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

by Matthew Schrier

  We all hugged to celebrate, and while doing so I noticed over the Moroccan’s shoulder that the wires covering one of the windows had been shoddily repaired, but since the Moroccan’s size meant only two out of three of us could fit through the window, I figured I was better off not even bringing up the topic of escape.

  After a few hours one of the guards came by to drop off several blankets, and we made up our beds. The Moroccan got the mattress and placed it in a corner. I took his extra blanket to use as a pillow and made my bed across the room from him, in the opposite corner. Instead of placing his bed in the center Theo laid his blanket directly next to the mattress, as if making it an extension of the bed, so they could sleep side by side.

  The bathroom was off to the left when you entered, and had been created by breaking through the concrete wall. The space was divided by a partition of cinder blocks piled about seven feet high, with your average white ceramic sink on one side and on the other a hose and a squat toilet in the tile floor. When I felt on top of the blocks I found a small piece of soap. The ground under the sink was unfinished and the pipes leaked; between that and the extra water from the toilet hose there was a constant puddle underfoot.

  One important difference in this jail we wouldn’t notice right away: Turning to the wall whenever someone entered the room was standard protocol everywhere, but usually this rule relaxed after a few days once the guards got used to us seeing their faces. Here, this didn’t happen. We had to keep our foreheads pinned to the wall while sitting on our beds without fail—we were never given permission to turn. This seemed like another hopeful sign. If they didn’t want us to see them they definitely didn’t plan on killing us, or so we told ourselves.

  The door that divided us from freedom was an iron one and huge—it was too big for the original frame, and pieces of the wall had been bashed off to make it fit. All this bashing had left a gap about two inches wide between the door and the jagged concrete on one side, giving us a clear view of the hallway. When I looked I saw a very limited space and only one other cell to the right of us, and broken broomsticks and cables all over the floor for those who were deemed worthy of torture.

  High on the far wall of our cell were four typical basement windows. They were about ten inches from top to bottom, and the four of them spanned the entire length of the wall. As usual, packed-out grain bags sat on the ground outside them, blocking our view. The two windows in the middle were intact, and opened inward. The other two, those to the far right and left, were broken, with only a shard or two of glass left sticking out of the frame. Beyond the frames were sills a little less than a foot wide, covered in dirt and broken glass, and beyond these, securing us in our prison, were strong metal wires running vertically and horizontally to create a grid, with squares each slightly smaller than a stamp. These wires were so strong they may as well have been bars—but unfortunately for the terrorists they weren’t bars, they were wires, and wires can be cut. And looking at the wires in front of the window under which I slept, anybody could tell that once upon a time that was exactly what had happened.

  Our keeper’s name was Abu Ali, but apart from the name he had nothing in common with the Abu Ali who’d delighted in tormenting us at the villa. This Abu Ali was soft-spoken and respectful; our first clue to his character came one night early on, when the three of us were hungry.

  “I’m gonna knock on the door and ask for more food,” I said.

  “Don’t do it,” warned the Moroccan.

  I asked Theo what he thought and he said I should knock, so with the majority ruling I began to pound on the door in short intervals, loudly enough to be heard upstairs. After my first round was ignored I started up again—and this time got a response in Arabic.

  “What’d he say?” I asked the Moroccan.

  He told me someone had said he was coming, so I ran back to my bed and assumed the position. After a few minutes the door opened and Abu Ali entered.

  “Who knocked on the door?” he asked.

  “He did!” cried Theo, pointing at me before I could say a word.

  I couldn’t believe it. He’d encouraged me to knock hoping I would be punished, making this the second time my fellow American had tried to get me beaten by the guards.

  “Food, please,” I said in Arabic, still facing the wall.

  Abu Ali answered my request with a long monologue that I didn’t understand, but it didn’t sound angry or threatening. When he left, the Moroccan explained that Abu Ali had said we were his guests, and that if we were ever hungry, all we had to do was knock. Not too long after that, three pieces of bread were delivered to us, along with a hot dish of eggs and tomatoes.

  At the warehouse I’d had weights and plenty of room to distance myself from these two, but now I couldn’t get more than a few feet away from them. I would have thought we’d be at each other’s throats, but it wasn’t so bad, mostly because Abu Ali supplied us with everything we asked for: pens and paper, a two-thousand-page Koran in English, soap, detergent, a laundry bucket, toothbrush, and even a book to teach Theo how to write in Arabic. He may have been a jihadi, but he was a good man, and a good Muslim. In the early days we’d often hear him say the same thing as he entered the cell, in a heaved sigh:

  “God, what are we doing?”

  This didn’t mean Theo couldn’t piss him off. Once, Abu Ali came in to drop off our food, and after the usual greeting while we all faced the wall, he suddenly started flipping out on Theo for what seemed like no reason. After he left I looked over to the Moroccan for an explanation. It was Theo’s ass crack—it had been staring Abu Ali in the face, which was haram.

  “What are you, a little kid?” the Moroccan asked him. “We have to tell you to pull up your pants?”

  I just shook my head.

  We didn’t know what the argument was about or who’d started it, only that it quickly spiraled out of control.

