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

by Matthew Schrier

  The building directly across the street from us had been completely destroyed by artillery. All that remained were three or four floors’ worth of rubble. On the side street, apartment buildings stood four or five stories and were still in good living condition—and occupied. When the electricity went on we could see several window fans spinning the hot summer air. As for the building we were in, it had a small parking lot in the rear with a tall white wall around it and an entrance at the far right with a security booth next to it.

  By the following day, not only had they not noticed the bag was moved, I’d noticed something myself: there was never a guard stationed in the back.

  On the twenty-third of July, the door opened and Abdullah was taken from the room, never to return.

  It was time to go home.

  From the moment Abdullah left I spent every conscious second planning the escape, and first up was figuring out how to remove the wires from the window. Theo wasn’t much help because he’d gone back to sleeping all day with both of his hands stuffed down his pants, which was driving me nuts, and the sight of this only made me more motivated to get the hell out of that room. After my second attempt to get the window free with the spoon failed he’d said he was out, snapping “You had your chance” before going back to sleep. His lack of interest in the planning process sometimes made me think he didn’t really want to leave at all.

  Since Theo was no longer letting me stand on his back, I took the bucket that we had been given to wash our laundry in and flipped it over to use as a stool. Unfortunately, the bucket wasn’t high enough. I needed another six- to eight-inch boost, so I folded up a few of my blankets, stacked them on the bucket, and at last stood at eye level with this sloppy, sorry excuse for a cage. As I stared at the wires, I thought of characters from movies and literature who had been in similar situations, and asked myself how they’d managed to get out of them. The characters that came most immediately to mind were the velociraptors from Jurassic Park: I remembered how they’d systematically tested the electrified wires holding them in, never touching the same spot twice, so I decided to do the same. I started by shaking each vertical wire in the window grate individually. None of them were welded in place and the tops of every one wiggled freely, while the bottoms were jammed tightly into the tiny gap in the window frame where the glass used to be. These wires were paper-clip-thin and would bend easily. Then I moved on to the horizontals, which were much thicker and harder to bend, quality steel, and found that only three of the thirteen were welded on, and only on the left side. The entire screen had simply been woven together before it was welded in these three spots and was held together by tension alone.

  As soon as I figured it out, I smiled.

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  I woke Theo up and explained that if we unwove the verticals we could bend the horizontals back and create an opening big enough to slide through. I had been watching out the window since Abdullah moved the grain bag and was absolutely certain there was never a guard stationed in the rear of the building. On some nights shots rang out from the rooftop across the street next to the bombed-out building, which meant there was a sniper stationed where—if he saw us—he would have a clean shot as soon as one of us stuck his head out the window. Because of this, and since it was my plan, I volunteered to go first—which Theo had no problem agreeing to.

  When I suggested that we split up once we were out for our own safety, Theo was all for it. It was obvious he wanted to get away from me just as much as I did from him. Since he wouldn’t be with me, I had to get a head start on learning the Arabic I’d need to communicate once I was free. The phrases I needed were simple: Please help me! I was kidnapped by criminals! I’m a Canadian! Where’s the Free Syrian Army? The rest I knew. I figured it was safer to say I was kidnapped by criminals—if they knew I’d been held by al-Nusra, whatever FSA group I managed to link up with might get scared enough to give me back.

  Besides getting the wires off, the most crucial piece was timing. There was never really a safe time. Our best bet for getting out without being seen was to do it under the cover of darkness, but we both knew we couldn’t walk around Aleppo at night without getting either shot or snatched all over again. So we had to get out of the window while it was still dark, but minutes before sunrise. During a normal month a pre-sunrise escape would be almost as dangerous as any other time because everyone wakes up so early to pray and many stay awake after that. But luckily, this wasn’t a normal month: this was Ramadan—and during Ramadan, the dawn prayer marked the beginning of a fourteen-hour fast. Instead of staying up after they were done praying, during Ramadan the majority of the jihadis went right back to sleep, because nobody wanted to be up for fourteen hours in the Syrian heat without being able to eat or even drink water.

  This meant that the dawn prayer would be the fixed point our entire escape would revolve around. Abu Ali would come down with our breakfast early in the morning as usual so that we could eat before prayer, and he wouldn’t return until evening when he brought our dinner. Meaning if we got out, we would have a fourteen-hour head start before anyone even knew we were gone.

  Theo and I agreed that we could get out by unweaving the vertical wires just down to the “third rail,” which was what I called the lowest welded horizontal wire, then folding the verticals down over it and sliding out the top. The verticals would remain held in place by the remaining horizontal and where they were jammed into the bottom of the frame, which meant I could work on unweaving them for a day or so before we planned to leave, folding them back up so that nobody would notice at a glance.

  The only problem now was how to get Theo level with the window so I could pull him out after I was through. I got the idea of making a rope out of our tee shirts to tie around the iron window frame, leaving a loop at the other end for his foot. Theo could then step into the loop while on the bucket, put his head, arms, and shoulders through the window frame, and then use the rope to hoist the bottom half of his body up so that it was horizontal with the window, while I pulled.

