The Dawn Prayer (Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison)

but when I asked him to describe it he was vague, saying just that it was a history of the country with some “brief discussion” of extremism. Much later I’d find out that the full title was Undercover Muslim: A Journey into Yemen, starring Theo as the “Undercover Muslim.” The book was meant to be an exposé—he moved to Yemen in 2005 and feigned conversion to Islam in order to deceive the locals and gain access to the incredibly secretive mosques and madrasas. This was an act of heresy so severe it would mean an immediate death sentence if it were ever discovered, which is why he went by two different names—he’d had to change his name after the book’s publication, for his own safety. I was unknowingly locked in a cell with someone who had disrespected the religion of our captors so blatantly and publicly that if they ever found out who he really was, he’d wish he were only a CIA agent, and things definitely wouldn’t improve for me, either.

The guards on the floor were all in their late teens and early twenties and seemed to be running the place with no adult supervision. The one thing I had to be grateful for was the fact that Yassine had been transferred to the new building with us. He still encouraged the guards to abuse Theo, but he always protected me from them, and never raised a hand to me himself.

Bathroom trips were a nightmare, with all the punks coming out of the woodwork to jeer at us and whip our elbows and the backs of our knees as we walked the hallway like a gauntlet. Occasionally I took a lash to the head from Sancho. Past the staircase the jihadis had spread sheets over the ground, but when we got there they’d kick them aside and make us continue on the dirty floor as if we weren’t good enough to walk on them. As we passed one of the rooms they slept and hung out in, I noticed a number on the door and beds inside. The place looked like it had been a dormitory before the war.

The bathroom was all white with a high window through which we could see a patch of sky. There was one squat toilet stall and two showers. While we were in there the jihadis would gather by the door to hurl insults and laugh at us. One time, a kid I had never seen before and never saw again gave me a lesson on Islam while I was standing there waiting my turn. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

“You’re going to hell!” he said fiercely, eyes glittering. “You’re not a Muslim! You’re going to hell! You’re all going to hell! Your mother is going to hell!”

As Theo translated, I just stood there looking at this mindless little turd, fascinated. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that I was going to hell, when here I thought I was already there. He would have been happy to kill us. That passion and intensity of belief in someone so young was a frightening thing, because these are the kids who can be talked into blowing themselves up, or flying planes into buildings.

The water was often out at this point, so it wasn’t uncommon to enter the stall to find the hole in the ground completely filled with the shit of what looked like twenty men, making it impossible to empty our piss bottles there. This also meant there was no way for us to clean ourselves up after using the toilet, and one time I had to go bad.

“Yassine, please, man, give us a pail of water,” I begged.

“No,” he answered sternly, “there is no water.”

I put my hands to the sides of my head in frustration. “Come on, Yassine!”

“All right, one second.”

He left the bathroom and returned a few seconds later with three tissues—two for me and one for Theo.

I rarely got much time to relieve myself because Yassine and the boys would usually start beating on Theo as soon as I was in the stall, and his screams forced me to hurry as much as possible in order to get him inside. I’d often emerge to find him already on the wet, filthy floor, screaming “Please, please, please!” in Arabic with one arm raised above his head. They kept a special cable in the bathroom just for him, thick and black like the one they did my feet with.

Whack! Whack! Whack!

Both the blows and Theo’s screams were especially loud this day.

“All right, I’m almost done!” I yelled, pulling up my pants.

When I stepped out Theo was on the ground and Dingleberry, who got his name because he was a little shit, was standing over him with the cable and a big smile, Yassine egging him on from the sidelines. While I was in the stall they’d managed to thrash Theo’s arm and hand badly enough that they’d knocked off one of his fingernails. I’d told him a hundred times to stop falling on his back right away like he did and to stand and take it instead, because they bring that cable down with a lot more force than when they lash it sideways, but either he didn’t listen or he just couldn’t help it.

“Go on, man, go,” I said, and Theo got up and into the stall. “So Yassine, you kill Bashar yet?”

“No, not yet, but I will,” he answered, smiling.

“Yeah, no doubt. Can I photograph it?”

“Yes.”

“All right!”

It was Yassine and conversations like this that got me through the bathroom trips mostly unharmed. Unfortunately, sometimes Bubbles was there instead, and Bubbles was dead set on breaking me, to be the hero who got my confession. One day when I came out of the stall I found Bubbles hitting Theo with a thin piece of wood that looked like molding for a door while the usual punks gathered around and laughed. He moved from hitting him on the arm