  “We don’t care!” yelled a jihadi somewhere upstairs. “We’re here to die!”

  The Moroccan stood by the door with his ear to the gap, translating as Theo and I listened, not missing a syllable. Whoever was flipping out up there was definitely not a member of the group holding us—nor was he alone or intimidated in any way.

  “They’re Egyptians,” said the Moroccan. “They’re speaking straight Arabic, like me.”

  After a few more minutes of arguing the yelling stopped, and the Moroccan returned to his bed. Five minutes after that, all hell broke loose. There was no short spray from an AK-47 setting it off, just a huge coordinated concentration of firepower at the rear of the building—where we were. Seconds later the gunshots doubled as our holders began to return fire.

  Boom! Boom!

  “Shit!” I yelled. “They’re tossing grenades!”

  The second blast sounded like it hadn’t fallen far from our windows.

  “Let’s go in the bathroom,” I said, standing.

  The Moroccan immediately got up as well, but Theo just sat there.

  “No,” he said. “Why?”

  I explained that if one of those grenades landed next to the windows it was going to turn whatever was in the grain bags into a hundred thousand little BBs shooting our way, not to mention cost us some of our hearing. A few seconds later the three of us were all crammed into the bathroom as the fighting continued outside. Abdelatif’s face was a mask of fear.

  “Allah Akbar!” a jihadi screamed as the fighting died down.

  “Someone’s dead,” said the Moroccan.

  A few moments later we heard the Adhan, and the most peculiar thing happened: the jihadis all split so they could go and pray. One second they were outside our window killing each other, and the next they were carting off their dead because it was time to kneel.

  On the night of July sixteenth, a group of jihadis trooped down the stairs and gathered outside our door. We never received visitors this late, and the tension in the air as we turned to face the wall was almost tangible; something unholy was about to happen.
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br />   “There’s a lot of people out there,” the Moroccan whispered, sounding concerned.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  The door opened and several men entered the cell. One walked straight up to the Moroccan.

  “What’s your name, Sheikh?” the man asked.

  “Abdelatif,” the Moroccan answered reluctantly.

  They told him to stand and follow them out of the room. As they all left, one of the men locked the door behind them. Alone, Theo and I sat and looked at each other in shock.

  As one hour turned into two and two into three, it soon became apparent that the Moroccan was not coming back. It was surreal to finally be rid of this beast of a man after spending almost every second in his company for the past four months. I remembered praying many times for our captors to either let him go or kill him already, just to make my life a little easier. Now he was gone . . . all 230 pounds of him, and once I realized this I looked at Theo and pointed to the grate with the shoddy repair job.

  “Do you think you could get out that window?” I asked.

  His answer was yes.

  In 1995 I was sixteen years old, but had packed what seemed then like a lifetime of suffering into my decade and a half. I lived in Deer Park out on Long Island with my mother, who held down two jobs to pay for our modest two-bedroom apartment that was built into the side of a house where the garage used to be. She was an extremely loving and hard-working woman who was accustomed to getting weekly phone calls at work thanks to whatever nonsense I had gotten myself into at school. I was far from dumb but never much of a student, and my life mainly revolved around raves, clubs, fighting, and partying until I couldn’t find the fucking door.

  Most of my friends came up the same way as I did or worse, and by my sophomore year we were ready to graduate from smoking pot and dropping ecstasy to something much worse. Our reign of terror began on a steel-gray day, after I’d beeped my friends to pick me up early from school. We found ourselves driving through a wealthy town nearby, passing one big house after another, all with empty driveways. Nobody was talking as the radio played.

  “Yo, let’s rob a house,” I said.

  And that was all it took. Within a few weeks we’d hit so many houses I’d lost count, and I decided to bow out before we got caught. My friends, on the other hand, were just getting started, and by the time they discovered they weren’t cut out to be career burglars it was too late. By then the cops had several accurate descriptions of the car, and one day after school my friends got pulled over and that was that.

  Unfortunately, my absence wouldn’t keep me out of trouble. My friend driving the car had decided to drop a few tabs of acid earlier that day, and it was just my luck that they started to kick in right before his interrogation. He gave a full confession, and even spelled my last name for the detectives.

  Since it was my first offense, the judge let me off easy, with sixty days of county time—two-thirds of which I served in Riverhead’s maximum security prison on the east end of Long Island. When I walked onto the minor tier it didn’t take long to realize I didn’t stand a chance against most of the brothers there in a fight. The majority of them looked like grown men, while I don’t even think I had my sideburns in yet, and I knew my survival would come down to balls and making people like me, the second being impossible without the first. It was a valuable experience, living with murderers and violent offenders and actually becoming close with some of them. I would later apply the same logic to my interactions with the emirs and guards, and it would work just as well on them. It’s funny—in America the criminals are the ones you do your time with, but in Syria they’re the ones who run the prisons.

  After someone who was supposed to be a close friend ratted me out, I had learned the hard way to be careful who to trust in life, but I’d also learned how to break into places successfully, which meant that if I really applied myself I could learn how to break out of them as well.