  Theo was slightly thicker than me, and as a fail-safe in case he wasn’t gliding through the window with ease I figured we needed some kind of lube for his chest and arms, and I knew exactly where to find it. For Ramadan Abu Ali prepared a beautiful feast for us every morning before prayer. It usually included a bowl filled with olives that he would pour in from a jar. Naturally, along with the olives the bowl would fill up with olive oil, so I began to transfer this to one of our chai cups, which I stashed in the bathroom. When I told Theo about the oil, he rolled his eyes and accused me of “overthinking everything.” The mechanics of the escape sounded relatively straightforward, and if the window had been just a few inches taller, getting through would have been the easy part. As it was, it would take preparation, strength, and agility, especially for Theo, who would have no one pushing him, and I was the only one preparing. When I tried to get him to practice, or even just make sure his shoulders actually fit through the window, I always got the same answer: “Shut up.”

  I started unweaving the vertical wires the day after Abdullah left, two days before we planned to leave. Theo got on his hands and knees, and I stood on his back and got to work. I could have used the bucket but Theo needed a sense of purpose, and this gave it to him. The first wire snapped from being bent back and forth again and again as I wove it downward, and I realized that I’d have to undo the grate with as few bends as possible, visualizing how I would bend and pull each wire before doing so. Luckily, this worked, and the first wire I snapped was also the last I snapped. Unfortunately, this meant it would take a lot longer than I’d expected.

  “How you doin’?” Theo kept asking from under me. “Where are you?”

  “Shut the fuck up already!” I yelled down.

  “All right, get off me! I’m not helping if you’re going to talk to me like that! You have to be nice to me or forget it!”

  He was dead serious, too—from the second we’d decided to escape h
e threatened to keep us both there anytime he didn’t like my attitude or I insulted him, which was about every eight seconds.

  By nightfall, the day after Abdullah left us, all the wires were unraveled and ready to go. All we had to do was fold down the screen, help each other out the window, and we were home free.

  The day before the escape I’d figured it was worth a shot to ask Abu Ali for a couple of razors—after all, he had given us everything else we had asked for. I’d said I wanted them so that we could shave our faces, and after he’d dropped our food that evening I turned and saw two yellow disposable razors on the prayer rug. There was absolutely no way we could shave our long, thick beards with those blades, but luckily I had no intention of using them to shave my face.

  After dinner that night, it was time to put those razors to good use. Since we were in Syria, shaving our faces wasn’t exactly going to help us blend in, but I wanted to change my appearance however I could for when the hounds inevitably came hunting. Because I was always facing the wall, the only part of me our captors knew was the back of my head, so I opted to shave that so I wouldn’t quite match whatever description went out for me. It was a good idea, but I overestimated the power of those razors—before I was halfway finished both blades were so dull I had to press them extra hard against the back of my skull to get them to work. By the end I had dozens of tiny cuts all over my head, but eventually I finished the job and walked out of the bathroom, with my head still dripping wet.

  “The horror! The horror!” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

  Theo didn’t get it.

  After Abu Ali supplied us with paper and a pen the first thing I did was make a deck of cards, so to keep our minds occupied we played Crazy Eights, and for once we seemed to get along without even trying. When we weren’t playing and he was awake, Theo sat against the wall, reading the Koran.

  “I just got to the dawn prayer,” he said.

  “Read it.”

  “Lord of this day of judgment. You alone do we worship and you alone do we ask for help. Lead us along the straight path, the path of those upon whom You have bestowed Your favors, not those who incurred Your wrath, nor of those who went astray!”

  I had never heard anything more appropriate. It seemed like fate—and so before my departure I left the Koran on my pillow, opened to the dawn prayer, for Kawa to find.

  “Don’t fuck with the Koran,” Theo said, warningly.

  “No, I’m fuckin’ with it,” I replied.

  This was the perfect touch, almost poetic: a fuck you to al-Nusra from their precious Americans.

  It was a long night. Theo insisted on making the rope; we ripped almost all of our extra tee shirts into long thin strips and sat for two hours braiding, Theo then tying the pieces together. After an hour I volunteered to take over but he refused. Around midnight we turned out the lights so it would look like we were sleeping, just in case anyone came down to check on us.

  I sat in the darkness and thought about one thing. I didn’t think about my mother, my friends, or my home—I thought of nothing but getting through that window.

  As the hours wound on, Theo and I were running back and forth to the toilet, sick with nerves. Upstairs, it was quiet. Finally, we began to hear the sounds of men moving around and knew that breakfast would be coming; soon, we heard Abu Ali heading down the stairs.

  When the door opened, Theo and I were staring at the wall as usual after hearing his warning knock. From Abu Ali’s perspective, the only thing that was different was my head—I’d tied the white cloth Obeida had used to blindfold me over it like a bandana so he wouldn’t know I’d shaved it. We said good morning like we always did and within a minute he was back outside, locking the door behind him. He hadn’t noticed the window, so we were good to go.

