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

by Matthew Schrier

  Sometimes I’d hear the door open directly next to me as we prayed and the guards would enter. As the imam recited the Koran we would hear the thud of their punches and whack of their slippers, which they removed and used to smack Theo atop the head over and over again. By the time they were done with the slipper beatings his hair was so caked in dirt and dust that he looked twice as gray and three times as broken as he had before.

  On these occasions I would just keep my head down, my eyes closed, and Allah took care of the rest, for I was never once assaulted or harassed in any way during prayer.

  On several occasions during the months leading to our transfer I got so frustrated with Theo’s stupidity that I yelled at him for not being Austin Tice. Austin was a marine who’d served in Afghanistan and had made it from Turkey all the way down to the outskirts of Damascus before he went missing. From what I knew about him, he was a stand-up guy from a stand-up family. He would have been a lot more help as a cellmate, and a lot better company.

  I was always asking Theo what he was going to tell people when they asked why he’d gone to Syria in the first place, knowing full well that when they found out he’d been kidnapped while trying to drum up a story about a famous kidnapping victim he’d be ridiculed. He never answered the question; just lay there pompously stroking his mustache in a way that told me he had no intention of ever admitting his real motivation for the trip.

  But here at the villa, he began crafting an alternative story, telling the soldiers that he’d come to Syria to visit villages and speak to citizens on both sides of the conflict, focusing on the dissent between them. I told him it was delusional to think that would ever fly at home, being that he’d already admitted the real reason, both to me and to Tice’s editor, who he’d emailed before he left.

  Theo’s usual response when I reminded him of this was some belittling comment. I didn’t get it, because I’d told him straight up that I would never lie for him. The only thing that ever explained his confidence was something he said once when we were talking about telling our stories back home. “That all depends on your ability to convince people,” he’d told me. “I am the media.”

  The first week at the villa was one of the most refreshing I had experienced in captivity. Yes, we were constantly abused and insulted by the guards, but after almost a full month of nobody but Theo and the Moroccan it was worth it to be back with friends. Just like before, I clicked instantly with all the men I had not had the privilege of meeting or getting to know well the last time, especially Rabir and Ayman.

  Rabir had a shady look that didn’t in any way reflect his personality, with one eye open slightly more than the other and two bullet holes in him, but he was genuinely loved by all due to his warmth and great sense of humor.

  “I love you, Matt!” he’d say in English, a big smile on his face.

  “I love you too, Rabir!”

  Ayman was a grunt, but one who was generally respected by all in the room. He was of average height and build, with one truly stunning feature: his hair. It was so thick that when he ran his fingers through it wet, it stood up in porcupine spikes all around his head. We became friends immediately, thanks to our identically competitive personalities. It began one day when he was sitting across the room and motioned for me to toss him the ball I’d made. I lobbed it gently over. He caught it and fired it back at me like he was Roger Clemens. I was caught off guard and failed to make the catch.

  “One,” Ayman said, wearing a smug grin and holding up a finger.

  “Oh, you wanna play rough, huh?”

  I hurled the ball right back, even harder. We went back and forth like this a few times . . . and then I dropped it again.

  “Two,” he said, holding up two fingers with that same grin.

  He also liked to give me shit when I was working out—I’d finish a round of push-ups and he’d have someone translate as he told me how meaningless my exercises were and demonstrated how they were done in Syria. The comical and endearing way he joked and competed with me made me love him like a brother from the jump.

  Aside from my ability to make everyone laugh, which is no small feat in a prison, my single greatest contribution to the room was the introduction of the ball. It started with me trying to show them how to hack, but since there wasn’t room to move around much, this quickly evolved into something new: hacky sack, Aleppo-style. Instead of standing and using our feet, we sat cross-legged or on our knees and used our hands—and instead of playing civilly, we beat the shit out of each other. Five or six of us sat in a circle, and once the ball was served the object was to keep it in the air and moving at a fast but reasonable pace. There was no spiking or anything like it allowed, and the penalty for fucking up a round was severe. Whoever missed the ball or hit it out of the circle into nowhere had to enter the ring of men to accept his punishment: a solid punch to either the back or the shoulder from every player, hard enough that they sometimes produced thuds that made everyone in the room wince and say “Oh!” before laughing at the loser.

  Intense rivalries formed, like the ones between me and Rias—who would throw fits when he lost—and me and Rabir, who just reveled in hurting me. Rabir may have loved me when we weren’t hacking, but when we were, it was total war. One time after I blew a round I entered the ring for my punishment and Rabir waited until everyone else was done dealing me my licks to take his turn. As I crouched down, knees and elbows to the ground in the customary position, Rabir pretended to spit shine his fist, as if he was about to deliver a blow so epic it would shake the villa.

  “Come on, already!” I yelled.

  As Rabir wound up, I put my head down and shut my eyes tight, just waiting for him to sock the same goddamn spot he had been pounding on the whole game, but nothing happened. I looked up, thinking maybe he wanted me to see it coming, and I was right—as his fist started down I braced myself for the impact and saw the massive ball of knuckles coming straight for my face . . . only to stop dead an inch from my eyes. Then Rabir placed his fists side by side and cranked his middle finger up until it was staring me right in the face. We all laughed like we were in grade school again and he spared me with a tap to the shoulder.

