The Dawn Prayer[Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison] Read online

  The whole encounter probably took less than a minute. A second later we started moving and Abu Mohammad shouted something in Arabic, and one of the jihadis yelled something right back, louder. I don’t know what he said, but it shut Abu Mohammad up real quick. A few minutes later they pulled over and took him out. That was the last time I ever saw him.

  THE HOSPITAL

  By the time we reached our destination about fifteen minutes later, my back was really starting to hurt from being hunched over for so long. From what I could see out of the bottom of my cap when I was taken from the Jeep, a crowd of people had assembled as if they were expecting me, many of them children, judging by the size of their feet. Two men, one on each side, led me into a building and down a staircase. When we reached the bottom, we made our way along a hallway to a door where one of the men said something in Arabic and pointed to my sneakers; they seemed to know I could see a little from under my makeshift blindfold. I took off my shoes and was marched inside and placed in a chair in front of a desk. There were several people in the room. One of them walked over with my iPhone, lifted my cap slightly, and made me punch in the password and write it on a piece of paper.

  I had a feeling I’d been taken by Jabhat al-Nusra, more commonly known in the West as the al-Nusra Front, but I wasn’t sure, being that there were so many gangs and crooked FSA militias littered throughout the country, so to try to get an idea of who had me, I threw out a question that I knew would yield a clue:

  “Anyone got a cigarette?”

  “No, there is no smoking.”

  This was the first sign that I was with fanatics, being that they consider smoking a sin while 99 percent of the FSA smokes like chimneys.

  “Would you like some tea?” a man asked.

  “Some tea?” I said, confused.

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  A few seconds later a small glass, filled to the brim, was placed in my hand.

  “Be very careful,” the man said. “It’s hot.”

  As I sat there sipping the tea, I decided I needed to keep myself from panicking and use whatever time I had wisely, to come up with a strategy. The conclusion I came to was that I had to make these guys like me, because people don’t usually torture those they like. But how does an American make Islamic extremists like him? Well, the next conclusion I came to was that I had to make them laugh.

  Almost as soon as I’d formulated this approach, a man sat beside me and lifted my cap. I shut my eyes tight so he wouldn’t think I’d been peeking, but after a few moments I realized he wanted me to look, and I slowly opened them again. Sitting before me was a commanding figure in his early thirties, maybe a couple of years younger than me. He had a long thin beard and would later introduce himself as General Mohammad. He smiled at me, but it wasn’t a smile that said Welcome!—it was more of a grin that said I gotcha! He covered my eyes again. I could tell that he was someone important, and sensing that he was approachable I decided to engage him.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  A few seconds passed. “Nahhhh,” he said.

  A moment of silence, and then—

  “Woo-hoo! Happy New Year!” I yelled, one fist raised triumphantly over my head. I let out a slight laugh to show that I wasn’t scared and gave him a friendly tap on the shoulder. “You guys really had me worried there for a second!”

  I’d tilted my head back when I yelled so I could gauge his reaction from under my cap and it was definitely a positive one: jumping back, raising his brow, and laughing. This unexpected display by their new prisoner caught the attention of everyone present, and the two jihadis on the other side of the room asked him impatiently to translate. He did so, and they started to laugh as well.

  Good job, Matt, I thought, you broke the ice! Keep it goin’! Keep it goin’!

  “What is your name?” asked General Mohammad enthusiastically.

  “Matthew,” I said.

  I had stopped saying Matt a while ago because it means “dead” in Arabic.

  “No, now you are Jumu’ah. Forget Matthew. ‘Jumu’ah’ means Friday, a holiday. Do you like it?”

  “Yeah, sure, who doesn’t love Friday? Listen, what’s going on here? Why did you guys take me? I mean, I’m on your side! I hate the regime.”

  “My English no that good, Jumu’ah, but wait—Wait.”

  A few seconds later a translator appeared to clear that problem right up and begin my interrogation. His name was Abdullah and his English was immaculate.

  “How are you?” he asked after he sat down in a chair across from me.

  “I’ve been better,” I said.

  “Keep your head down.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Now I am going to ask you some questions. You answer them very honestly or else you will be very sorry, okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who are you, and what are you doing in Syria?”

  “My name is Matthew Schrier and I’m a freelance photographer. I was invited here.”

  “By who?”

  “By my friend Ahmed, who’s a Syrian refugee in Kilis, and my friend Majed, in Hraytan.”

  “I see. Do you speak Arabic?”

  “No, just a few words and phrases.”

  “Like what?”

  “Uh, ana isme Matthew. Ana moswer. Ana Ameriki. Ana osla.”

  The last sentence made everyone laugh. I’d said, “My name is Matthew. I’m a photographer. I’m American. I’m bald.”

  “What is your background?”

  “My background?”

  “Yes, your background.”

  “Well, I’m thirty-four years old and I was born and raised in New York—”

  “No, that is not what I am asking. What is your religion? What are your parents?”

  “I’m a Christian and my great-grandparents were all German.”

  An older jihadi seemed to like this answer and reached over to give me a pat on the back.

  “Ah, German!” he said.

