Between the villages was the countryside, mile upon mile of hills covered in jagged rocks and bleak olive groves. For some reason I found myself thinking of that Louis Armstrong song “What a Wonderful World,” playing it in my head as the neatly planted rows of trees rushed past us under the scarce white clouds. Then we got to the first checkpoint, and the music was over.

  We pulled right through and then off to the side of the road. The FSA group controlling this checkpoint wasn’t interested in what was in our little truck—they wanted to know what was in the big green shipping container. However, our captors were prepared to blow themselves and everyone else to hell before they would let anyone else get so much as a peek. We heard yelling, and then I saw Mohammad, a suicide belt strapped around his waist, pull out his Glock. By now our escorts had fled the vehicle for the action and Jamal was in a cluster of jihadis, holding Mohammad back so that his gun was forced toward the sky. I don’t know who said what to calm the dispute, but within minutes we were all moving again. When I was free, the FSA and al-Nusra were staunch allies, with the FSA being the bigger power, but over the months of my captivity that had drastically changed, with the extremist groups rising to become the tail that wagged the dog.

  The second checkpoint we hit went even less smoothly. Jamal sailed right through and pulled off to the side just like the last time, and again the FSA group minding the passageway wanted to see what was in the shipping container. This group was much larger than the last and from the looks of them nothing to fuck with. It didn’t take long for a burst of gunfire to ring out, followed by a few seconds of silence and an answering burst. Then all hell broke loose and we heard AKs spraying from all directions within the cluster of vehicles that had accumulated around the truck holding the container.

  “They’re fighting!” the Moroccan yelled.

  “No shit!” I said, grabbing the blankets and pushing them against the wall of the van.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, removing his blindfold.

  “Putting the blankets against the walls in case any bullets pierce the truck.”

  “That won’t do anything.”

  “It’ll do better than nothing,” I said, motioning to what he had next to him.

  This was around the time I looked at Theo, who had also removed his blindfold to peer out the window. His eyes were puffy and full of tears, but none slid down his cheeks.

  “Hey, I know that guy from Anadan!” the Moroccan shouted suddenly. “He lived next door to my wife! I’m gonna try to escape!”

  “Are you fuckin’ nuts?” I yelled, grabbing him. “You have a bullet in your leg and as soon as you open the doors they’re gonna light up everyone in this truck!”

  I swear that lunatic didn’t even know the guy. We were an hour and a half from Anadan.

  As the fighting continued I locked eyes with an FSA jihadi. His hair was all gelled back and he wore a huge grin on his face. In his hand was an RPG. I held up my wrists to show the hand ties so he’d know we weren’t hostiles.

  “That guy’s going to blow himself up!” the Moroccan yelled, pointing in the opposite direction.

  And it looked like he was right. Standing about twenty feet from us in front of the container was one of our escorts in a suicide vest—with his finger on the detonator, ready to blow.

  “No, that guy is gonna blow us up!” I said, and I pointed to the kid holding the RPG as he raised it to his shoulder, his eyes again locked with mine, and in the same motion, turned to point it at the truck carrying the shipping container.

  A few very long minutes later the firing stopped, and then a jihadi I had never seen before walked right past our window and screamed “Allah Akbar” so loud I could see the vein popping on the side of his head. Then dozens of other fighters started to do the same.

  “Someone’s dead,” the Moroccan said.

  “Allah Akbar!” jihadis screamed from all directions as Crop Top swung into the passenger seat and a new face jumped behind the wheel and took off.

  Al-Nusra had lost two men during the firefight—and they were not happy about it.

  I can’t be sure, but the ride felt like it was about two and a half hours long. It finally ended after we’d pulled through a fancy concrete arch and up a long driveway. The driver parked and got out. We fixed our blindfolds so as not to get caught peeking, but not before I got a look at several other prisoners in green smocks walking blindfolded toward a large house, some carrying blankets.

  A second later the back doors opened and we were ordered from the vehicle. When we went to grab our blankets they told us to leave them and take only our spare clothes. We were led around the side of the massive home to join a group of POWs, all of us then forced through a door and down a few steps into the basement. From what I could see under my cap, at one time it had probably been a beautiful apartment for either guests or the caretaker. The smell of gasoline upon entering was so powerful that at first I thought we were in some kind of bomb-making lab, but it was just the other prisoners. They were soaked in it from the ride.

