When I Was a Hostage
My ordeal in Syria showed me how terrorism thrives in war. I see echoes in Gaza today.
Browsing through the internet on the afternoon of the October 7 Hamas attacks, I came across a video that brought me back to an important turning point in my life. It showed an Israeli hostage being pulled from the back of a jeep as a crowd of onlookers whistled and called out to God. Even the particulars of this scene match my own experience. The blood-covered clothing, the bare feet, the hands cuffed behind the back, the joy in the street, the terrorists’ habit of yanking their captive around by the hair, their frantic waving of handguns—all of this is familiar to me from my own kidnapping, which occurred in Northern Syria in October 2012.
In those days, I was trying to make a go of it as a freelance reporter in Antakya, Turkey. My plan was to make day trips across the border into Syria, to report on the art works and songs the civil war was churning up, and in this way make myself into the war’s go-to cultural correspondent. As it happened, during the first 24 hours of my first trip I was captured by a band of amateur terrorists. They deliberated on things for a while, abused me a bit, decided that I was probably a CIA agent, then turned me over to their professional colleagues in the Syrian al Qaeda affiliate, Jebhat al Nusra. They called up the most redoubtable terrorist in the region, the future ISIS impresario Abu Muhammad al-Adnani. In the fullness of time, al-Adnani went on to organize the attacks at the Bataclan in Paris, and the immolation of the Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh. I knew him when he was a mere jeep driver.
Probably, the October 7 video seemed so familiar because the essence of the situation was the same. In both cases, millions of citizens had been subjected to a regime of on-again off-again air strikes. In both cases, terrorists thrived. Having persuaded themselves that their army amounted to a modern version of the world-destroying flood of the Koran, the terrorists intended for a rain of destruction to wash across the world. October 7 didn’t only recall my own blank terror and didn’t only make me tremble for the life of yet another innocent, though it did these things well enough. It also returned me to the moment in which my education in the psychology of terrorism began.
The thing about life in an electricity-less cell, far underground, is that you soon lose your orientation in time and space. Sometimes you wake up in the early evening believing it to be dawn. Winter couldn’t possibly have come yet, you tell yourself, and then one day, some chance glimpse of the out-of-doors reveals the snow to be sifting down over a hospital courtyard.
One’s captors do everything in their power to deepen this disorientation. Whenever you most need to see, that’s when they put you in a blindfold. You’re not meant to know the date, who’s winning the war, where you are, anyone’s actual names. The process by which your fate is being determined is a blackness: superintended, you are told, by the hand of God. During my time in Syria, I sustained a series of head injuries. Under such circumstances, the more one stares at the walls, the more the room spins. In the darkness, the problem gets worse. Which way is the floor? Off which walls is the gunfire ricocheting? You can guess, but really you have no idea. When I was living in these conditions, I longed to look out of one particular window, which was much too high up on the wall for me to touch, even when I took a running jump. At the time, I didn’t wonder much about why I was spending hours leaping at a barred window which was in any case covered over, on the outside, by a blue plastic tarp and a stack of sandbags. Now I know that I needed to reckon with the dimensions of my trap.
I happened to be captured just when al Qaeda’s power—over Aleppo, over weapons suppliers in the Gulf countries, over the imaginations of young Muslims everywhere—was reaching its peak. The prison was located in the basement of the Aleppo eye hospital, and life there had the feeling of an ongoing, occasionally terrifying, religious festival. Late at night, long after the rest of Aleppo had gone to sleep, the Jebhat al Nusra rank and file used to gather in nicely carpeted underground suites. They feasted. They sang their war hymns at the tops of their lungs, then woke in the predawn darkness to perform the Fajr, the first of the five daily prayers. Their togetherness delighted them, as did the stream of weapons and recruits from the West that coursed through the hospital corridors.
