I Was a Prisoner of Al Qaeda In Syria. My Captor Is Now President

Last December, the former al Qaeda leader, Ahmed al-Shara, made history as he led a loose coalition of rebels into downtown Damascus. The Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, promptly fled in a helicopter. In January, al-Shara appointed himself the country’s new president. Lately, he’s been having earnest sit downs with David Patraeus in New York, addressing the U.N. General Assembly, and rocking a $50,000 Patek Philippe watch.

Before all this, I was his prisoner. In October of 2012, I slipped into Syria in order to carry out some freelance reporting. I was arrested almost right away. After about a week of being shuttled around in the trunk of a car, my captors brought me to the Aleppo eye hospital, which al-Shara was using as a prison. His men installed me in Cell One, formerly a toilet, in a line of basement cells. Somewhere above me, a civil war was laying Aleppo to waste

My time in that prison gave me some insights into al-Shara’s world view. I sincerely doubt the passage of time or victory in the Syrian civil war has changed any of his more extreme beliefs.

Down in that basement, the commanders liked to exhibit their readiness for martyrdom by strolling the corridor of this prison with their suicide pouches half open, so that red wires and little packets of putty, packed away in translucent envelopes, poked out over their bellies. 

All day long, every day, most of the men lounged on their sofas. They watched a lot of TV. As far as I could tell, these soldiers of God were in it for the feasts (platters of rice, chicken) and the choral singing (sample lyric: “We destroyed America, with civilian airplanes we did it/Reduced them to dust”), which occurred every evening in a prayer room across the hall from my cell. 

At the time, this prison also functioned as a GHQ for the Syrian phase of the International jihad. Down in the basement, this band of daytime TV watchers had kitted up an internet-equipped office, a many-pillowed meeting room, an industrial-scale kitchen, a torture suite, and a mosque. The other boss of this establishment, a character I knew as Abu Taha, eventually achieved a degree of fame as the director of the on-camera immolation of Jordanian pilot Moaz Kassabe, and as the organizer of the beheadings of three American prisoners: James Foley, Stephen Sotloff, and Peter Kassig. Eventually, under the name Mohammed Adnani, he presided over the ISIS caliphate as the sheikh of general affairs. In those early days, I knew next to nothing about these two men. 

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Even then, Adnani and al-Shara were famous. Among their admirers, it was understood that their devotion to Islam had forced them underground at an early age, and that, as they fomented revolution in the darkness, they learned to see — particularly into the will of God — as few men ever do. It was understood that the American authorities in Iraq had been aware of their extraordinary affinity for the world beyond our senses, had locked them away in their prisons for this reason, and that, during their years in Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, as the Americans did everything imaginable to shut out the light, their powers grew. 

During those early months in prison, I was aware in the dim, unconscious way a prisoner who is frightened out of his mind and doesn’t want to know a thing will eventually become aware, that Adnani and al-Shara wanted everyone in Syria to see just as they did. They were focused on sharpening the vision of their brothers in arms. In particular, the little society of revolutionaries that was coming to life in this basement was meant to see that shadowy powers abroad had been trying to destroy Islam in Syria for a thousand years, that lately these powers had been sending in CIA agents to get the job done, that the 3 million members of Syria’s Alawite sect were in on the plot, as were the 800,000 Druze and the 500,000 Christians, and that some portion of the nation’s 16 million Sunni Muslims had likewise given their hearts and minds to the international enemies of Islam. 

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According to the foreign fighters and the former students from the Aleppo university who delivered food to my cell every day, there was no sense in throwing oneself at the government machine guns, at least not for the time being, because the real enemies in Syria were the foreign powers. Who were their local agents? Everyone understood that Bashar al-Assad was one such agent, that thousands of his fellow agents had been doing evil in Syria, in secret, for generations, that a great rounding up was underway, and that now, these agents were being punished according to the law of God. What had they done, exactly? Which laws applied to them? Provided I had broken none of the sacred laws, these jihadis seemed to believe, I wouldn’t be killed. 

It took me about six weeks of listening at the heavy wooden door of my cell to guess that al-Shara, who was the cooler, more level-headed of the two eye hospital commanders, determined who had done what during processes, known in the hospital as “investigations,” and that he staged his investigations nearly every night in the hospital boiler room, a few doors down from my cell. 