  Abu Ali had hooked us up with hot tea and the usual massive Ramadan breakfast of champions, and I stuffed my face like I would have on any normal day, eating most of Theo’s share because he wasn’t hungry. Then I hit the lights and we began to prep the room for the escape. When everything was in place we sat in silence, waiting for the Adhan to blare out from every mosque in the city for the dawn prayer, which would mean the countdown was officially on.

  Once I’d figured out how to free up the window I spent every morning staring at the sky, studying the light so I could time everything just perfectly. We needed to get out that window ten minutes before daylight to avoid being seen by anyone who happened to look down from the apartment buildings or the roof. In a way it was the perfect job for me—I’d been a film student and a photographer, and both mediums boil down to the same thing: the study and capture of light. During one of these study sessions, Theo walked up behind me.

  “Maybe they’ll let us go tomorrow,” he said.

  “I don’t want them to let us go anymore,” I’d replied. “I wanna escape.”

  Now, as the Adhan echoed outside, we could hear all the jihadis in the building running up the stairs to pray. All we had to do now was wait for them to finish praying and go to sleep, and then for the right light in the sky.

  “We’re goin’ home, Theo,” I said. “We’re goin’ home.”

  As I looked up I could tell that the sky was about to start changing color. It was time to get to work.

  Theo got down on all fours and I jumped up and removed the ten horizontal wires that weren’t welded on and tossed them aside. Once these were out of the way, I bent down all of the verticals. Lastly, I grabbed the top two thick horizontals, bending them back behind the frame.

  “Shit!” I said. “They both snapped off!”

  There was nothing to do about it now; I jumped down. Theo tied the rope to the frame and I laid a blanket that had been folded to the exact width of the windowsill over the wires. We grabbed the few items we’d each chosen to take: I had my hat, slippers, and the mesbahah that Ayman had given me, along with an extra tee shirt to tie around my head Arab-style to help me blend in. Theo had his sneakers and toothbrush.

  For some reason, instead of boosting me up Theo insisted that I use the rope for myself as well, saying “I don’t want to help you until I have to.” I put my foot through the loop; as soon as I put my weight on it, the loop tore in half.

  “Shit!” I said.

  “Forget the rope! Just go!”

  There was no time to argue—Theo locked his hands together and hoisted me up like a cheerleader, and I maneuvered my arm, head, and shoulders through the interior frame with Theo pushing from beneath. The next thing to go wrong was the blanket—it was too thick and got in the way, so I tossed it onto the floor. Then, with one arm extended in front of me and the other pinned to my side, I slowly began to make my way through the outside frame of the window, where the wires had been. I got one arm through. Then I got my head out. And then, with Theo pushing as hard as he could, I found myself wedged at the shoulder, unmoving, between the third rail and the frame. As I tried to force my way through, pushing off of Theo’s hands with all my strength, I realized that if I wasn’t fitting, Theo never would, and I began to panic.

  “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!” I cried out in a whisper.

  By the time I got back down I was soaked with perspiration. The wires were a mess and the sun was starting to rise. If somebody came in or walked by and saw this we would be tortured until we were begging for death. For a full minute I paced back and forth, trying to come up with a solution as the sweat poured down my head.

  “Get down,” I said. “I have to put it back together.”

  Somehow, I managed to rig it so it looked like it had before. I folded the verticals back up and wedged the tops of them tightly against the roof of the frame, then slid the horizontals through. When it was as good as it was going to get I hopped down and had Theo examine it. We put the rest of the room back in order, and then we both lay down on our beds. I hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours and was exhausted, not to mention devastated. We had been certain we could both fit through with the third rail still in place, but w
ere both wrong. Now we had a big problem on our hands as soon as someone inspected the room, which was bound to happen sooner or later.

  I slept, kind of. Really, I drifted off into an uneasy doze, thinking about the window and the wires, and my shoulder stuck against the frame. When I woke up, with daylight illuminating the room, I knew what we had to do.

  “We have to remove the third rail,” I told Theo. “We have to remove the third rail and go with two arms extended like Superman, so our shoulders don’t get in the way.”

  Theo didn’t respond. He just lay in his usual position with his shirt over his eyes to block out the sun. I repeated myself, louder.

  “Okay,” he said, without moving.

  “All right!”

  All day I did laps and psyched myself up. When Theo finally woke, it was night.

  “Yo, you ready to go?” I asked enthusiastically.

  “No, I’m not following you anymore,” he snapped. “You don’t have the athletic ability or physical strength to pull it off.”

  “But you said this morning you would go!”

  “I just said that so you’d shut up and let me sleep.”

  I was livid. I’d spent all day mentally preparing myself to risk death and this pussy says he lied to me so he could sleep!

  “Okay, fuck you, you can stay here then,” I said, heading into the bathroom.

  When I came out I had the laundry bucket in my hands so I could use it instead of Theo as my stepping stool.

  “You do it and I’m going to knock on the door,” he said.

  “What? You’re gonna tell al-Qaeda on me? What kind of an American are you? What are you gonna tell people when we get home?”