More men piled into the SUV, and we started moving. Some crazy jihadi song came blasting from the speakers—it began with the terrifying neighing of a horse and the sounds of hooves clopping on a hard surface. The song was a favorite, almost like an anthem; it got them all amped up and we could hear General Mohammad singing along. Their adrenaline was flowing, which couldn’t be good for us. I grabbed Theo’s hand and gave it a squeeze, kind of a combined let’s do this and if this is the end, it was nice knowing you. The car bumped along the road.
We didn’t know it yet, but we were heading straight toward hell.
THE ELECTRICAL INSTITUTE
FEBRUARY 6, 2013
It was about an hour’s drive to the dark side of hell. It was located northeast of Aleppo, in an electrical institute abandoned after God knows how many battles by the regime. Unbeknownst to me, we were in Hraytan—the same town in which I’d stayed during most of my eighteen days in Syria. When we finally stopped, the rain was still falling hard. My back and head were killing me. Every time the SUV hit a bump I’d cracked my head on the side of the trunk, and my lower spine felt like someone was drilling into it. The men got out of the car and Theo and I lay there for a while longer, listening to them talking and joking before they opened the trunk and took us out. We were still barefoot, and as soon as my battered feet hit the pavement pain shot through them. A second later someone dropped a pair of orange rubber slippers at my feet and nudged me to put them on. The slippers were the kind with textured, grippy insoles; I stepped into them and onto what felt like hundreds of rubber spikes digging into raw flesh. I was led inside a building and down a staircase.
We were in a basement; everything I could see from beneath my cap was concrete, except for the door, which was steel and painted gray. Inside, I was set down on a blanket, and as soon as my escort left I lifted my cap. I was alone in this huge, empty cell. The ceilings had to be twenty feet high. All the windows were broken, and thick shards of glass littered the floor. After a few seconds I heard footsteps and covered my eyes again before the door opened. Theo was placed next to me and we were instructed to remove our blindfolds. Kneeling before us was Jamal, General Mohammad’s right-hand man.
“Don’t look at the windows,” Theo translated as Jamal spoke to us in Arabic. “He said if we look at the windows we’ll be shot.”
“Ask him if we’re goin’ back to the other jail,” I said.
Theo asked.
“La,” said Jamal. He left.
We sat there absorbing our new surroundings. We didn’t know what to think: Were we brought here for punishment or for death? It was freezing in the room and there were only two blankets spread out about twenty feet apart. Theo was shivering in his wet pants and underwear—he said they’d gotten soaked when the jihadis poured water on his feet midtorture, and I didn’t press the issue. We needed blankets and we needed them fast.
It didn’t take long for Mohammad to pay us a visit, accompanied by what must have been about ten masked men. We hadn’t moved an inch because neither one of us wanted to walk on our ruined feet. He approached us wearing a giant smile with his arms extended, like he was the Dalai Lama.
“Jumu’ahhhh!” he said.
“Hey, General,” I responded. “So, what’s goin’ on here?”
He knelt beside me and made the same twisting hand motion he’d used when fitting the broken piece of concrete into the gouge in the door.
“You try to make hole?” he said, making a circle with his fingers and holding it up to his eye as if he were looking through a peephole.
“That was already there, man. I swear,” I said.
He said something in Arabic, his tone suddenly serious. His smile was completely gone and the expression that remained was unsettling. I didn’t understand a word until the very end, when I heard him say “Israel.”
Oh shit! I thought. Did he know?
After this, Mohammad stood and headed for the door, entourage in tow. The last kid to leave, Thug Life, had obviously missed his calling in theater, walking backward toward the door with a hand on his sheathed knife the whole time, never taking his eyes off us. Once Thug Life was out the door it was shut and locked.
“What’d Mohammad say?” I asked Theo immediately.
“He called you a Jew.”
This made what was already a worst-case scenario impossibly worse. Had he known the whole time? Were they saving me for some kind of public execution? I told myself that chances were he was just trying to insult me. Theo agreed.
Half an hour later we had two armed visitors. One was a young guard and the other a tall man of about thirty, wearing an army-green jumpsuit with “Qatar” stitched on the breast. He welcomed us to his house, calling us guests. They had brought us each three blankets, but when the older one asked if there was anything else we needed, Theo requested more.