  Like being German is something to be so proud of, I thought. I’d figured my captors would love that answer, for obvious reasons. Actually I am of mostly Russian descent—and 100 percent Jewish, a detail that if discovered I knew would probably lead to me being decapitated online, Daniel Pearl–style, for all the world to see.

  “Look, what do you guys want from me, man?” I said impatiently. “I didn’t do anything to you and I’m not worth shit.”

  “Don’t curse. We have information that there are CIA agents in the area,” replied Abdullah.

  “CIA? You think I’m CIA? Look at me, my socks don’t even match,” I said, laughing. “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?”

  “Please don’t use foul language,” said Abdullah, firmly.

  “Sorry, it’s just the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Well, we have to investigate you. We have to know who you are.”

  “Well, then bring me my phone and I’ll give you the numbers of all my friends in Syria and Turkey, and bring me my cameras and let me show you my photos. I was in Karm al-Jabal and outside Air Force Intelligence. The fuckin’ regime almost blew me away for those pictures.”

  “Don’t curse!”

  “Sorry, sorry,” I said, as sincerely as possible.

  This obsession with cursing was a second sign that I was with fanatics. They hate profanity and consider it haram—a sin.

  “So if everything I say checks out, are you gonna let me go?” I asked.

  “Yes, if you are telling the truth we will let you go.”

  “All right.”

  For the next ten minutes or so I answered questions about who I knew, where I had been, and where my funding came from. He didn’t seem all that surprised when I told him I’d funded the trip myself with my savings. Toward the end of the conversation, Abdullah told me to raise my head and I did.

  “Now, take the cap from your eyes,�
� he said.

  “No, I’m cool, man. I don’t have to see your faces.”

  “I wasn’t asking.”

  “Look, I don’t wanna see you guys. Just make your calls, do your investigation, and then let me go. That’s the deal, right?”

  Mohammad reached over and lifted the cap for me, but my eyes remained closed. After a second I slowly opened them and got my first look at Abdullah. I was shocked. He was young and very good-looking, with pale skin; he had dark, wavy hair, and a neatly shaped goatee. I was expecting a Salafi, one of those ugly bearded maniacs.

  “Do you know who Jabhat al-Nusra are?” he asked me.

  And that was the third sign that I was with not only fanatics, but the fanatics—al-Qaeda in Syria.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Who are they?”

  “They are the fiercest warriors in this war and the reason the opposition has been able to take on the regime so successfully. They are always at the front of the most dangerous battles and have no fear of death. I know that my government has labeled them a terrorist organization even though they have never committed one terrorist act or—”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Abdullah said, smelling the bullshit on my breath. “We are going to search you now and put you in your room.”

  “But what about my pictures? They’ll prove everything I just said to you. Let me show them to you, come on, please?”

  “In time.”

  I remember sitting there for a little while longer, waiting, while my captors put on a surreal kind of show-and-tell. I saw my first suicide belt: This little nerdy guy walked over wearing one and displayed it for me. It was pin-striped—talk about going out in style. Then Mohammad showed me this giant gun, one I think I had seen in some SWAT scene in a movie once.

  “American! American!” he said proudly, wearing a huge smile.

  “It’s very nice,” I said, not sure how to respond to this.

  Two kids, teenagers, came in and started cleaning out my pockets. They took my passport and wallet with my credit cards in it. One of them was wearing green scrubs, which was the first detail suggesting the building I was in might once have been a hospital. After my pockets were emptied, my eyes were covered again and I was led out, where I was allowed to put my sneakers back on and taken down the hallway and into another room. Abdullah, Mohammad, and a third jihadi called Sheikh Ali followed me in, and Abdullah gave me permission to uncover my eyes. The room was fairly large, and empty except for two wool blankets on the tile floor and a two-liter Pepsi bottle filled with water.

  “Whenever you hear the door opening you will stand and put your face to the wall, understand?”

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  “Goodbye, Jumu’ah,” said Mohammad as they left. The door shut and locked behind them.

  “What the fuck have you gotten yourself into now, Matthew?” I said, looking around. “You might be here for a long time.”

  The cell was about twenty-two feet long and twelve feet wide. It had light-pink walls with markings all over them from previous prisoners. None of the writing scratched into the paint was in English, which led me to conclude I was the first of my kind to stay there. The ceilings were raised, about fifteen feet high, and there was one window too far up to see out of, which had nevertheless been blocked with a wooden door propped against it from the outside. It was dim—and there was nothing I could do about that, because the light switch had been ripped out, and all the wires except one along with it.

  I walked over to the blankets, took off my black Jordans, and sat down. The water in the Pepsi bottle was ice-cold, but that was it for hospitality. The floor looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since peacetime. Within a few seconds I was back in my kicks, pacing back and forth. I was concerned, of course, but not scared: I was sure as shit not in the CIA, and there were people from Kilis to Aleppo to Amman who would vouch for me and the fact that I’d been invited to Syria. I decided to remain calm and not worry for two days, which was more than enough time for the jihadis to check my story. I was pretty sure that if I was there for longer than that, there was no telling when I might be released, if I was released at all.

  A few hours had gone by when I heard a key turn in the door and immediately put my forehead to the wall.