  The first room was empty except for a bunch of construction materials, and we were ushered down a narrow hallway. The screaming from the guards was intense—they were clearly angry about losing two of their men and taking it out on us. At the end of the hallway was Crop
Top, screaming Yala! Yala! nonstop and dealing every prisoner an openhanded blow to the back of the neck as they passed through the door into the cell. When it was my turn to get hit I saw stars.

  Crop Top was screaming out instructions in Arabic, and I followed the lead of the prisoners before me. Once through the door everyone crowded to the back wall and crouched down. The terror in the air was as thick as the scent of gasoline. It felt like we were awaiting the firing squad. I was still blindfolded and had no idea which other prisoners were in the room aside from Theo and the Moroccan. When the door finally slammed shut and locked there was silence, not a sound except for the heavy breathing of the men. I was the first one to remove my blindfold, and I couldn’t have been happier when I saw who was beside me: it was Ali, the English-speaking POW and the first friend I’d made at the hospital. His blindfold was still covering his eyes but fear was written on his face.

  “Hey, Ali, what’s up?” I said enthusiastically.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “It’s Matt! Who do you think it is?”

  “We are in danger,” he replied.

  That was when I looked around at our new environment and realized it was just another prison.

  “Nah, we’ll be all right,” I said confidently.

  After a while we all removed our blindfolds and began to embrace one another like men who knew they’d just escaped death. Despite the zip ties I was shaking so many hands I felt like the mayor, and for a few minutes the huge blisters that had formed on my wrists ceased to exist; I was once again among friends. We passed the next few hours speculating on where we were and why we’d been brought here. Some thought this was just a temporary holding place because of the trouble at the checkpoint, whereas others thought it was where we’d been heading the whole time, another routine transfer so as not to keep us in any one place for too long.

  I knew that this prison was going to be different from all the rest when I heard the prisoners in the cell across from ours. There were two of them and they were women—one never stopped pounding on the door while the other never stopped crying. The sound of her weeping pierced the heart of pretty much every man in the room until it ended, when the guards came for them later that night. Like all the others that had come and gone and would in the future, we’d never know where they ended up. All we knew for certain was that we never heard them again.

  This was our introduction to the House of Mohammad.

  We had not seen much of General Mohammad since the electrical institute, and now we learned why. He had been made an emir and given his own militia to command. This villa was one of two that he had either requisitioned from their former owners or simply taken when they fled in the wake of the war.

  The cell must have been the apartment’s master bedroom, and at one time a set of large French doors had spanned almost the entire twenty-foot length of the room. Now those French doors were a thing of the past, covered with layer upon layer of concrete, spackled on so jaggedly that we hung our spare clothes from the sharp points that protruded. It made for a dim scene. Both the light switch and the fixture had been ripped out, leaving nothing but thin wires snaking out into the air. The only unobstructed windows were set at about eye level, each with two glass doors that opened in and bars on the outside. It was a gray day, and only a dreary light filtered through.

  I caught up with old friends and was introduced to the new arrivals among the POWs, one of the most memorable being Pops, a short little dude of around sixty with salt-and-pepper hair and a raspy voice. Once we got to know each other he called me “Mr. Friday.” Pops was a total nymphomaniac, and sometimes it seemed like he knew just enough English to talk about sex. I’ll never forget what he said to me after we’d introduced ourselves in the fading light of that first afternoon:

  “Can you get me a date with Hill-or-ee Cleen-ton?”

  For some reason Pops had a real thing for Hillary. One time he crept up behind me and started stroking the top of my head, telling everyone in the room that he bet the skin on my bald head was “as smooth as the skin on Hill-or-ee Cleen-ton’s ass.”

  I also met Senator Iayd Sulaiman, a cool cat of forty who’d held a seat in Bashar’s parliament before being kidnapped in Homs. He stood 6′3″, with thick curly hair. The Senator was a trip. Here was a man who was accustomed to receiving daily hour-long massages back home and now he was sleeping on the floor with the rest of us. He spent hours reading the Koran and praying, and later the two of us would have long talks about everything from politics to religion and become close friends in the process. He almost always had one pant leg rolled up over his kneecap, where the bone was covered only by scar tissue. I never asked what had happened because I’d seen enough to know it was the result of being struck repeatedly with a thick cable like the one they’d tortured me with, probably while he was in the tire.

  And then there was Fatr, a twenty-five-year-old so fresh faced and innocent looking that he could’ve been the poster boy for the Syrian Boy Scouts, if such a thing existed. He had thick black hair and a long patchy beard that never came in fully. Looking at him you didn’t really think “warrior,” but then he took off his shirt and you saw the scars. That kid took five bullets to the chest and abdomen, and still he almost never stopped smiling.

