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

by Matthew Schrier

  “I’ll tell my side.”

  “Which is what?”

  “You’re endangering my life.”

  “I’m trying to save your life!” I said, exasperated. “You know what? Fuck you, go ahead, knock!”

  And as I made a move to step toward the window, he did just that. I couldn’t believe how easily he did it, how swiftly and loudly he banged on that door. The sound echoed up the stairs where we could hear the jihadis and they could definitely hear us. The look on Theo’s face was one of pure confidence, the look of a man who has people on his side. My heart sank as he looked me straight in the eye with his chest out, without an ounce of regret. He really was going to rat me out to the terrorists holding us.

  After a few seconds passed and there were no feet on the stairs I lunged at him, ready to smash the bucket over his head and do what I should have done a long time ago—beat him within an inch of his life, or maybe even a few inches past it, but at the last moment I stopped and fought to compose myself. If I smashed that bucket in his smug fucking face I knew he would never agree to try again. I had to calm down and win him over. First I appealed to his love for his mother.

  “Come on, Theo, don’t you wanna go home to your mother? Don’t you wanna spare her from seeing her only son get his head chopped off online?”

  But my words had absolutely no effect on him, so the second tactic I employed was trying to exploit his terrorist-sympathizing tendencies.

  “Come on, Theo! 9/11 didn’t work out the first time! It took two attempts!”

  Again I got nowhere, so as a last-ditch effort, I even tried Eminem.

  “Theo, if you had one shot—one opportunity to seize everything you’ve ever wanted in one moment would you capture it, or just let it slip?”

  Let it slip, was basically his answer. After this it didn’t take me long to realize what had to be done: I had to make him so fucking miserable that he would rather die than spend another second in that room with me . . .

  . . . It took about three hours.

  To start, I confiscated the Koran, which he loved to read almost as much as he loved sleeping.

  “Give it to me or I’m going to tell Abu Ali!” he cried. “He wants me to read it!”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said coldly. “That’s not gonna happen.”

  This got Theo about as mad as I’d seen him, and before I knew it he was standing above me and I rose to meet his aggressive stare.

  “You’re going to give me that Koran!” he yelled.

  “No, I’m not,” I said, calmly.

  He grabbed me by my wrists and shoved me into the wall with the scariest face he could muster, his nose inches from mine.

  “Get off of me,” I said.

  “I can kick your ass!”

  “I said get off me,” I repeated, still calm, but slightly louder.

  “I can kick your—”

  I didn’t let him finish the sentence. When my forehead collided with his it made a sound like the crack of one pool ball hitting another, loud enough that it could probably be heard on the other side of the door. The head butt sent him staggering backward and busted him open like a grape. Blood flowed into his eye; on his forehead was a large round gash about the size of a bullet hole.

  “Give me the Koran!” he yelled, coming at me again.

  “You want more?”

  I took him down on top of the prayer rug, but didn’t hit him again, just grabbed his wrists and pinned him. He struggled, thrashing around like a child having a tantrum.

  “Theo, calm down! Stop it!” I yelled.

  “I want that Koran!”

  No matter how hard I tried to calm him he would not stop fighting, so I threw him into a headlock and got comfortable on the prayer rug.

  “Theo, I can sit like this all night,” I said, applying some pressure.

  “Okay,” he said after a few seconds, and tapped out.

  A second after I got to my feet so did Theo. The blood was still streaming from the wound on his forehead, but he ignored it.

  “Give me the Koran,” he said.

  And he came at me again, but this time I didn’t humor him—I threw up my fists, charging him like a bull. He backed up until he was against the wall, crouched over and holding his hands in front of his face to block the punches he thought were coming. Instead I tapped his face again and again with my fingertips.

  “You see, Theo! These could be punches! You see? Now stop it! You’re not getting that Koran!”

  I left him and took a seat on my bed. Then I started to laugh. An American Jew pretending to be a German-American Christian pretending to be a Sunni Muslim, and an atheist pretending to be a Christian had just gotten into a fight over a Koran.

  Only in fucking Syria.

  Theo sat on his bed, bleeding and sulking.

  “It looks like someone shot you in your fuckin’ forehead,” I said, laughing.

  “You hit like a girl. And you’re bleeding, too,” he said.

  “No, that’s your blood, dipshit,” I said, wiping my forehead. I started back in again, continuing my verbal assault, nagging him into letting me save his life.

  I don’t even remember what I was saying when he finally capitulated.

  “All right!” he said, defeated. “I didn’t say I was completely turned off to the idea!”

  “Yes! Here you go,” I said, getting up and returning the Koran to him.

  “But we have to wait three days,” he added.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  “But Theo, in three days they could find the window, put someone else in here with us again, or move us—and we’re due!” I said. With the exception of the warehouse they’d always moved us every month or month and a half; we were up for a transfer any day now and he knew it.

  None of this made any difference to him. He finally had a situation that put him in control.

  “You also have to be nice to me. If you’re not nice to me, forget it.”

  This was his other condition for letting me spare him from death. I had to be nice to him too. I agreed to the three days because I saw there was no way around it. However, being nice to him turned out to be much harder.