  Since his last brilliant idea for an escape got us tortured and starved for over a month, this time Theo let me do the planning.

  The key, obviously, was finding a way to exploit the piss-poor job the welder had done when fixing the grate on the window. It was too high for me to inspect, so Theo got on all fours and I stepped onto his back so it was at eye level. The grate had twenty-three vertical wires woven around thirteen thicker wires going horizontally, and at a glance you couldn’t even tell it was welded on at all. I thought I might be able to just yank it off, but it didn’t budge. I tried again, summoning all my strength and thinking about my poor old mother, and got the same results—nothing.

  “Oh well, there goes that idea,” said Theo, sounding relieved.

  “No, fuck that!” I said, to let him know I was just getting started.

  When they fed us I hid one of the metal spoons in the bathroom, and later I tried to break the bond of the weld by prying it with the handle.

  “Is it working? Is it working?” Theo kept asking as I stood on his back.

  “Would you shut the fuck up? I’ll let you know if it works!”

  He started bitching at me to get off him, saying that I had better be nicer or he wasn’t going to help us escape. How serious he was I would have to wait to find out, because a 285-pound wrench was about to be thrown into my spokes before I even got a chance to pedal.

  I think his name was Abdullah, though to be perfectly honest I’m not sure that’s right. What I do remember is that the door opened, and when it shut a second later, Abdullah was locked inside. At first I thought he was a member of the organization coming to interrogate us, but in fact he was a dentist, and one of the sweetest men I met during my time in Syria. He was very tall, towering above me with a huge belly that made him look pregnant. He’d been arrested by Jabhat al-Nusra after somebody in his town made a bogus complaint against him about some stolen dental office equipment.

  It didn’t take Theo more than a split second to crouch down next to our new cellmate like a buzzard and start trying to win him over as an ally. The question I got from Abdullah after his first exchange with Theo in Arabic actually amused me.

  “Why do you beat him?” he asked me in English, disgusted.

  “Because he asks for it,” I answered, without shame.

  I can just imagine what kind of bullshit Theo fed him. Where I come from, when a man slaps a woman he’s beating her, but when a man slaps another man it’s just a slap. He probably made me sound like Ike Turner.

  Abdullah had a wife and four little girls that he had not been permitted to call. The pain of being away from his family and not knowing how long it would be before he could see them again ripped him apart—and the fact that this was happening during Ramadan, which was now in full swing, made it even worse. Sometimes he’d sit on his bed weeping, wiping the tears away out of embarrassment as soon as they left his eyes.

  Because Abdullah was older we gave him the mattress, though he pretended not to want it. He was local, from Aleppo, and knew pretty much exactly where we were, if not the building we were in. We were in the Sh’ar district, about a thousand yards from the hospital where we’d first been kept. When I asked him which direction the hospital was he pointed northwest, which meant if I ever did get out of the window, I would have to go south. It was easy to figure out directions because the guards always let us know which way Mecca was so that we could face it for prayer. At one point, they threw a mechanic from the other cell in with us for about half an hour, and it was through him that we found out exactly where we were: the transportation building, which was kind of like the Syrian DMV.

  After I asked Abdullah the directions of a few other landmarks in the area I was familiar with, I had him draw me a map and sketch out who controlled what territory. These days, the city was pretty much split in half between the rebels and the regime.

  Abdullah’s tears were pitiful, but they also suggested that he would have a newfound hatred for Jabhat al-Nusra after he was released, so I decided to let him in on the escape to see
if we could recruit him to pick us up once we were out. It was risky, but with no money and no passport it didn’t hurt to have a friend, and I knew there was no way they were going to keep this guy for more than a few days.

  Abdullah didn’t hide the fact that he didn’t think we had a chance in hell of escaping, but he said if we managed to pull it off he would try to help, and gave us his cell phone number. Once I’d thought about it, though, I decided the number was useless. If he wasn’t willing to be waiting somewhere in a car for us the day after his release, then we couldn’t trust him enough to call, either. There was no way this crybaby was going to risk his life and that of his family to help a couple of Americans. If we got out and used that number, there was a good chance we’d find some al-Nusra boys waiting for us wherever we went next.

  No. If I got out that window, I was on my own.

  Abdullah wrote so many letters to the emir detailing his references and all the free dental work he’d done for the al-Nusra fighters controlling his neighborhood that Abu Ali kept having to bring him more paper. When he didn’t get a response, what he got was desperate, and desperate men in desperate times do desperate things without thinking or because they just don’t know better. In Abdullah’s case, this meant grabbing our broom and shoving the broken end of the stick through the flawed wires, poking at one of the grain bags blocking our window. His plan was to flag down a civilian and pass him a note to take to his family. I bugged out and grabbed the broom handle, and as I was yelling at him to stop he managed to push one of the bags over slightly, enough to give us a clear view of almost everything outside our window. This was not good. Our guards probably wouldn’t notice during the day but I was sure they would at night, when the lights were on. For the rest of the day I just walked around in circles, waiting for the sun to set. If they noticed we were in deep shit, but then again if they didn’t we had just improved our odds of escaping, because now I could monitor everything going on outside.