  The sight of a bunch of prison guards has never been more welcome than when the door opened and they entered to remove our restraints. I was in so much pain from the ties digging into my flesh that I thought my hands might fall off. They dumped everyone’s blankets on the floor in a single pile, and we could tell right away that ours were missing. Our blankets had been the same brown wool as the rest, but my quilt was nowhere to be seen, and before I knew it every blanket in the room had been snatched up and either spread on the floor or used as a cover, leaving me with nothing. Even Theo got one, but he didn’t offer to share it with me.

  We were now realizing how inadequate the room was for confining so many people. Once lying down, the twenty-three of us were packed so tightly that everyone’s legs overlapped, and some inmates—like Theo, and Ammar, who was a Shabiha—got stuck sleeping in the middle between everyone’s feet, so that most of the men had to sleep with their legs bent up. On top of having no blanket on a cold night, I was also in the middle at first, lying there curled up to keep warm. Then Rias, my old friend from the hospital, noticed I had no covers. He stood up, handed me his only blanket, and motioned for me to squeeze in between him and another inmate. When I tried to share his blanket with him he waved me off and got under his neighbor’s. I was completely overwhelmed with gratitude. We were jammed together so tight that it was impossible to roll over unless the man next to you did the same, and still it was a huge relief to be there, with men who had a deep and unshakeable sense of brotherhood, so different from either Theo’s stubborn isolation or the Moroccan’s self-serving and ever-shifting loyalties.

  When morning came, sunshine flooded into the room along with the sounds of birds singing. Piled up on the windowsills, which were so deep we could sit on them, were the bowls from dinner the night before. Dangling above them from outside one window was a light that the guards had hung a few hours after it got dark. I was one of the first to awaken and did so with a bladder so full that holding it was not an option. After months of erratic bathroom access and drinking contaminated water, I had some kind of urinary tract infection that resulted in pain whenever my bladder filled up. Unfortunately, there were no soda bottles in the room yet, just a big blue five-gallon water jug we all drank out of. Sensing that this wasn’t the type of place where I could knock on the door, I grabbed one of the halawa bowls and whipped it out. A few of the men waking up weren’t happy to see me urinating in one of the dishes we ate out of, but there was really nothing I could do about it. When I finished I went to empty the bowl out the window, but several of my cellmates told me to wait for the bathroom run to dump it there, and not wanting to make any more waves, I listened.

  Just then the Moroccan woke up, and cho
se this moment to attempt to demonstrate to the room his nonexistent dominance over me.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he yelled. “Dump that shit out the window!”

  “What? Fuck you!” I bellowed back. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talkin’ to—Theo?”

  I set the bowl on the windowsill while staring him down. It was now game on between America and Morocco in Syria.

  It wasn’t long into the day when Theo learned how insignificant his little physical therapy sessions and massages were when it came to making an ally out of the Moroccan.

  “Hey, Theo, give me massage!” Abdelatif demanded loudly. The whole room watched.

  “No, not right now,” said Theo softly.

  “What?” the Moroccan asked, surprised.

  “I’m not going to help you anymore if you talk to me like that.” It seemed Theo was trying to make an impression on our new cellmates by showing them he had some balls.

  Abdelatif’s response to Theo’s defiance was so swift and conniving that JR Ewing would have tipped his hat to him. First he began by grilling Theo on why he refused to convert to Islam, which won the support of half the men in the room. Then he started in on why Theo knew Arabic so well, which won over the rest, and before Theo knew it he was surrounded by suspicious eyes, all accusing him of being a CIA agent. Theo tried to defend himself, but Abdelatif was just too devious. I’m sure he would have tried the same thing with me if he hadn’t realized I was immune to his accusations, as I already knew most of the men in the room better than he did.

  The night before, after the lights went on, Theo had been giving a bunch of the men English lessons, but now by nightfall every man in the room had marked him as a spy and class was out. And after all this, he still dropped to his knees that evening to give the Moroccan’s leg a massage.

  The first time I was locked up with the soldiers, few were very religious, but now they all prayed five times a day without fail, and not only did none of them give me a hard time about my conversion, they embraced it. We would line up in two tight rows to kneel, with one of the men playing the role of imam. My conversion may not have been real, but there was something truly amazing about being so welcomed into the Alawite sect of Islam, them praying to their God, me praying to mine.