  Over the next three days I did my best to get Theo to wake up and practice, but he refused. He was back to sleeping eighteen to twenty hours a day, and no matter how hard I tried there was nothing I could do to motivate him to get with the program. All day I would plead with him to get up and tie the rope around the window frame to get a feel for exactly what he needed to be able to accomplish physically, but he always responded either confrontationally or by offering some nonsensical reason as to why he didn’t need to prepare.

  “Come on, Theo, get up! Practice!” I said.

  “I don’t need to. I used to go spelunking.”

  “What? What the fuck is spelunking?” I said, losing my mind.

  “It’s caving. I know how to contort my body.”

  “What are you, out of your mind?” I yelled. “We’re trying to escape from a terrorist prison here! We have a lot more to worry about than getting our arm jammed between a rock and a hard place for a hundred and twenty-seven hours!”

  “I never saw that movie,” he said.

  “Ahhhh!” I screamed, gripping both sides of my head in frustration.

  He also refused to use the olive oil, or listen to me when I tried to explain why he needed to go with both arms out. I don’t know how I didn’t lose it. It wasn’t enough that I had to go first and deal with the possibility of the sniper seeing me. That I had to plan out every single detail. That I had to stay awake and monitor everything happening outside the door and the window while he slept. No—I had to deal with this bullshit, too.

  After a while I just gave up and let him sleep. It was no use trying to get through to him. He was done.

  Waiting those three days was literally a torture unlike any I had faced at the hands of al-Nusra. As the first day came and went, so did Abu Ali, without ev
er noticing the window. I stayed as active as possible, played memory with the deck of cards to keep my mind sharp, and continued to pray for my freedom and to be reunited with my family. At night, Theo would usually come out for a little while to read the Koran and play cards, and we got along pretty well for those few hours.

  “If they catch us again they’re never going to let us go,” he said, tossing out a card.

  “I know, but there’s a good chance they’re never gonna let us go anyway,” I answered.

  As we were playing on the second night, a single rifle shot rang out from the rooftop across the street. We looked at each other, knowing damn well that rifle might be there waiting for us the morning after next, but it was just another one of the grim realities we had to live with, so neither one of us said a word.

  Finally, it was the night of July twenty-eighth. By this time tomorrow, I will be a free man, I thought, and never stopped thinking it for a single second, letting it play in the background of my head like a heartbeat. As I’m sure you can imagine, it wasn’t easy getting Theo into warrior mode.

  “You ready to go home, Theo?” I’d say, “You ready, Theonidas? You ready? Zero Dark Theo! Yeah!” I would jump and pound my fist into my hand.

  From what I could tell, my efforts to convince him that he was qualified to walk around with “Bad Motherfucker” branded on his wallet actually worked. At one point in the hours leading up to the escape he wandered up to the window, staring at it.

  “It’s almost Zero Dark Thirty,” he said.

  We had both gotten so used to the idea of being killed that I don’t think either one of us was afraid of it anymore. All we were afraid of now was time, and how viciously they were certain to torture us if we got caught. During the three days we waited, I’d decided that once I made it through that window, it was either freedom or death for me. I was not going to be taken back to the transportation building alive; I made sure to have more than enough diarrhea pills to do the job if I got cornered, and just in case I had some other capsules we had been given when I got sick.

  Once it got late, we turned out the lights to wait for our breakfast. The last time I’d stared at the window all night long, envisioning myself getting out of it, but this time instead I thought of everything that had happened leading up to this moment. I thought of Ayman, Shareef, Ali, and all the other friends and brothers I had made during my captivity. I thought about Pops, who I’d lost, and before long I began to realize that what I had told the Leader that night at the warehouse was true. I was glad I had come to Syria. It really had made me a better person, a stronger person, and now I was going to use that strength to do what those bastards upstairs thought I never would—prevail.

  Once the lights were out time seemed frozen. Finally, we began to hear the jihadis moving around and knew Abu Ali would be down shortly with our last meal in captivity. When he’d left and we turned from the wall, our breakfast was laid out in front of us on a silver tray, with two cups of steaming hot tea.

  “To freedom,” I said, holding up my cup.

  As usual Theo ate like a bird and I ate like a horse, saving nothing but the olive oil and yogurt for Theo to use as lube in case he decided to follow my plan.

  When we heard the Adhan for the dawn prayer we knew the clock was running for the second and last time. In an hour and a half we would either be free, dead, or wishing they’d kill us to end the torture.

  My heart hadn’t raced when I was kidnapped, but it felt like it was punching its way through my chest as I stared up at the sky waiting for the right light to blossom out of the silence. Most of the jihadis had been done praying for a while now and the noise upstairs was at a minimum, which meant most had gone back to sleep. With the Koran opened to the dawn prayer on my pillow for Kawa to find, and all of our gear rolled up and ready to be handed out the window to me the second I was through, I watched as the sky’s tone lifted until it was just as I wanted it to be.

  “Let’s go!” I said.

