After a short while the electricity came back on and we heard movement outside our door, sending everyone scrambling to put their blindfolds back on. A large, soft-spoken jihadi entered, holding a giant kitchen knife, which he used to loosen and remove our restraints without cutting them. So that’s how you do it, I thought. I had never seen him before.
As we were freed we all instinctively lined the walls, leaving the center of the cell clear. We were told that the emir was on his way to see us and asked if we needed the bathroom.
One by one we were taken from the cell to relieve ourselves. There was no yelling, there was no hitting, and no one rushed us. When my turn came I walked to the door and stopped in front of a guard holding an AK-47. As he reached up to my blindfold my heart jumped—I thought he could tell that I could see through the cloth—but he was only raising it. I slowly opened my eyes to see a very good-looking young man with light-brown hair and beard wearing a skullcap with black cargo pants and an Armani Exchange tee shirt. He looked at me with a raised brow over kind eyes that said: If you don’t give me any problems, I will not give you any. He was Abu Obeida, and he ran shit in this jail.
The cell we were in looked like a small bodega, the kind you’d see in Brooklyn or Manhattan back home. In the front was a solid steel gate that had been pulled down and locked on the outside with a padlock. Inside, the room was about twenty-five feet long and nine feet wide. The door of the cell, the one we used to go in and out to the bathroom, had not been there during peacetime: they had smashed through the wall between our cell and the space next to it and bolted a metal door into the resulting hole. The door was not solid, instead it was the kind you might see being used instead of a screen door in a bad neighborhood, with a slot above it to hand things through. Covering the iron curlicues that served as bars was a thin sheet of cloudy plastic, with a peephole cut into it above the doorknob.
As I made my way out with Obeida, I saw that several other rebels stood outside along the path from the cell to the bathroom. They kept their AKs pointed at us the whole way. These men were a far cry from the kids who had taken us to the bathroom in previous jails. These were some real-deal jihadis, all with long, thick beards and the scent of the front lines on their clothes. The room next to ours was cluttered with everything from furniture to gun parts, with cinder blocks stacked to the ceiling. In the room next to that was the bathroom and an enormous pile of clothing. There was also a stack of wooden crates, ten feet high, and next to these was a huge military trunk overflowing with guns.
This was the first time in almost a month we’d been able to use the bathroom without being screamed at to hurry up, and it was more than an hour before we had all finished. At one point a jihadi entered the cell and screamed at us to face the wall, but almost immediately Obeida appeared and warned him not to do it again.
My positive feeling upon leaving the villa had been justified. It may not have been freedom, but for now we were in a much better place.
When the emir entered he had our full attention from the moment his shiny black shoes touched the floor. He was about forty-five, with dark skin, jet-black hair, and a long, thick, but neatly trimmed beard. He was wearing a blue-and-white pinstriped dress shirt with black dress pants. This emir was unlike any of the others we had seen during our confinement, most of whom were young thugs who wore suicide belts as fashion accessories. He was professional, and so were the men under him.
After looking around the room, he told the big guy who’d taken off our hand ties to go get us sandwiches. He then calmly insulted the men after telling them that their army had committed an atrocity elsewhere in the country that left many women and children dead. As he was leaving I got his attention and asked for a soda bottle to piss in. The emir gave his consent and a bottle was promptly delivered to me by one of the other jihadis.
A little while later the big soft-spoken jihadi returned, with two huge bags containing our dinner. There was a sandwich for each man in the room and every one was hot and fresh from the shop. These sandwiches aren’t like the ones we eat in the West, more like burritos filled with potatoes, peppers, and some kind of sauce. You’d think we’d tear into them like wild beasts after being tortured with hunger for twenty-three days at the villa, but we didn’t. We carefully unwrapped our sandwiches and bit into them slowly, savoring every bite we took. This went for pretty much everyone except the Moroccan, who scarfed his down in less than two minutes.
“Man, I’m still hungry! Watch this!” he said to me, a now-familiar evil smile on his face. “Theo, come here!”
Theo jumped up and within seconds was crouched before Abdelatif.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Can I get some of your sandwich?”
“Didn’t you get one?” Theo asked, knowing damn well what was coming next.
“Yeah, but I’m still hungry,” said the Moroccan.
Silence ensued as they
