“No, no, no,” Abu Dejana said when I grunted in pain, letting my holder know I wasn’t to be treated that way.
The rear door of the van opened and Theo, the Moroccan, and I were placed inside. A few minutes later, we were zooming through the streets of Aleppo—I was crushed, knowing that we were right back in Kawa’s hands.
THE TRANSPORTATION BUILDING
JULY 1, 2013
Almost the second the van stopped, we were taken from it—this time the Moroccan and I had been cuffed together; we were ushered into a building and down a staircase just inside the entrance, then down another set of stairs to the basement, then through a door, about ten feet from the bottom step. We were made to sit down and heard men gathering around us from all sides. I felt someone’s warm breath next to my ear.
“What is your name?” hissed a voice in English.
“Matthew, but they call me Jumu’ah.”
“What do you want?”
“Huriya,” I answered.
My Arabic had thrown him off.
“What?”
“Huriya!” I said, louder. “Freedom!”
The man stood back up and addressed us in Arabic. He wasn’t whispering now, and I recognized the voice immediately—it was Kawa. A few moments later our handcuffs were removed, the door was locked, and a second after that our blindfolds were off.
Theo, the Moroccan, and I were alone. The room was small, about twelve paces wide and the same across; on the floor was nothing but a single black mattress with no blankets. This cell was not like any we had been in before. For one thing, there were no names, calendars, or Koran quotes carved into the walls. Wherever we were, this was obviously not a room used for holding prisoners long term. When I pointed this out to the other two, there was really only one conclusion to draw: we were in court.
We all hugged to celebrate, and while doing so I noticed over the Moroccan’s shoulder that the wires covering one of the windows had been shoddily repaired, but since the Moroccan’s size meant only two out of three of us could fit through the window, I figured I was better off not even bringing up the topic of escape.
After a few hours one of the guards came by to drop off several blankets, and we made up our beds. The Moroccan got the mattress and placed it in a corner. I took his extra blanket to use as a pillow and made my bed across the room from him, in the opposite corner. Instead of placing his bed in the center Theo laid his blanket directly next to the mattress, as if making it an extension of the bed, so they could sleep side by side.
The bathroom was off to the left when you entered, and had been created by breaking through the concrete wall. The space was divided by a partition of cinder blocks piled about seven feet high, with your average white ceramic sink on one side and on the other a hose and a squat toilet in the tile floor. When I felt on top of the blocks I found a small piece of soap. The ground under the sink was unfinished and the pipes leaked; between that and the extra water from the toilet hose there was a constant puddle underfoot.
One important difference in this jail we wouldn’t notice right away: Turning to the wall whenever someone entered the room was standard protocol everywhere, but usually this rule relaxed after a few days once the guards got used to us seeing their faces. Here, this didn’t happen. We had to keep our foreheads pinned to the wall while sitting on our beds without fail—we were never given permission to turn. This seemed like another hopeful sign. If they didn’t want us to see them they definitely didn’t plan on killing us, or so we told ourselves.
The door that divided us from freedom was an iron one and huge—it was too big for the original frame, and pieces of the wall had been bashed off to make it fit. All this bashing had left a gap about two inches wide between the door and the jagged concrete on one side, giving us a clear view of the hallway. When I looked I saw a very limited space and only one other cell to the right of us, and broken broomsticks and cables all over the floor for those who were deemed worthy of torture.
High on the far wall of our cell were four typical basement windows. They were about ten inches from top to bottom, and the four of them spanned the entire length of the wall. As usual, packed-out grain bags sat on the ground outside them, blocking our view. The two windows in the middle were intact, and opened inward. The other two, those to the far right and left, were broken, with only a shard or two of glass left sticking out of the frame. Beyond the frames were sills a little less than a foot wide, covered in dirt and broken glass, and beyond these, securing us in our prison, were strong metal wires running vertically and horizontally to create a grid, with squares each slightly smaller than a stamp. These wires were so strong they may as well have been bars—but unfortunately for the terrorists they weren’t bars, they were wires, and wires can be cut. And looking at the wires in front of the window under which I slept, anybody could tell that once upon a time that was exactly what had happened.
Our keeper’s name was Abu Ali, but apart from the name he had nothing in common with the Abu Ali who’d delighted in tormenting us at the villa. This Abu Ali was soft-spoken and respectful; our first clue to his character came one night early on, when the three of us were hungry.
“I’m gonna
