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

by Matthew Schrier

  After looking around the room, he told the big guy who’d taken off our hand ties to go get us sandwiches. He then calmly insulted the men after telling them that their army had committed an atrocity elsewhere in the country that left many women and children dead. As he was leaving I got his attention and asked for a soda bottle to piss in. The emir gave his consent and a bottle was promptly delivered to me by one of the other jihadis.

  A little while later the big soft-spoken jihadi returned, with two huge bags containing our dinner. There was a sandwich for each man in the room and every one was hot and fresh from the shop. These sandwiches aren’t like the ones we eat in the West, more like burritos filled with potatoes, peppers, and some kind of sauce. You’d think we’d tear into them like wild beasts after being tortured with hunger for twenty-three days at the villa, but we didn’t. We carefully unwrapped our sandwiches and bit into them slowly, savoring every bite we took. This went for pretty much everyone except the Moroccan, who scarfed his down in less than two minutes.

  “Man, I’m still hungry! Watch this!” he said to me, a now-familiar evil smile on his face. “Theo, come here!”

  Theo jumped up and within seconds was crouched before Abdelatif.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Can I get some of your sandwich?”

  “Didn’t you get one?” Theo asked, knowing damn well what was coming next.

  “Yeah, but I’m still hungry,” said the Moroccan.

  Silence ensued as they stared at each other.

  “Do you want a piece of mine?”

  And that was how Abdelatif snagged himself a quarter of Theo’s dinner, the best one he’d had since being kidnapped, without so much as a threat. It was the kind of thing I usually would have spoken up about, but ever since that little stunt Theo pulled during the bathroom run back at the villa, I figured he was pretty much on his own when it came to the Moroccan.

  We were given blankets, but as at the villa there were not enough. Once the entire floor was covered, except for the space immediately in front of the door, there were a limited number left to cover up with, and the Moroccan and I had to share. At first Theo didn’t get one at all, but when the guard noticed, he left and came back, bringing him both a blanket and a flat foam pillow with a SpongeBob SquarePants pillow-case. When it came time for us to go to sleep, it was a tight fit, with everyone’s feet overlapping those of the men sleeping opposite. Theo got stuck in front of the door with no blankets beneath him and had to fold his and curl up inside it to avoid sleeping on the concrete. Because this was the only area not covered, it became the place where everyone shook their blankets off and would get particularly dirty, but by now that didn’t matter to Theo.

  Obviously, none of us were looking Rico Suave at the moment, but Theo’s appearance was the worst by far. He only had one pair of pants and one tee shirt, originally white, but now so far past the yellow stage that it had turned a light gray. All of his other clothes had been stolen by the other prisoners at the villa after the jihadis did a wash and then dumped everything in a pile for us to go through. Here he’d walk around the cell with his tee shirt tucked into his boxer shorts in an attempt to thwart the bedbugs, SpongeBob pillow tucked under his arm for safekeeping. Some of the men began to call him a kalb, which meant dog, and one day I accidentally nicknamed him Scrappy because he really did resemble a stray. The name didn’t stick for long, but it was funny as shit watching the Moroccan use it whenever he wanted a massage.

  “Hey, Scrappy!” he’d call, and then whistle, snapping his fingers. “Come here, boy!”

  I knew it was insensitive, but it was hard not to laugh when his flea-ridden ass actually came running over, looking like Old Yeller after he’d been bitten, in a hurry to obey his master’s every command.

  When I awoke on our first morning in the stores, the room was filled with a yellow glow from the sun reflecting off the stone wall of the neighboring building and in through the bars to our cell. A few hours later we were each given a piece of bread and a hard-boiled egg, which would have constituted a feast at the villa.

  Shortly after breakfast we got our first glimpse of the Wolfman, a jihadi whose appearance made our blood run cold. He was not a large man, standing about 5′9″ with an average build, wearing a pine-green Adidas knockoff jumpsuit. His hair, which he kept pushed back, was wavy and very long, but this wasn’t his defining feature. His defining feature was his beard, which was a sight to behold, growing well down his chest and covering nearly his whole face, springing thick and bushy from right below his eyes. When he walked in nobody looked at the wall; instead we all stared at him in awe as he stepped to the Shabiha, sized them up without saying a word, and then left the room as silently as he had entered it.

  “He looks like he’s ready to blow himself up, man,” the Moroccan whispered in my ear.

  A minute later the emir arrived, with three men—visitors. After looking us over they walked up to the Shabiha, who were sitting by their mattress. As the emir looked down on them he began to roll up his sleeves. Shabiha Ali and his little friend stared steadily down at the Korans open in front of them as if they were the only people in the room. Then the emir said something in Arabic and the little one looked up and handed him the Koran. The emir passed it to one of his friends, and that’s when the show began.

  Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!

  The emir’s hand colliding with the little Shabiha’s face made a sound so loud it barely sounded real, like something out of a seventies porno flick. Defenseless, he had no choice but to sit there and take the blows as they came, one after another after another.

  “Holy shit!” I whispered in the Moroccan’s ear. “I’ve never heard slaps like that in my life! No wonder he doesn’t have any wrinkles in his clothes.”

