“Whenever you hear the door opening you will stand and put your face to the wall, understand?”
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Goodbye, Jumu’ah,” said Mohammad as they left. The door shut and locked behind them.
“What the fuck have you gotten yourself into now, Matthew?” I said, looking around. “You might be here for a long time.”
The cell was about twenty-two feet long and twelve feet wide. It had light-pink walls with markings all over them from previous prisoners. None of the writing scratched into the paint was in English, which led me to conclude I was the first of my kind to stay there. The ceilings were raised, about fifteen feet high, and there was one window too far up to see out of, which had nevertheless been blocked with a wooden door propped against it from the outside. It was dim—and there was nothing I could do about that, because the light switch had been ripped out, and all the wires except one along with it.
I walked over to the blankets, took off my black Jordans, and sat down. The water in the Pepsi bottle was ice-cold, but that was it for hospitality. The floor looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since peacetime. Within a few seconds I was back in my kicks, pacing back and forth. I was concerned, of course, but not scared: I was sure as shit not in the CIA, and there were people from Kilis to Aleppo to Amman who would vouch for me and the fact that I’d been invited to Syria. I decided to remain calm and not worry for two days, which was more than enough time for the jihadis to check my story. I was pretty sure that if I was there for longer than that, there was no telling when I might be released, if I was released at all.
A few hours had gone by when I heard a key turn in the door and immediately put my forehead to the wall.
“You may turn around,” said Abdullah’s voice.
Mohammad was by his side.
“How are you, Jumu’ah?” Mohammad asked.
“Never better,” I said.
“Do you need anything?”
“Yeah, a cigarette.”
“No,” said Abdullah.
“Then how about a piss bottle?”
Abdullah translated and Mohammad made a face that said, Why not? This tipped me off that he was the one in charge.
“Okay,” said Abdullah.
“Thank you. Have you called any of my people yet?”
“In time,” Abdullah replied.
“You want another blanket?” asked Mohammad.
“Sure,” I said. “You know, you guys are pretty nice. Nothing like what you see in the movies.”
Abdullah laughed and translated for Mohammad, whose English was too poor to follow. They left and a few minutes later Mohammad returned with an empty soda bottle for me to piss in—which I later learned was against the rules—and a blue quilt.
After a while the door opened again and someone dropped a piece of bread, a tray of olives, and some halawa on the floor. If there was one thing in the world I hated to eat, it was olives, especially these olives, which were everywhere over here. They came drenched in a nasty oily red sauce that tasted like seasoned shit. As for halawa, it’s basically diabetes on a dish, a dry pastry made mostly of sugar. I didn’t touch it or the olives, just ate the bread.
Once the sun went down I was in complete darkness except for the light that crept in through the bottom of the door. I’d discover that this—the darkness—was a form of torture just as bad as anything physical, and one that could drive a prisoner just as mad. I kept on pacing, even when I could no longer see what was in front of me, trying to keep from bumping into the walls by counting my steps, but I kept veering off course and hitting them anyway. Finally, I sat back down on the blanket, taking a break from the only activity available to me.
A little less than two weeks before I was kidnapped, I had been on the front lines with the FSA at the besieged Air Force Intelligence Directorate, where thousands of regime soldiers were holed up—one of the most sought-after strongholds left in Aleppo. I spent two and a half days with the men of the Modar Group, a militia. The grunts dug my style, from my clothes to my jokes, and we formed a strong bond. At one point, expecting a night raid, they pulled at least three men off a front line that was already short of bodies just to guard the house where I was staying. For the two and a half days I was with them, we laughed and laughed even while the shells were falling outside our walls. Not one of the men spoke more than a few words of English. But that was one of the things that made me good at what I did: my talent for communicating with people who didn’t understand a word I was saying—mostly through humor. One of our favorite topics was politics.
“Bashar?” I would ask.
“Fuck Bashar!” the men would all respond, with vigorous thumbs down.
I’d taught them “fuck” on my first day. By day two, rebels I had never met were saying “Fuck Bashar!” all the way down the line. They taught me some Arabic words too, like donkey (khar), which is a huge insult in the region.
“Mohamed Morsi?” I asked.
“Good Morsi, good!” they’d say, thumbs up.
“How about Barack Obama?”
“Good Obama!” they yelled.
Apparently they all thought he was a Muslim.
“Saddam?”
“Fuck you, Saddam!”
“Yeah! George Bush?”
“Fuck Bush!”
And so on. On my last day there I went down to the front, a five-minute walk from where we all slept, to say goodbye to everyone on duty. This was when I made a very big and very unprofessional mistake and let one of the men convince me to shoot a video, something they had been unsuccessfully begging me to do since I got