  Theo was on all fours and I was up on his back getting to work on the screen. At first I removed the horizontals carefully in case I had to put the whole thing back together again, but I quickly realized that if I approached the task with that kind of mentality we were doomed to failure and started ripping out the wires like the caged beast I had become. When I had torn out enough verticals and folded the third rail backward, it snapped, just like I’d known it would. There was no way to put the window back together now and no turning back; we either got out or got fucked. I folded down the remaining verticals to cut down on the noise and then the frame was clear and we were good to go. I jumped down and went to put my foot in the rope like I had the first time, but Theo stopped me.

  “Forget the rope,” he said, cupping his hands together.

  As soon as I placed my bare foot in his hands he boosted me up with all his strength, and I carefully maneuvered my arms, head, and shoulders through the window. From beneath me Theo pushed my legs up so I could inch my way through the second opening. As I reached my arms through like Superman I pushed aside the grain bags, and before I knew it half my body was outside, but it was a tight fit. The wires that I had folded down were ripping through my tee shirt and carving cuts into my abdomen, slowing me down.

  I pulled myself out a little more but got stuck around my stomach, so I sucked it in with all my might and thrust the rest of my upper body out into the great wide open as the sky was beginning to turn gray, and just when I thought I was home free I was stuck again. It was my jeans. Half out and with my legs kicking inside, I reached in and tugged on my pants so Theo could unbutton them, but he didn’t get it so I sucked my stomach in again, reached for the button and started trying to get it open. After a second of fumbling, the fabric folded over the button and I slid right out the window in my underwear with my pants around my ankles, like a baby fresh from the womb. The first thing I did as I pulled on my pants was to look up. Above me were two huge wide-open windows with the lights on—and since the generator was humming and they didn’t waste petrol, that meant they were in there.

  I crouched down and took the clothes and shoes from Theo. Now it was his turn. The plan was no talking, but that went out the window as soon as I did.

  “Take your shirt off,” I whispered to Theo. “And go with two arms! The windows above me are open and the lights are on.”

  “No!” he snapped.

  Theo got on the bucket, put his foot through the rope, and hoisted himself up until he could place his head and one arm through the window. He didn’t take off his shirt, he didn’t use the olive oil, he didn’t go with two arms, and he wasn’t leveling himself out with the rope, but I gripped him by his wrist and pulled with all my might anyway. After about thirty seconds to a minute it was obvious that his other shoulder wasn’t fitting, and we were wasting valuable time. Finally, as I sat there exposed, he realized what I’d been trying to nail into his head for the past three days—he needed to go with both arms out.

  “Theo, get in there and take off your shirt and go with two arms!” I hissed.

  As he stripped off his shirt I thought about the olive oil but I knew we had to keep the talking to a minimum. For three days I had told him to use it if he didn’t slide through right away, and I wasn’t about to start another debate about it now with two windows open above me and a possible sniper on the roof behind me.

  When he jumped up the second time, he got both of his arms and shoulders through the window and I immediately grabbed them and started pulling as hard as I could, but he wasn’t leveling out. I placed my foot against the building and pulled until it felt like my head was going to explode. As I pulled I stared into his eyes, then up at the windows, then back into his eyes, and then right back up to the windows. I was just waiting for one of them to walk over and empty a clip out into my face.

  “You’re not fitting!” I said.

  “No, I can fit!” he cried desperately.

  The sides of Theo’s arms were streaming with blood from pu
ncture wounds from the horizontal wires that stuck out from the sides of the next window over. I was still pulling, feeling every second, over three minutes by now at least, tick by. If he had gotten up and practiced just once we would have immediately realized he wasn’t strong enough to hoist his lower body up and we could have amended the plan, but now it was too late, and after what felt like forever I stopped pulling and placed my mouth next to his ear.

  “Theo, you’re not fitting,” I whispered. “I have to go. The windows above us are open. They’re gonna hear us. I’ll get help.”

  “Come back,” he said desperately, after jumping back down into the cell.

  “I can’t come back,” I replied. “I’ll get help.”

  I sat there, waiting for him to speak as he paced. I didn’t want to be known as the American who left another American behind, but even more than that I didn’t want to be known as the American who foolishly sacrificed his life for someone who chose to sleep instead of preparing for something that nobody had ever accomplished before. Finally, Theo broke the silence.

  “Okay, go,” he said.

  After I handed him back his clothes I squeezed the size nines Theo had found in the warehouse onto my size-ten feet, shoved my hat into my pocket, checked the windows, and then took off for the open gate at the back. I ran to it crouched down, but when I hit the street I popped up and immediately started walking. A civilian was approaching me, and as we passed each other we briefly made eye contact. Once he was behind me I took off running for the corner. I knew that once I rounded that corner the worst would be behind me.

  I was free.

  ALEPPO

  JULY 29, 2013

  The first building I came across had a well-lit entrance to a staircase going up. I ducked into it and stripped off my torn shirt, replacing it with the one I had planned to tie around my head. My abdomen was all chopped up from the wires, and the clean shirt stuck to my wounds as soon as I put it on. I tied the torn shirt around my head so a flap came down over my neck, Arab-style.