  When the emir was done he turned his attention toward the third Shabiha, but one of the emir’s friends, who was wearing an untucked purple dress shirt, grabbed him by the arm and yelled something in Arabic.

  “They’re fighting over who’s going to get to hit him!” the Moroccan said. “He’s saying, ‘No! No, this one is mine!’”

  The emir politely stepped aside and let his buddy go to work. The slaps were the same, the only difference was that this guy didn’t bother rolling up his sleeves. As for Shabiha Ali, who never once looked up from his Koran, they left him alone, and when the man in purple was finished they all left the room. Not one of us said a word and a few seconds later we heard somebody coming back and the emir’s voice calling to the little Shabiha. Face full of dread, the Shabiha slowly got up and made his way to the door, shaking. We all sat tense with anticipation as he stood there, waiting for it to open . . . then the emir slipped the Koran he’d taken through the slot above the door.

  “He’s giving him back the Koran,” said Abdelatif. “We’re with good Muslims now.”

  Later that day Obeida paid us a visit with one of his friends, a skinny jihadi with dark skin and an especially long beard. Upon hearing that I’d recently converted to Islam they both lit up, and when I kicked the Fatiha for them they couldn’t have been more pleased. By now I had it down pat from studying with the guys and practicing before sleep every night.

  It was during another, similar exchange that Theo tried to make me think they were going to kill me. As the Moroccan went back and forth with Obeida, he suddenly threw in a question as if it were from us.

  “He asked him if they’re going to kill us because we are really scared,” said Theo.

  “What’d he say?”

  “Maybe,” Theo answered.

  I turned to Ali for confirmation, but before he could expose the lie, Theo decided to come clean.

  “No, no, he said no.”

  “No? Then why’d you tell me maybe?” I asked, pissed.

  “I got confused.”

  That was his excuse. Someone who spoke fluent Arabic confused “maybe” and “no” when it came to a question of life or death. This wasn’t the first time Theo had used my l
ack of Arabic to try to make me think someone had said they were going to kill me when they’d actually said something else entirely. I didn’t really get that mad or go nuts after Obeida left like you’d think. I mainly just wondered what kind of human being does something like that to another, let alone one of his own.

  Later that day Oqba told me that we were no longer in the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra. We were now being held in trust for them by Ahrar al-Sham, another incredibly powerful rebel group.

  After the sun went down, Obeida came in and told Theo and me that we were not in the same boat as everyone else and that they were going to launch an investigation into us, starting that night. An investigation would mean questioning, and after he left, the Moroccan told me that he no longer wanted to act as my translator. He said he wanted to distance himself from being lumped in with the Americans, which I totally understood. However, he got pushback from the place he least expected it.

  “I don’t want to translate for him,” Theo said bluntly.

  I just shook my head at his treachery. Abdelatif quickly went from mad to furious as Theo continued to refuse, because he wasn’t only creating a dangerous situation for me, but for him as well. As he got angrier and angrier, a cold and sinister look came over his eyes.

  Crack!

  It happened so fast I didn’t see it coming. With the knuckles of his pointer and middle fingers jutting from his fist, Abdelatif punched Theo in the face, just below his eye. A second later, little drops of blood began to run down his cheek like tears. He crouched there, shaking with what looked more like humiliation than fear. The rest of the men were disgusted by this violence, but I admit I felt mostly satisfaction. Leave it to Theo to provoke a terrorist to punch him in my defense.

  “That’s Karma for you,” I said, as footsteps approached. “Wipe your eye.”

  The door opened and I was taken out for interrogation, with the Moroccan acting as my translator.

  The shelling began at dinner a few nights later. Each group had a huge metal tray piled with a steaming mountain of brown rice. I said the Bismillah and then ripped off a big piece of bread, using it to pinch up a mouthful.

  Before I swallowed we heard a sharp whistle, followed by a huge explosion less than a second later. The shell had landed maybe a hundred yards away and caused a near panic in the room. One of the soldiers jumped to his feet with fear on his face and walked to the back wall, and within seconds we had all followed his lead. A few minutes later we heard another whistle and looked up, waiting to see if this one would land on us.

  Crash!

  This explosion could not have been more than fifty yards from our cell and was followed by something awful, the screaming of a man on his way to paradise. His shrieking paralyzed the room, though it didn’t last long. Not one of us ate a bite until the suffering expired.

  The rest of the night was quiet.

  Ever since we’d arrived at Obeida’s, Theo had been trying to make chess pieces out of the flat Styrofoam trays we sometimes ate from, or the paper wrappings from sandwich night, but somehow it never seemed to work—until one day, when every tray came wrapped in aluminum foil. When everyone was finished eating and only the trays remained, I watched as Theo ripped off a piece of foil. From the look on his face you would have thought he’d just discovered fire.

  “You should use that for your chess pieces,” I said with a smile, but he was way ahead of me.

  Within a few hours one of the soldiers had sculpted all the pieces from the foil and another had made a perfectly symmetrical board on a white sheet with one of the pens we’d kept from writing our reports after the interrogations. By nightfall, Fadaar and some of the other men had made another game as well, using the leftover foil and a piece of foam. The game was called Mancala, and it was something the men loved to teach me to play and completely whip my ass at while doing so.