But their greatest source of happiness was the 20 members of the Alawite religion they had taken hostage. Alawites, to Jebhat al Nusra’s way of thinking, were the historical enemy of the Syrian people. “What is an Alawite?”—The preachers who came to our cells sometimes put this question to us, then dared us to respond. The right answer, for Jebhat al Nusra, was that Alawites, of whom there are some four million in Syria, were actually a species of Zoroastrian, originally from Iran. Many centuries ago, they had flooded into Syria in order to plunder the nation’s wealth, and, by practicing their black magic, to inveigle their way into power. Their true purpose, the Jebhat al Nusra sages taught, was to destroy Islam from within.
In the spring of 2013, I was moved into a communal cell which contained these 20 Alawite hostages, and about 15 Sunni prisoners. The terrorists had given us reason to suppose that their real plan was to kill us all. But one afternoon, a delegation of high-ranking terrorists appeared on the threshold of the cell to announce that the Alawite prisoners might not be killed after all. Their survival, it turned out, was to depend on the success of a cockamamie plan. The terrorists wanted the Alawites, whose number included a member of parliament and a military general, to call up their most powerful, most well-connected relatives. Aleppo was being bombed to smithereens at the time. The Alawite hostages were expected to press their families, who were, in turn, meant to press the Syrian government to end its carpet-bombing campaign. The families were then to deploy their dark arts in such a way as to cause the government to give the terrorists hundreds of prisoners and mountains of cash.
At the time, I understood the Syrian government’s hostage policy well enough to know that it couldn’t be questioned. Its policy was to bomb Aleppo as much as possible, to make no concessions, and to announce, every few days, with special fanfare, on national TV, that the army had hunted down and neutralized yet another terrorist lair. The Alawites knew that their relatives would already have thrown themselves at the feet of every government official they could find. They knew the Syrian government well enough to know what the outcome of this special pleading would have been. The government officials would have sighed. “Our military is pressuring the terrorists to submit,” they would have said. And also: “If you must blame someone, kindly blame the terrorists.”
Given the hopelessness of the situation, the hostages’ family conversations went rather well. As far as I could tell, they neglected to relay so much as a word of the captors’ demands. After all, the circumstances implied all the relevant conclusions. When my fellow prisoners got their families on the line, they cut straight to the important business. All of the hostages were men. All of them wanted to spend the minute and a half the terrorists had allotted in the presence of female voices. So husbands whispered to wives. Brothers urged sisters to relay the news from home. One of my fellow hostages had a pair of ten-year-old daughters. “Put the girls on the phone,” he told whoever picked up his call. When sons got their moms on the line, some of the sons couldn't speak. “Mom?” They said after a few moments of silence, “is that you, Mom? Oh. My mom?”
Before the war, during my occasional trips to Aleppo, I had only lovely conversations with the people there. Talking with strangers in the street made me fall in love with the city. Since then, however, it was obvious that something had gone badly wrong. Each of my fellow prisoners had been through some version of the bloody jeep ride. All of us were aware that the crowds in the street could, under the right circumstances, be more dangerous to us than the terrorists were. What had changed? When? Why?
To be sure, our captors developed a Koran-based justification for what they were doing. Like the terrorists in Gaza now, the ones in Aleppo were fond of referring to their army as a “flood” and a “typhoon.” They took it for granted that the time had come for a civilization-destroying cataclysm, during which the waves would sweep many of their own away. But it would all work out okay in the end, according to their reading of scripture, because after great violence, a great rejuvenation would come. The long-suffering families of this place would have the land all to themselves, as it had been in the golden time. God would ensure the restoration of their ancient powers.
In the meantime, in every vehicle and corridor, someone somewhere arranged for the terrorist war hymns to play softly in the background. Eventually, I came to memorize their lyrics. The jihad is a time of love, they said. It is love for your brothers in arms, for God, and for the thousands of absent comrades who call to you, right now, from paradise. Day after day, inside the prison, streams of young men appeared on the threshold of my cell. Sometimes they smiled at me. “The victory is ours, and we are upon the truth,” they would say. And also, “do you prefer the bullet or the knife?” We often had child visitors to our cell.
