“America?”
“Yes, good America,” said a rebel named Ahmad, giving the camera a thumbs-up—with the Palestinian flag wrapped around his head and an RPG in the background.
“Bashar?”
“Bashar, fuck you, Bashar!”
“Osama bin Laden?”
“Fuck you!” Ahmad said emphatically, thumbs down.
It was a truly hilarious display of Middle East meets West . . . except to the members of Jabhat al-Nusra, when they saw it. They did not think it was funny at all.
I was wide awake when the door opened and a lone silhouette ordered me out of the room. I pulled my cap down covering my eyes like I had when they’d taken me to the bathroom earlier, and was led down the hall into a room. As soon as I stepped inside I knew why I was there.
“Osama bin Laden?” I heard my own voice say, laughing.
“Fuck you!” replied Ahmad in the video.
I stopped dead in my tracks and closed my eyes.
“Oh shit,” I whispered to myself.
A second later I was seated next to Mohammad behind the desk in the same room where I had been interrogated. He raised my cap from my eyes and I saw that it was just us and his friend Sheikh Ali. They had uploaded all my photos and videos onto a laptop. Sheikh Ali was pudgy and of average height, with a thin mustache. By now the video was over—it being only about a minute long—so he pressed play again. When Ahmad dropped the F-bomb on Osama bin Laden again, I slowly turned my head toward Mohammad with a Whoops expression pasted on my face. He stared back at me with an enormous smile.
“You’re in big trouble,” he said, and pressed play again.
“Oh, come on, man! Fuck Bashar? Fuck Bush? Those are the people I’m really making fun of here. Bin Laden’s just a name I threw in! I’m sorry.”
“You see him!” yelled Sheikh Ali, pointing to Ahmad in the video. “Donkey!”
“Khar,” I agreed, nodding.
“Yes, khar!” he yelled, picking up an AK-47. “Fuck Osama bin Laden? We’re Jabhat al-Nusra!”
I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to know for certain who had me, but now the cat was out of the bag, which couldn’t be good. It just figured that this stupid fucking video was the thing that made one of them slip.
“Oh, come on, man, you’re really gonna shoot me over this?” I said. “I’m on your side. I came here to photograph guys like you killing Bashar. I love the Syrian people. Mohammad, hand me my phone, please?” I pointed to my iPhone, which was lying on the desk next to the laptop. “Come on, I can prove it to you.”
Mohammad, who was playing the video over and over again, handed me my phone. I opened it up and found the folder with the photographs of refugees I had taken on my first trip to Syria the month before. I passed the phone back and was shocked by their response. I expected them to be moved by the suffering of their own people; instead they laughed as they flipped through the photos, making fun of the elderly and sobbing women.
“How can you laugh at that?” I said in a disappointed tone. “That woman’s son was killed. That’s why she’s crying.”
Sheikh Ali said something in Arabic and he and Mohammad laughed some more, proving Joyce right: “’Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be fighting for these people?” I asked.
“You—You!” yelled Mohammad enthusiastically, pointing to the phone and holding it out to me.
“What? You want to see pictures of me?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“All right,” I said and opened another folder for them to look through.
I couldn’t believe it had worked. Breaking out my photos had made them completely forget about the video. As they scrolled through them, they saw me with people from all over the world: Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, and finally . . . Rio during Carnival. I hadn’t remembered these, and will never forget the looks on the faces of my two militant jihadist captors when I popped up on the small screen, shirtless, tattoo visible on my abdomen, with five muscular transvestites in blonde wigs and cheetah-print miniskirts draped all over me, some holding beers, some puckering their lips for a kiss. There was a long, uncomfortable moment of silence as Mohammad and Sheikh Ali stared at the photo—which encompassed about five major sins—their jaws on the floor. Then the silence was broken: pointing at the picture, Mohammad began laughing hysterically and Sheikh Ali followed his lead. Is this really fucking happening to me right now? I thought to myself. That picture was some serious haram, but since nobody seemed to care, I just went with it, determined to keep them amused.
“Yeah, yeah, that was in Rio! They were diggin’ my shit, man!” I said, laughing along with them. “Check out the next one! Check out the next one!”
This next photo showed me standing tall, shirtless again and ripped, wearing a pair of joke glasses with a huge penis in place of the nose. They didn’t seem to know what they were looking at, so I tapped the screen and zoomed in for them.
“Check it out, man—It’s a dick!”
As soon as they realized I was wearing a giant penis on my face they lost it all over again, just laughing their asses off. Mohammad even reached out and grabbed my chest to see if I was still as firm as when the photo was taken.
“Yeah, I hit the gym every day. We should work out sometime,” I said, motioning toward the hallway where free weights were set up for the jihadis.
They scrolled through a few more photos and finally came to
