After I was turned down by what felt like every landlord in the city, one finally looked at my near-perfect credit score from before the kidnapping and decided to rent me a modest one-bedroom on the Upper East Side. I moved in on September first, exactly one month after landing at JFK, and having my own place again could not have been a greater feeling. On my first night in my new home I sat on an air mattress looking up some of the soldiers I’d been locked up with on Facebook. I stared at a photo of Shareef on his page—I could tell from the date and his unwounded hand that it had been taken just before he was captured, and his huge smile brought tears to my eyes. I looked to see if he had any family listed and found three relatives; all had blocked the ability to message them except one, his cousin Heba. I figured reaching out to her was the right thing to do, and I wrote her a message letting her know that Shareef was alive and being treated as well as one could hope for under the circumstances. Within a few days I received the most beautiful response, full of gratitude, and in no time Heba and I were friends.
Knowing that Brody was probably monitoring my every move, I told her about my communication with Heba right away. She’d already jumped to the conclusion that I’d joined al-Qaeda before; I didn’t want her getting the idea that I was working with Bashar’s regime. I also told her that I thought this was our best chance of getting information that might lead to Theo, being that I knew al-Nusra was openly negotiating for Shareef and the rest of the men. She blew me off.
Needless to say, after all I had seen and endured in the months leading up to my homecoming, it wasn’t easy to surprise me. But when I received a message from Heba just twenty-five days after we’d first connected, telling me that Shareef and Ali had been exchanged for six high-level al-Nusra figures, to say I was surprised would be an understatement. I couldn’t believe it—I’d been so afraid I would never see any of my friends again, and this news brought not only relief that at least some had survived, but hope that others would as well. Naturally, once he was home it didn’t take me and Shareef long to get on a Skype call together, and we beamed at each other like brothers who were just as grateful to God for the other’s survival as we were for our own.
“Theo?” Shareef asked almost immediately.
“He didn’t make it out,” I told him.
“Kawa, Skype. Theo, mother,” Shareef said then.
I smiled.
“Give it to me.”
And just like that, I had Kawa’s Skype name—and Kawa, I now learned, was in charge of all negotiations on behalf of Jabhat al-Nusra for any and all prisoners in his custody.
After this was out of the way we moved on to other topics, like how they had heard from Obeida that the Moroccan had been judged a “bad man” and executed. Neither of us exhibited an ounce of emotion at the loss, and moments later Shareef was suddenly wearing the all-knowing smile of a man who already knew the answer to the question he was about to ask.
“So, Jumu’ah,” he said, “you still Muslim?”
“Yeah, about that . . .” I smiled and scratched the top of my head as I looked down and then back up at him, searching for the right words. “There’s something I kind of have to tell you . . . I’m Jewish.”
A second after he absorbed this information, Shareef’s jaw hit the floor, and then he broke into the biggest, loudest laugh I had ever heard. I cracked up, too, but when we were done laughing at the fact that I had tricked al-Qaeda into thinking that a unicorn was a donkey for seven months, Shareef grew serious and assured me he didn’t care that I was Jewish, that he had nothing against my people, and that he still loved me and would be my brother forever.
After our call ended I sent Brody an email, containing Kawa’s Skype name preceded by one short sentence:
The following day I sent her another message, this one outlining what I knew, specifically the fact that Kawa had expressed an interest in dealing with Qatar when it came to any negotiations. I told her that this was who the Skype name should be given to in order to secure Theo’s release.
Sorry—unable to talk right now, she replied.
Ten months later, James Foley was brutally executed by ISIS for all the world to see. Five days after that, Peter Theo Curtis was released—in a deal negotiated by none other than Qatar. I had kept my promise and gotten help; they just chose to leave him there until it suited them to bring him home.
Ali’s response to the news of my Jewish heritage during our first Skype call was much less dramatic than Shareef’s. In fact, he didn’t look surprised at all—and for very good reason.
“You know, we discussed that you might be Jewish once,” he said with a smile. “Because every time we asked you a question about Christianity, you never knew any of the answers.”
Ali’s smile had always had a grounding effect on me when we were inside, and now that we were out it was no different. His and Shareef’s survival made life easier for me. I was home, but I no longer had any friends I could relate to—they made me feel less alone, even though they