  The game was so addictive that sometimes there was a waiting list to get in on the action. Even the brass would play, though if they ended up in the middle nobody ever gave them more than a pat. I invited Theo to play several times, but he always declined, even when I promised that nobody would hurt him.

  “No, I’m not going to play if you’re going to hit me,” he snapped.

  Once the rivalries started heating up you’d see some of us walking around the room rubbing our bruised-to-the-bone arms and shoulders—we were beating each other worse than the guards were. Leave it to the Syrian Army to turn hacky sack into a full-contact sport.

  All of our clothes were in tatters so one of the men asked a guard to bring us a needle and thread. Surprisingly, he delivered, which was great for me because I had a rip in my pants that ran from the crotch all the way down the seam of the left leg. My only problem was that I didn’t know how to sew, but luckily one of the soldiers did, and later that same day after he fixed my pants he tossed me my ball with a sock sewn tightly around it. Our games were frequently interrupted by ball malfunctions, specifically the need to rewind the shoelace; now that would never happen again. And our new, sturdier equipment made it possible for us to evolve from playing full-contact hacky sack to one-on-one volleyball.

  I don’t know whose idea it was, but one night I looked up to see Rias and another inmate on their knees, each holding one end of a blanket that stretched from one side of the room to the other, while two prisoners, also kneeling, volleyed the ball back and forth over the top. The Syrian people are definitely the most competitive I have ever met in my life, and within minutes they were playing for points and everyone was lining up to play the winner. Unlike our Aleppo-style hacky sack, this game involved no corporal punishment, but that didn’t stop the men from fighting or throwing
temper tantrums when they lost. Eventually the arguing got so bad that Rabir took the title of referee, standing over every game as if perched on a high chair like a tennis umpire.

  The rules of the tournament were simple: the first man to reach five points won and moved on to the next round. As in hacky sack there was no spiking, otherwise no game would have lasted longer than three seconds, and also as in hacky sack, intense rivalries formed between the players. Mine was with Hassan, whose gaunt frame and protruding cheekbones led some of the men to call him “the human skeleton.” Every time I played him, he scored on me with the same dinky-ass move, and every game started out the same way, with me staring at him from one side of the net like a gunslinger at high noon, and him staring back with a big grin that said: I’m about to school your ass in front of the whole room, son.

  The winner of our first tournament was Rabir, and upon beating the runner-up he rose like a phoenix with his arms held high in triumph and was immediately surrounded as nearly every man in the room stormed the court. As someone lifted one of Rabir’s arms up to declare him the victor, Fatr handed him an empty two-liter soda bottle as if it were the Stanley Cup. Rabir thrust the bottle proudly into the air as everyone hollered, and for a moment our cell resembled a baseball field after a World Series victory. We’d have many tournaments, but no other moments quite like this one, where for a few precious minutes we all forgot we were prisoners.

  They came for them at night. There was no warning, no light, and no goodbyes—only the voice of a guard telling Pops and the Shabiha to get up and follow him. We never saw either one of them again, and were never told their fate, but we all knew that they had most likely been executed. The Senator had been in the boiler room at the hospital when the Shabiha’s confession was forced from him and said there was no way in hell he’d ever be released given what he’d admitted to.

  Earlier that evening, Pops had led everyone in prayer, reciting the Koran in the same fading light in which I’d met him. It was a moment of pure beauty, and I remember so clearly sitting there watching him as he sat cross-legged, the prayer flowing out of him in his raspy voice. We all missed him, just like I’m sure his family did.

  The bathroom was up the hall from our cell and had a regular toilet like the ones we use in the West. Unfortunately, it did not flush. There were over twenty of us sharing this one toilet, and during our first days there the bowl filled up so fast that by the time it was my turn people had already begun to shit in the bidet. I’d breathe through my mouth to avoid the smell but the air was so moist and putrid I could almost taste it. Twice a day prisoners were taken from the cell for dish duty upstairs, and I assumed they were the ones burdened with emptying the toilet.

  There was a hose in the wall, but it rarely worked, and so instead we had another blue five-gallon jug of water and a plastic cup. A prisoner had sixty seconds to shit, wash his rear out with cups of water and his finger, and then wash his hands—if we were lucky enough to have soap, which we often weren’t. Needless to say, this was not enough time for my pampered American ass, and it was not uncommon to hear the guard—usually Abu Ali—screaming at me to hurry up as I hovered above the feces-filled bowl, trying to get myself clean. Abu Ali was in his midtwenties, with a pencil-thin mustache and a fierce hatred for every prisoner he watched over. Usually—when my game went into overtime, so to speak—Abu Ali’s response was to zap me on my ass with his Taser as I reentered the cell, but as far as I was concerned I would rather take a Tase than sit around filthy all day. One time, however, I must have pissed him off more than usual, because instead of just zapping me, he put me in one of the punishment cells.