  As for chess, I had never really learned to play, but prison seemed like a great time to pick it up. The only problem was that I was the only beginner in the room, with the exception of the Moroccan, which meant I had to take some serious shit as I was learning. One of my favorite people to play with was Shareef—the officer who’d been shot through the hand and loved Jennifer Lopez—though he certainly never took it easy on me.

  “Wait a minute, did you just fuckin’ win?” I asked, staring at the board we had just finished setting up not two minutes earlier.

  When I looked up, Shareef was wearing an enormous smile, holding up three of his fingers.

  “Three!” he said.

  “I can’t believe you just beat me in three moves,” I said, pissed.

  “My turn, Jumu’ah,” said Ayman, tapping my arm to tell me to step aside.

  “No, fuck that! I’m playing again! I’ve been sitting here for two hours waiting for my turn!” As I reset the board, word of my humiliating defeat spread throughout the room—along with a wave of laughter that accompanied it.

  Since the Moroccan didn’t know how to play either I decided to practice by kicking his al-Qaeda ass. He’d sit there playing with a disinterested look on his face, acting like he didn’t care when he clearly did. After about a week of doing this and being schooled by Ayman and Shareef during my games with the others, I started doing better and quite naturally rubbed it in their faces like they did with me every opportunity I had.

  I had never seen anybody come back from the dead before, so you can imagine my surprise when the door opened and Kawa entered, carrying a black satchel. He glanced blandly around the room as we all stared at him with our jaws on the floor.

  “Jumu’ah!” he said when he spotted me, breaking into a big grin under his Puma cap.

  “What up, boss?” I said, forcing myself to return the smile.

  The Moroccan told him how saddened we’d all been to hear of his death and that we’d dedicated the Fatiha to him after. Kawa seemed about as moved by that as he was by the news that I was a Muslim—the Little Judge was many things, but foolish wasn’t one of them.

  A few minutes later he left and I just sat there, with my head throbbing, devastated to learn he was still breathing. We were right back where we had been since day one—nowhere. With Kawa dead I’d thought there was a chance someone reasonable might be put in charge of my fate, but now all my hopes and prayers had been flushed down the toilet. My misery was painted all over my face. When I finally looked up and made eye contact with Theo I couldn’t believe it: he was staring at me with the most evil, sadistic grin I had ever seen, to let me know that he was taking considerable pleasure in my pain. It was like something you would expect from a Dostoevsky villain.

  “What the fuck are you looking at?” I asked, jumping to my feet. I charged over, grabbed him by his beard and yanked it as hard as I could, ready to follow it up with a blow.

  Naturally I only got one tug before it was broken up, but other than that nobody really seemed to mind. His conduct was becoming so perfidious that I found myself again asking God what I had done to deserve being locked in a room with such a person.

  As always, I received no answer.

  There were times during our stay at Obeida’s when I came close to losing it. I wasn’t the only one—it was obvious when someone was sinking into that place beyond depression, and usually when this happened the best thing was to leave them be as they stared into oblivion, letting them slog through to the other side on their own. The one who could always sense when I was in that dark place the most was Ayman, and when he did he would plop down in front of me, trying to distract me from whatever thoughts were circling my mind. To cheer me up he used the little English he knew to rag on Theo.

  “Dog!” he’d say, jerking his thumb in Theo’s direction, and I always laughed.

  Other times he would just start pointing around the room at different objects, teaching me their names in Arabic and quizzing me on them. Then he’d move on to the days of the week and other basics. If anyone else had dropped in to give me language lessons when I was depressed I’d have told the
m to fuck off, and the rest of the men knew to give me my space when I was in this state, but my connection with Ayman was one of such deep affection that he knew I’d never say that to him. He was my best friend, someone who gave me solace when I found myself considering the possibility that I might die there, because I knew that as long as I ended up in a ditch with him, I’d be ready to face the end with a full heart and a brother beside me.

  Since we were all taking full advantage of not being rushed while in the bathroom, Obeida began to have second thoughts about our setup. All week we watched him turning the room where the bathroom and arsenal were into a cell, building it up with cinder blocks. When it was finished he secured a thick iron door in the wall, with a big slot above it. That night we were transferred in to our new home, and at first sight it couldn’t have been a bigger blow to morale.

  The room was about the same size as our old one but pitch-black, with no window and no working light fixtures even when the electricity was on. The front of this store, where the gate was drawn down, had been completely sealed off with a wall of cinder blocks, except for at the very top where two blocks were missing and a piece of concrete divided the hole to make it impossible for any of us to fit through. All we had was the fluorescent light, which began to fade almost as soon as we switched it on. We all sought out new sleeping spots and I spread my blanket by Rias, directly next to the doorway. This spot turned out to be one of the crown jewels of the cell, with a constant draft from under the door that would keep me cool on the painfully hot days to come.

  As soon as Obeida dropped by to check on us we started to bitch about the lights and he promised to bring in an electrician the next day. We were appropriately gracious but still pessimism loomed, as we all knew that in wartime plenty of things just couldn’t be fixed.