I wanted to know what had been going on out there, in the streets, that even the adorable Aleppo children wanted to see my throat slit. I had heard every falling bomb and every gunfight during the previous six months. I could imagine what the geography looked like well enough. The power lines lay in a thick spaghetti salad on the sidewalks. Every car had been incinerated. Every tree had been snapped off at the trunk. Here and there, at the entrances to once-important government buildings, the black flag flew.
But when a population has been living under a regime of on-again off-again airstrikes over a period of years, the changes that really take your breath away are the psychological ones. The hostage knows about these sorts of changes because they’re happening to him, too. The state of mind that comes to the survivors isn’t necessarily love for the local “resistance” fighters, nor is it total submission to God—though pretty much everyone you know will expect these attitudes from you. It is ambient terror. It is also an odd kind of ecstasy. After the airplanes have vanished from the sky, when only shouting can be heard in the streets, the children go rushing toward the impact crater. They shriek at the sky. Because they have gotten used to the airplanes, they quickly resume their soccer games. Their moms and dads yell for ambulances. If the kids have guns, as the older ones sometimes do, they strafe the clouds.
If you want to create a generation of young men who sometimes dream of suicide, sometimes of homicide, and always of final, spectacular, destruction, here is a foolproof way to do it: Isolate your subjects from the world. The Syrian government did this by drawing a military cordon around Aleppo. Something similar has been underway in Gaza for decades. Under such conditions, the local cleric-zealots, many of whom will themselves have spent years in underground government prisons, will find that recruiting for the jihad is as easy as shaking apples from a tree. The young fighters should be isolated from their families, the past, the news, from their own names—if their given names don’t recall the heroes of yesteryear—and prevented from knowing if it’s day or night. They should feel their former selves dying away. In the Jebhat al Nusra prisons, the dozens of guards, factotums, and Koran memorizers were undergoing some such sequestration from the world, though probably they thought they were just hanging out with their friends. This period of isolation was a rite of passage for all the fighters. Everyone had to go to a “camp.” Afterwards, many lived in safe houses in the countryside. Others weren’t exactly guards in our prison, nor were they fighters. All day long, every day, they recited the Koran. They lounged on sofas in the prison corridors.
In order to remind them of their holy obligation, the elder men put quizzes to the younger ones. “Who has signed the contract?” the clerics liked to ask, and also, more directly, “who isn’t afraid of death?” Of course, these clerics’ real purpose was to cause everyone under their control to give up on the world of the living. Darkness, intermittent sleep, ongoing terror—all such things were helpful to them but they tried not to overdo it since they also wanted to give their suicide-killers ample reason to carry on. Thus, all of these love-starved teenagers were under the impression that soon—not right away, but soon—some cleric or commander or sheikh would see to it that the teenager would be given a bride. As they waited, the teenagers often spoke, among themselves, of love. “I love you in God,” they liked to say. To each other, they were “my precious one,” and “sweetheart” and “my love.”
It wasn’t so hard for me to guess at the result of this program of isolation, death, and love. When the young people emerged—after six months or a year or however long it took—they belonged to the people who cared for them in their hour of need. They took their orientation in life as the elder Jebhat al Nusra men took theirs: from the Islamic calendar, which happens to be in the midst of the 15th century; from the Qibla, or direction of prayer; and from the clerics’ dreams of a globe-dominating caliphate.
In other words, the state of mind that comes over a city which has put up under sieges and air strikes over a period of years is a pleasant, total departure into the unreal. In my experience, this departure isn’t so different from the concentration that comes over a novelist or any creative artist who spends his hours among unreal things. Does it bother him that his creation doesn’t yet exist? Hardly. That his dream is too far-fetched to be taken seriously? He may well like it more. In the fullness of time, he’ll make the world believe, for this is his gift and his reason to live.
