I can just imagine what kind of bullshit Theo fed him. Where I come from, when a man slaps a woman he’s beating her, but when a man slaps another man it’s just a slap. He probably made me sound like Ike Turner.
Abdullah had a wife and four little girls that he had not been permitted to call. The pain of being away from his family and not knowing how long it would be before he could see them again ripped him apart—and the fact that this was happening during Ramadan, which was now in full swing, made it even worse. Sometimes he’d sit on his bed weeping, wiping the tears away out of embarrassment as soon as they left his eyes.
Because Abdullah was older we gave him the mattress, though he pretended not to want it. He was local, from Aleppo, and knew pretty much exactly where we were, if not the building we were in. We were in the Sh’ar district, about a thousand yards from the hospital where we’d first been kept. When I asked him which direction the hospital was he pointed northwest, which meant if I ever did get out of the window, I would have to go south. It was easy to figure out directions because the guards always let us know which way Mecca was so that we could face it for prayer. At one point, they threw a mechanic from the other cell in with us for about half an hour, and it was through him that we found out exactly where we were: the transportation building, which was kind of like the Syrian DMV.
After I asked Abdullah the directions of a few other landmarks in the area I was familiar with, I had him draw me a map and sketch out who controlled what territory. These days, the city was pretty much split in half between the rebels and the regime.
Abdullah’s tears were pitiful, but they also suggested that he would have a newfound hatred for Jabhat al-Nusra after he was released, so I decided to let him in on the escape to see if we could recruit him to pick us up once we were out. It was risky, but with no money and no passport it didn’t hurt to have a friend, and I knew there was no way they were going to keep this guy for more than a few days.
Abdullah didn’t hide the fact that he didn’t think we had a chance in hell of escaping, but he said if we managed to pull it off he would try to help, and gave us his cell phone number. Once I’d thought about it, though, I decided the number was useless. If he wasn’t willing to be waiting somewhere in a car for us the day after his release, then we couldn’t trust him enough to call, either. There was no way this crybaby was going to risk his life and that of his family to help a couple of Americans. If we got out and used that number, there was a good chance we’d find some al-Nusra boys waiting for us wherever we went next.
No. If I got out that window, I was on my own.
Abdullah wrote so many letters to the emir detailing his references and all the free dental work he’d done for the al-Nusra fighters controlling his neighborhood that Abu Ali kept having to bring him more paper. When he didn’t get a response, what he got was desperate, and desperate men in desperate times do desperate things without thinking or because they just don’t know better. In Abdullah’s case, this meant grabbing our broom and shoving the broken end of the stick through the flawed wires, poking at one of the grain bags blocking our window. His plan was to flag down a civilian and pass him a note to take to his family. I bugged out and grabbed the broom handle, and as I was yelling at him to stop he managed to push one of the bags over slightly, enough to give us a clear view of almost everything outside our window. This was not good. Our guards probably wouldn’t notice during the day but I was sure they would at night, when the lights were on. For the rest of the day I just walked around in circles, waiting for the sun to set. If they noticed we were in deep shit, but then again if they didn’t we had just improved our odds of escaping, because now I could monitor everything going on outside.
The building directly across the street from us had been completely destroyed by artillery. All that remained were three or four floors’ worth of rubble. On the side street, apartment buildings stood four or five stories and were still in good living condition—and occupied. When the electricity went on we could see several window fans spinning the hot summer air. As for the building we were in, it had a small parking lot in the rear with a tall white wall around it and an entrance at the far right with a security booth next to it.
By the following day, not only had they not noticed the bag was moved, I’d noticed something myself: there was never a guard stationed in the back.
On the twenty-third of July, the door opened and Abdullah was taken from the room, never to return.
It was time to go home.
From the moment Abdullah left I spent every conscious second planning the escape, and first up was figuring out how to remove the wires from the window. Theo wasn’t much help because he’d gone back to sleeping all day with both of his hands stuffed down his pants, which was driving me nuts, and the sight of this only made me more motivated to get the hell out of that room. After my second attempt to get the window free with the spoon failed he’d said he was out,
