He did not drink the water. He did not touch the sweets. He had no desire to taste his own death sentence.
* * *
That night a young boy was thrown into the cell. Sadiq glimpsed him in the scant seconds the door was open and the light from outside came in—the silhouette of a boy not yet fully grown, with the face of a child. Sadiq did not utter a word. He could not bring himself to. He waited. And kept watch. And waited. He could not sleep when he knew one of them would be killed during the night. They came again just before dawn, pausing in the doorway for a moment before they hauled the boy out and disappeared.
Sadiq laid his head on the filthy floor. He had gotten used to the stench, the shit, the dankness. He thought about the guards, soldiers, torturers, and executioners he was surrounded by. What kind of people were they? How did their minds work? Sadiq believed himself a man who respected others, almost without exception, but he could not understand the men in this al-Dawla al-Islamiya. This had nothing to do with Islam, nothing to do with jihad. Least of all had it anything to do with God. Because God was merciful. They had forgotten that.
The next night he was the one they took out. He was handcuffed and blindfolded. Soft rain fell on his sweaty brow. Followed by a fist. He fell down, got mud on his face, in his mouth, all over. Then the blows ceased. Sadiq wondered what was coming. They removed his blindfold and turned him over.
“My father hasn’t come here looking for me,” the fat one said. He pointed at the two others. “Neither has the father of my brother from Eritrea, or my Libyan brother. Nobody comes here to fetch anyone. You’re lying!”
He ordered Sadiq onto his knees. Drizzle was falling. The knife the man had pressed to his throat was wet.
They wanted a confession.
Sadiq answered on autopilot: “I’m just a father.”
The knife was removed. While he kneeled in the mud, his hands tied behind his back, they debated whether or not to kill him there and then or let him live.
The rain continued to fall.
They forced him to his feet and back to his cell.
I have a small spark named Sadiq, he thought, as he lay dazed. The rest of me is dead. So far four people had shared the cell with him. All of them were gone.
He tried to put thoughts of them out of his head, empty his mind. He got to his feet, then slept in the fetal position, woke up, and got back to his feet. He did push-ups, knuckles resting on the wall, and performed squats to keep his blood circulating.
He had tried to keep count of the days, but become mixed up. Slowly, he grew accustomed to an existence in an area four yards square.
Occasional occurrences made life a little better. One day Abu Ahmed appeared with an empty bottle. Turned upside down and jammed into the hole in the floor, it reduced the stink.
One morning his warder brought him out into the backyard.
“They don’t work on Fridays,” he said.
Friday. Day off. No beatings.
It was the first time he had seen the yard in daylight. Small light-pink flowers climbed up a wall, growing out of the compacted sandy earth. There were a few chairs and a lopsided table. A couple of cars took up the rest of the space. Beyond the wall, scattered olive trees grew. Sorrow welled up inside Sadiq. The thought of the vigorous young farmer. Syria was being drained of its best men.
A black flag with the seal of Muhammad flew above them. On a sign that no one had bothered to take down he saw where he actually was: Al-Dana Water Supply and Sewerage Treatment Plant. The Islamists were experts at making prisons of everything.
Sadiq swung his outstretched arms back and forth, enjoying the space and air around his body, the sun, the gentle breeze. “I’ve spoken to someone…” Abu Ahmed said. “I told them about you. If you’re lucky, he’ll be here today.”
In the middle of the yard a group stood chatting. They had reddish beards and were light-skinned. Chechens, Abu Ahmed told him. They were reputed to be the best soldiers, brutal, disciplined, practiced in guerrilla tactics cultivated over centuries of warfare against the Russians.
“They want to see combat,” Abu Ahmed said, “like everyone else who comes. A lot of people are disappointed when they are assigned to watch prisoners. They didn’t enlist for that, not to hang around this shithole.”
Sadiq wanted to ask Abu Ahmed how he wound up here, what he was doing working for ISIS, but he did not. He remained stuck in his own thoughts, lacked the energy to contemplate those of others. He looked around. Prisoners and guards, executioners and victims. He drew in deep lungfuls of the autumn air. Oh, for a cigarette now!
A man came over to Abu Ahmed. He had a slight limp and stood resting his weight on one foot. The guard straightened up and pointed toward Sadiq. The man motioned him to follow and led Sadiq and Abu Ahmed inside the building. He showed them into one of the treatment plant’s offices and introduced himself as Abu Sayaf.
“What brings you to Syria?” he asked Sadiq.
When he had heard Sadiq’s story, he stood up and paced back and forth in the room, mumbling some verses from the Koran.
He turned and looked straight at Sadiq. “If you remain in that cell, sooner or later you’ll be killed.”
He left the room; Abu Ahmed and Sadiq sat and waited. When he returned, he had two of the Chechens with him. He instructed Sadiq to accompany them, and Sadiq found himself being led across the yard to another building, through a door, and down a corridor. He was shown into a large room with mats on the floor. “Find an empty spot,” a guard told him.
A mattress!