Such a state of concentration exists among those who are planning out spectacular attacks. It exists among those who are working out the bylaws for the city of God. One isn’t loyal to it because it is “ISIS” or “Hamas” or whatever the latest group of terrorists happens to be calling itself today. One is loyal to it because there is joy in creation, and because the creators are one’s (often actual) family members. Everyone who dreams such dreams knows that they are always under threat, especially from insidious things that creep in amongst the faithful, like rats, germs, and spies. That is why, indoors, among friends, love of the dream was a public thing, to be sung about and worked on and argued over in loud voices. Yet outdoors, among strangers, it had to be hidden away. Each member of the society of dreamers with which I lived had two selves: one for presentation in the public square, and one for the secret, steady, communal work of making the dream real.
I soon had enough of the dreamers. The dream had music, though in theory these dreamers were against music. It had costumes and scripted public exhibitions, though in theory the dreamers were against shows. I hated all of that. I was keen to make contact with the city’s real population. I knew it was out there. How could it not be? The population consisted mostly of women, I felt, since women, in that society, were focused on the everyday details of life: clean water, teaching the alphabet to children and foreigners, gathering enough fuel to heat the evening tea.
Eventually, my captors locked me inside the bedrooms of family households. Now and then I heard husbands shouting at wives. Those women, I decided, somewhat arbitrarily but with total conviction, were my fellow travelers. Their wicked government had been threatening them since they were children. Their husbands, I felt, weren’t much sweeter. So they adapted. They knew how to play along, how to get away with things, and what to say to soothe the poison out of the men. Had they been in charge, I was pretty sure, they would have come to an agreement with the Syrian government in 20 minutes. Inside my locked-down bedroom, I could hear these women washing the dishes, scolding their kids, and going about their lives. The more I listened to them, the more obvious it was to me that I needed these women. I needed their calm, their talent with the beautiful Arabic language, and their genius for getting through each day. Naturally, I wanted to speak to them.
Sadly, those women and I had been condemned to the back rooms of the houses. We couldn’t leave those rooms and we couldn’t talk to one another. A peek at our daily calendars would have shown solitary darkness in the morning, followed by shouting at midday, followed by outbreaks of terror at night. This is how the terrorists keep themselves in power: by making sure that if the practical-minded, reasonable people live at all, they live alone, in fear.
The terrorist high command soon separated me from the Alawite prisoners. A year and a half later, in late summer of 2014, the government of Qatar worked out a ransom payment—how much exactly I do not know—with my captors. The Syrian government had doubled and tripled down on its policy of blowing up the places in which it suspected the terrorists were living. Sadly, it proved incompetent at negotiating with them. Probably, it never really tried. With no one negotiating on their behalf, no Qatari ransom money on the horizon, and the army’s ground assault looming, my fellow Alawite hostages found themselves on their own. Those family phone calls were the last the families ever heard of their fathers and sons. I think about them still. This past summer marked the 10th anniversary of their disappearance.
Theo Padnos is a journalist and the author of Blindfold, a memoir about his two years in terrorist prisons in Syria.
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I read up until "The Syrian government did this by drawing a military cordon around Aleppo. Something similar has been underway in Gaza for decades." It's false. Many Gazans came regularly into Israel and even more traveled wherever they wanted via Egypt.
I think it is a fallacy to believe that anti-terrorism foments terrorism. Just like the fallacy that neutering law enforcement will result in better angels and less crime. The justification for terrorism and crime are similar and often linked… that the terrorist and criminal are part of an oppressed people that have the right to behave in immoral ways because of the oppression. The problem is that this feeling of oppression is often relative to the observation of what others have, and since somebody else will always have more, the justification is perpetual. Secondly, the immoral behavior becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the bad festers in the culture of the people and makes them unwanted by everyone else. The only remedy and redemption for this situation is to make the people so much more miserable that they begin to seek a different path. They must be made tired of the negative impacts derived from their bad behavior and not energized by it.