Around this time I started to examine the moments leading up to my abduction, replaying them like one of my stories. After we left Aleppo, Abu Mohammad drove up the enormous steel arch with “Industrial City” written on it in huge English letters. This was a major checkpoint, the largest I had seen in my travels around the country, with at least thirty rebels manning it. When Abu Mohammad tried to drive through, a rebel knocked on my window and he pulled over. After getting out and having a short conversation, he jumped back in again and turned the taxi around. This was what should have set off alarms in my head, but I just assumed the road beyond the checkpoint had been bombed from the air and we had to find another route. I was wrong—less than ten minutes later I was in the back of the Cherokee with the man in black.
The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that Abu Mohammad—and my host in Aleppo, who’d introduced me to him—had set me up. He had an AK-47 in the car, but didn’t reach for it when they came at us. He insisted on being paid up-front for the ride and then made four stops before finally leaving the city. And even before all that, he just seemed . . . off.
When I told Oqba my thoughts on the subject, he agreed with me right away.
“You are a very smart man,” he said.
I felt myself tuning in to Edmond Dantés the more I thought about it; that old Bible quote Tolstoy used in the beginning of Anna Karenina constantly floating around in my head: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”
One night when the lights were out, General Mohammad paid us a visit with two of his subordinates. One was a guy I called Fenster (because he mumbled like Benicio Del Toro’s character in The Usual Suspects and kind of resembled him, too); the other one, pudgy with an expression of stone, was the type who just crackled with negative energy, a guy you knew was capable of horrific acts. He stood there impassively, shining his flashlight in our faces one by one like he was choosing his daily sacrifice. Mohammad, on the other hand, was in high spirits, joking around and laughing, telling us that we would all be going home soon, Inshallah—“by the will of God.” After a few minutes of this the lights came on and he left the room, returning a minute later with a blue plastic tub and an electric heater so we could bathe.
Later he came over and sat down next to me on the floor.
“Jumu’ahhhh!” he said like always, with a smile.
“How you doin’, Mohammad?” I asked.
We went back and forth for the next few minutes.
“You C-I-A?” he asked me.
“Nah, man,” I answered.
“Jumu’ah, bin Laden a good man.”
I sat there, trying to think of something to say to that.
“Well, he definitely was fascinating,” I allowed, shivering.
“You cold?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He said something to Fenster that sent him from the room, and a minute later he came back holding another blanket for me. Fenster was someone who I later heard had said he enjoyed torturing people because “it brought him closer to God,” and I could feel the jealousy of everyone around me. All prisoners got two blankets, if they were lucky, and now I had four. Mohammad liked me, and everyone knew it. I later found out from Ali that he was the one who had informed the men I was coming to be their new cellmate, and that I was not to be bothered. This was a serious message to them: fuck with Jumu’ah and there will be blood.
It was on my fifth day with the POWs that the door opened and the Shabiha were ushered into the room. There were thirteen of them, all dressed in civilian clothing, ranging from their early twenties to sixty or so. Shabiha were not treated with the same respect as the soldiers. They were basically civilians who’d taken up arms to fight on the side of the regime, which made them far more despised by the opposition—al-Nusra, at least the group we were with, could respect a soldier’s duty to fight, whereas a Shabiha was just a traitor who’d turned his back on the revolution. Their chances of survival in an environment like this were much slimmer than mine given their lack of value.
I sensed an immediate shift in the room’s mood as the new inmates congregated in small groups all over the place. The cell was now crowded beyond its capacity; everyone was uncomfortable. None of the Shabiha had been given blankets, and I was ready to have to fight to keep what was mine if it came to that. There was an unspoken tension in the air. When I heard someone unlocking the door I remember praying to hear my name called so I could just be judged and go home already.
“Jumu’ah,” said a young voice.
“Yes!”
The voice told me to grab my blankets and follow him, which I did. Looking out through the bottom of my cap as we walked down the hallway, I saw a crowd of jihadis. We stopped at a door, and a second later I found myself locked back up, in an empty room this time.
Solitary again.
The new room was identical to the one I had been placed in my first day as a prisoner; the only difference was that this one had five blankets neatly folded into a bed on a plastic mat, bringing my grand total of blankets up to nine. Pipes ran from one side of the room to the other just below the windows, and within minutes I was testing them to see whether they were strong enough
