After about forty minutes of walking through the bombed-out city, past buildings leveled by artillery and the air force, I came upon three men just kicking it on a corner and decided to engage them. Since my pleas for help hadn’t gotten me anywhere so far, I figured I needed to change my game, and instead of acting desperate I went with confused.
“Assallam alekum,” I said. “Where’s the Free Syrian Army?”
As I asked this I tapped the side of my head and shook it, to make them think I’d gotten lost on my way back from somewhere.
“I am a photographer. I am a Canadian. I am a Muslim,” I said in Arabic.
None of the men spoke English, but the youngest one, who was sitting on the curb, pointed behind me in the direction I’d come from.
“You know, I just can’t find it,” I said, shaking my head. “Would you?”
The man jumped to his feet and motioned for me to follow him. We walked for a couple of minutes until we came upon a tall, bright-green metal door. The man knocked. When nobody answered he knocked again, and after a few seconds I heard the door being unlocked from the inside. When it opened, standing before me was a young jihadi of about twenty-five, wearing a black-and-blue-striped polo with a neatly groomed beard and mustache. I figured now was the time for my desperation act so I fell to my knees and begged him to help me with the most fervent Arabic I knew. When the jihadi pulled me to my feet I saw only one thing on his face: skepticism.
The man who’d led me to the door disappeared as soon as it opened. The jihadi who’d answered it let me in and searched me as we stood in the entryway, emptying my pockets and removing the shirt from my head. I could feel him contemplating me, trying to decide whether or not I was a CIA agent. By now I had told him that I was a Muslim and a Canadian photographer who’d been kidnapped by criminals. The first things he’d produced from my pockets were the pills I’d brought in case I was recaptured. Since they were loose and wrapped in plastic I admit they looked kind of shady, and he stared at me, waiting for an explanation.
“Diarrhea,” I said.
He didn’t speak a word of English, so I squatted and made a few short farting sounds. That cleared everything right up, and I got my first smile out of him. The next thing he produced, however, was a possible problem. It was Abdullah the dentist’s phone number. The last thing I wanted was for these guys to call him and find out that I had escaped not from common criminals, but from Jabhat al-Nusra, so when the jihadi found the small strip of paper with the number on it I pretended I’d never seen it before.
“I don’t know what that is,” I said, shrugging. “I just got these jeans and that must have been in there.”
By now all this activity by the entrance had drawn the attention of another jihadi, this one older and clearly just awakened from sleep. After a brief exchange the young man who’d answered the door returned the contents of my pockets and led me back outside. He motioned for me to sit on the curb and joined me a second later. Now everyone was awake, and the older man had come outside to stand above me, along with two more jihadis who looked to be barely out of their teens and one who looked a couple of years younger. I figured it was time for the test to see who they really were.
“You have a cigarette?” I asked, putting my fingers to my mouth.
None of the men were smoking, but as soon as I asked, the baby of the group ran inside, returning a second later holding a pack of cigarettes. He then handed me the luckiest Lucky I would ever smoke, along with a lighter. This meant that I was with the FSA and not fanatics—which also meant my odds of getting to the Turkish border had just improved tenfold.
Now I had to make a decision. Go for the border and try to help Theo from there, or try to get to the town of Hraytan, where my contacts—including an FSA commander with three hundred battle-hardened men under him—were still fighting. This commander, Sheikh Modar, was a very highly respected and religious man, the type with clout; the type that may have been able to help no matter how much of a long shot it was. It was a no-brainer. I had to get to Hraytan. A promise is a promise.
“Hraytan, Sheikh Modar, Ameriki journalist,” I said holding up my hands with my wrists together to show them that another man was still in captivity.
They asked me who had him and where, but I pretended not to know. They still hadn’t even invited me inside, which worried me a little. But after about half an hour of chain-smoking the kid’s Luckies and talking, the jihadi who’d answered the door reached out, put his hand on my shoulder, and gave me a single nod that said: Don’t worry, you’re with friends now.
They led me inside. As we entered the building, which had been a rug factory before the war, I looked to my left and saw a large room with mattresses all over the floor and a table off to the side that had to be fifteen feet long, with AK-47s leaning against the wall on top of it. We turned to the right instead, into an empty room that led to an office where there was a desk with several chairs