  The punishment cells had not yet been constructed when we arrived, but we heard them being built with the supplies we’d passed on the way in. There were three of them, basically lockers for human beings with cinder-block walls and tall black steel doors. When I was locked inside the first thing I noticed was the cold; it was freezing in there. It was also completely dark, the only light that crept in was through a peephole drilled in the door and the cracks in the wall. To maximize suffering and discomfort, a cinder block was cemented directly in the middle of the floor, making it impossible to stretch out when sitting down. I was only in there for a minute and that was long enough by far. Luckily for me, Yassine was present on this bathroom run and by now had total authority over punks like Abu Ali and Crop Top; he ordered them to let me out, and after a little arguing they did as they were told. When I emerged, Yassine gave me a pat on the shoulder and led me back to the cell.

  Hunger was another form of torture at the villa, and outside our barred windows we could hear the jihadis swimming in the pool and laughing as we starved. Usually we were given a breakfast of halawa and bread around 1 PM, but sometimes breakfast never came and we had to wait until dinner, which was brought late in the evening, to eat at all. On those days, some of the longest of my life, we were quiet except for our stomachs, which never stopped talking. No one had the energy to do anything but wait to be fed.

  We dined in groups. Theo refused to eat with Abdelatif due to the brush with death he’d had after eating off the wrong side of the bowl back at the hospital, so he decided to sit with the brass. The brass, however, were disgusted by Theo’s presence because of the open sores that had formed on every inch of his body except his face from scratching his bedbug bites. The men in his group approached me, pointing at him and then scratching their arms and pretending to eat, to show me how unsanitary it was to dine with him, so before every meal I began calling Theo over to the window to wash up as best he could. I remember feeling pity as he held his hands through the bars while I poured water over them from a soda bottle. He was like a child, completely incapable of taking care of himself. After he was done, I would rinse my own hands and join my group.

  As time went on, the Moroccan’s attitude toward Theo and me grew more and more hostile. Unlike Theo I refused to take his shit for even one second, which led to frequent arguments, and twice these arguments turned physical. The first time this happened I resorted to a tactic I’d used once before, when we got into an altercation over the Koran back at the hospital. It was three days after I’d converted, and Abdelatif was angry that I hadn’t yet memorized any of the prayers in Arabic, so he confiscated my Koran until I lived up to his expectations. When I grabbed it back he lunged at me in a rage, so I just rolled onto his broken leg and that ended it, with the book back in my hands. When I did the same thing during our brawl at the villa he shrieked in pain and the men quickly broke it up. That’s how our first fight ended, but I honestly don’t remember how it started.

  Our second fight, however, I remember vividly. It began late at night, when everyone was sleeping except for me, Abdelatif, Rabir, Ayman, and Fadaar.

  “Hey, Nassir,” the Moroccan said, grabbing the thick part of his forearm to illustrate how well-endowed he was. “When we get out of here I’m going to give it to your sister.”

  Now this was a kind of disrespect I could not stand for, especially with others listening, so I gave it back as good as I got it and made a similar remark about his sister.

  “What?” he yelled, struggling to his feet. “You can’t say that about my sister! She wears a veil!”

  “Well, if you don’t like it, don’t talk shit about my sister.”

  “It’s not the same thing!” he said, and his open hand connected with the side of my face.

  The slap turned my head but it snapped right back into place, followed by an open hand of my own, which landed with a smack across Abdelatif’s jaw. Within seconds, every man in the room was awake and Rabir and Ayman were holding me back as another group did the same with the Moroccan, who was going absolutely ballistic.

  “I’m a Muslim!” he screamed. “He can’t say that about my sister! Just wait! Wait until the guards come!”

  “Go ahead!” I bellowed back.

  Usually when our arguments escalated like this they deescalated just as fast. “Jumu’ah!” the Senator woul
d yell, grabbing my arm. “Sit down and be quiet!” And I would, for the good of the room. But this time, the Moroccan and I were still riled up the next day, with him constantly barking the same threat: that he’d tell the guards I was a Jewish CIA agent sent there to spy on them.

  “Go ahead, Kawa already knows who I am,” I responded every time, calling his bluff. “You tell him lies and he’s just gonna torture you.”

  When Oqba called me over, I knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. He wanted me to apologize to Abdelatif, to make peace in the room and relieve the tension.

  “Do it for me, please? Do it for me?” he asked in his sweet voice.

  “No, fuck him! He talked shit about my sister first!” I replied.

  “You don’t understand, in this part of the world when you talk about someone’s sister, or mother, or father . . . it’s blood.”

  “And you think we just let that shit slide in America?” I asked, incredulous, but out of respect I heard him out and afterward I went over to that psychotic son of a bitch and made peace.

  I felt nothing but disgust as his repugnant ass hugged me and said he was sorry. As I returned the hug I rolled my eyes over his shoulder, so every man in the room could see that I was completely full of shit.

  After that first day at the villa I don’t remember Theo ever refusing a request from Abdelatif; he was massaging him so many times a day I would have needed two hands to keep track.

  “Theo, come! Come give me a massage!” the Moroccan would shout, and it didn’t matter if Theo was asleep or giving an English lesson, he’d go running.