But that night something happened, something so shocking it even drew Theo out of his blanket cave: we got a new cellmate. We’d been purposely isolated, kept apart from other prisoners for the almost three months we’d been together. When the door opened and a man hopped in on one leg, smiling and joking with the guards, we couldn’t have been more surprised if Navy SEALs had stormed the castle to rescue us. As soon as the door shut I stood up, extended my hand, and introduced myself. His name was Abdelatif.
“Are you American?” he asked, in perfect English.
When I said I was, he lit up and started talking—he had lived in the States for twelve years, until his deportation back to Morocco five years earlier for falsifying his personal information on a Banana Republic job application, and he still had two wives and three children in the US. I spread my blankets out to share, as they hadn’t yet given any to the Moroccan, and we all took a seat. After so long with only Theo to talk to, the presence of another person who spoke my language was almost intoxicating. For all his hermit tendencies, Theo seemed to feel the same way—he was giddy as a schoolgirl, lying propped up on his elbows with a big smile on his pale face.
I received my second shock of the evening after Abdelatif asked who I was and what I was doing in Syria. When I told him I was a photographer, his face changed as if he’d had a sudden epiphany.
“Were you tortured?” he asked, sounding as if he already knew the answer.
“Yeah, how did you know?”
“Because I was in the room when they did it to you! I heard you saying Ana moswer! Ana moswer! Did you know there was an old man hanging by his wrists from a pipe right above your head?”
“No . . .”
And then there were three.
Abdelatif’s story was fascinating, but full of lies so fantastic it was hard to believe there was a person on earth foolish enough to believe them, lies about everything from his occupation to the events leading up to his kidnapping. At thirty-two, he was the youngest of the three of us. He said he’d been trained as a cardiologist at an American university, and was one year from finishing his program, but I had my doubts. He’d been shot in the leg when the jihadis took him a month ago, and upon lifting his pants leg we saw that his entire thigh was filled with some kind of fluid and looked like it was ready to explode, though the wound had healed. Despite his supposed medical training he was baffled by this and kept asking us to diagnose him. I told him I didn’t know, but to put him at ease said his femur probably wasn’t broken (though we could feel the bone poking out). I almost laughed in the doctor’s face at his response:
“What’s a femur?” he asked seriously.
His excuse for not knowing about things like femurs was that his primary focus had been cardiology, so then I asked if he knew what an arrhythmia was and he didn’t have a clue. Needless to say, after hearing that he’d been diagnosing and prescribing medications to the Syrian population when he was grabbed I was pretty sure I knew at least one of the reasons he’d been arrested, though he claimed to have no idea.
Abdelatif came to Syria from Morocco to aid the jihadis as a fake doctor. He arrived in early December after running away from home because of a brutal argument he’d had with his father, stealing his sister’s car and selling it so he could fund the trip. Once in Syria and posing as a doctor, he linked up with some FSA and Jabhat al-Nusra fighters from the town of Anadan, just north of Aleppo; started his own practice; and to hear him tell it, went on to save over 250 lives with nothing more than antibiotics.
Another cataclysmic error he made was marrying a veiled woman in her early thirties—women here usually marry young, and this one had waited years and what she got was a con man. Now this was a big deal. Not just because marriage is sacred, but because in the Muslim world, deciding to get married is a lot more involved than just getting on your knee and popping the question. You need to get permission from the woman’s father and after that you have to hand over a dowry. Abdelatif said he’d done all this, and on the night of the wedding, right after the ceremony, he decided to take a ride with his new brother-in-law. About fifty feet from the headquarters of a Jabhat al-Nusra katiba that he thought were his friends, a car cut them off and four armed gunmen jumped out with their AKs raised. One fired a shot through the center of Abdelatif’s windshield as a warning, but the Moroccan was impervious to fear and went for his pistol . . . which he dropped in the car after fumbling with it. His new brother-in-law ran off into the night, taking a bullet to the shoulder on the way, while Abdelatif got out and fought off all four men without a weapon for forty-five minutes, Bruce Lee style. You see, he had twenty years of Muay Thai martial arts training, or “My Thai,” as he pronounced it, and was a lethal weapon. In the end, the jihadis were only able to subdue him by pressing a pistol against his thigh and pulling the trigger. After that, he was blindfolded and thrown in the trunk of the car.