  “You may turn around,” said Abdullah’s voice.

  Mohammad was by his side.

  “How are you, Jumu’ah?” Mohammad asked.

  “Never better,” I said.

  “Do you need anything?”

  “Yeah, a cigarette.”

  “No,” said Abdullah.

  “Then how about a piss bottle?”

  Abdullah translated and Mohammad made a face that said, Why not? This tipped me off that he was the one in charge.

  “Okay,” said Abdullah.

  “Thank you. Have you called any of my people yet?”

  “In time,” Abdullah replied.

  “You want another blanket?” asked Mohammad.

  “Sure,” I said. “You know, you guys are pretty nice. Nothing like what you see in the movies.”

  Abdullah laughed and translated for Mohammad, whose English was too poor to follow. They left and a few minutes later Mohammad returned with an empty soda bottle for me to piss in—which I later learned was against the rules—and a blue quilt.

  After a while the door opened again and someone dropped a piece of bread, a tray of olives, and some halawa on the floor. If there was one thing in the world I hated to eat, it was olives, especially these olives, which were everywhere over here. They came drenched in a nasty oily red sauce that tasted like seasoned shit. As for halawa, it’s basically diabetes on a dish, a dry pastry made mostly of sugar. I didn’t touch it or the olives, just ate the bread.

  Once the sun went down I was in complete darkness except for the light that crept in through the bottom of the door. I’d discover that this—the darkness—was a form of torture just as bad as anything physical, and one that could drive a prisoner just as mad. I kept on pacing, even when I could no longer see what was in front of me, trying to keep from bumping into the walls by counting my steps, but I kept veering off course and hitting them anyway. Finally, I sat back down on the blanket, taking a break from the only activity available to me.

  A little less than two weeks before I was kidnapped, I had been on the front lines with the FSA at the besieged Air Force Intelligence Directorate, where thousands of regime soldiers were holed up—one of the most sought-after strongholds left in Aleppo. I spent two and a half days with the men of the Modar Group, a militia. The grunts dug my style, from my clothes to my jokes, and we formed a strong bond. At one point, expecting a night raid, they pulled at least three men off a front line that was already short of bodies just to guard the house where I was staying. For the two and a half days I was with them, we laughed and laughed even while the shells were falling outside our walls. Not one of the men spoke more than a few words of English. But that was one of the things that made me good at what I did: my talent for communicating with people who didn’t understand a word I was saying—mostly through humor. One of our favorite topics was politics.

  “Bashar?” I would ask.

  “Fuck Bashar!” the men would all respond, with vigorous thumbs down.

  I’d taught them “fuck” on my first day. By day two, rebels I had never met were saying “Fuck Bashar!” all the way down the line. They taught me some Arabic words too, like donkey (khar), which is a huge insult in the region.

  “Mohamed Morsi?” I asked.

  “Good Morsi, good!” they’d say, thumbs up.

  “How about Barack Obama?”

  “Good Obama!” they yelled.

  Apparently they all thought he was a Muslim.

  “Saddam?”

  “Fuck you, Saddam!”

  “Yeah! George Bush?”

  “Fuck Bush!”

  And so on. On my last day there I went down to the front, a five-minute walk from where we all slept, to say goodbye to everyo
ne on duty. This was when I made a very big and very unprofessional mistake and let one of the men convince me to shoot a video, something they had been unsuccessfully begging me to do since I got there. The subject I chose to discuss with them was, of course, our usual: politics. I figured this would show my friends back home that these guys weren’t all a bunch of Koran-clutching maniacs; some actually had really great senses of humor. This time, while shooting the video, I spontaneously threw in a name I hadn’t used before.

  “America?”

  “Yes, good America,” said a rebel named Ahmad, giving the camera a thumbs-up—with the Palestinian flag wrapped around his head and an RPG in the background.

  “Bashar?”

  “Bashar, fuck you, Bashar!”

  “Osama bin Laden?”

  “Fuck you!” Ahmad said emphatically, thumbs down.

  It was a truly hilarious display of Middle East meets West . . . except to the members of Jabhat al-Nusra, when they saw it. They did not think it was funny at all.

  I was wide awake when the door opened and a lone silhouette ordered me out of the room. I pulled my cap down covering my eyes like I had when they’d taken me to the bathroom earlier, and was led down the hall into a room. As soon as I stepped inside I knew why I was there.

  “Osama bin Laden?” I heard my own voice say, laughing.

  “Fuck you!” replied Ahmad in the video.

  I stopped dead in my tracks and closed my eyes.

  “Oh shit,” I whispered to myself.

  A second later I was seated next to Mohammad behind the desk in the same room where I had been interrogated. He raised my cap from my eyes and I saw that it was just us and his friend Sheikh Ali. They had uploaded all my photos and videos onto a laptop. Sheikh Ali was pudgy and of average height, with a thin mustache. By now the video was over—it being only about a minute long—so he pressed play again. When Ahmad dropped the F-bomb on Osama bin Laden again, I slowly turned my head toward Mohammad with a Whoops expression pasted on my face. He stared back at me with an enormous smile.