At that time of night, the city electricity had long since been cut. The war outside had all but died away. We could have been on our own little planet. During the course of one of the proceedings for which I was present, my blindfold fell off. Such light as there was in that room, I discovered, came from candles and camping lanterns that had been scattered across the floor. A white plastic garden table, which sat just behind the room’s double doors, had been set with an arrangement of bullets, a few pairs of handcuffs, and a handgun. 

On the nights when the important commanders were present, an audience of 20-odd spectators would gather in the shadows. Foreign fighters interspersed themselves among teenagers from the neighborhood. Watery-eyed old grandfathers held the hands of school-age children. Everyone over the age of eight was covered in guns. 

There were times when the commanders hanged two or three people at once — by their wrists, from pipes beneath the ceiling. The guards would attach car battery cables to the prisoners’ limbs. In their first moments in the air, the prisoners’ feet would bicycle away. Yes, they confessed, they despised Islam. Yes, the Syrian government had sent them to kill the Muslims of Aleppo. Yes, they would do it again if they could.

Naturally, the confessions made matters worse. “You have been lying every moment of your life,” the interrogators would say. The guards would then bludgeon the prisoners. An insane kind of scream would make the room ring. When this subsided, the commanders would conclude: “You have no idea who we are, do you?” And then, almost always, they would deliver a warning: “Prepare yourself. For we’ve only just begun.” Eventually, the hanging people would withdraw from the conversation. “Oh God, Oh God,” they would shout. “Please, dearest God. I’m begging you.”

It usually took about 20 minutes for the strength in the prisoners’ voices to give out. As those men were surrendering, it would have been impossible for the audience — and everyone else in the room, by the way — not to see and feel and hear that a reckoning was at hand. For those present, it was a reckoning with what comes to people who devote themselves to empty powers, like the Syrian government and the CIA. It was a reckoning with the interrogators’ extraordinary capacity to see into the prisoners’ secret lives, the inescapability of punishment, and the terrible power of the divine law.

During my two years in Syria, I lived in 13 separate prisons. Over time, I must have listened to a hundred such reckonings. Whenever the guards came for a prisoner, they would stand in front of the door of his cell, then fling open the food hatch. A voice would order him to stand. The prisoner would be made to blindfold himself. “Give us your hands, animal,” a voice would say. The prisoner would reach his hands through the food hatch. His wrists would be cuffed. The cell door would swing open. “Come out,” a voice would say. Every time I heard this sequence of sounds it felt to me as though the prisoner was being asked to walk out of the cell, down the hall, then out of this world altogether. 

“Thank God, I am innocent,” a small-town mayor who happened to occupy a cell next to mine for a time used to say in the evenings as he was drifting off to sleep. He had been accused of helping to conscript the men of his town into the government army. “There isn’t a thing upon me. Look all you like,” he would say to himself — or to the eavesdropping guards, or, perhaps, to me. He would sigh, then drift off to sleep. One night, a few hours after he had put himself to sleep in this manner, they killed him. I listened to every second of it. I mopped up his cell afterward. I poured the water out of the tub in which they flung his bloody robe. 

What does this accomplish? Is it not unpleasant for the killers? When will it stop? These are the questions that come to the listeners in such prisons. Over time, I came to think that when the candlelight was throwing shadows against the walls and the car-battery power was crackling through the air — when prisoners really were being escorted out of this world — the little community that gathered in the shadows was itself drifting away from time and space. The deeper the shock and awe, the more totally the community took leave of planet Earth. Out there, for a little while at least, everything came clear. 

Not that it matters much now, but the stuff I made up for my captors had to do with my personal depravity. I admitted that I had come to Syria to seduce — or rape, if it came to that — as many Syrian women as I could. I wanted to do this for fun, and because I hoped to poison the women of Syria, and whatever children resulted from our unions, in the American way — that is, through continuous illicit sex. Eventually, I hoped, these Muslim women would all be like me. They would hate Islam. They would wander the Earth as I did, in search of money and sex. So they would appear to be human, but really, on the inside, they would be like the monkeys and the pigs.

The guy who took my rape-the-local-women confession from me wanted it to be true so badly that he typed it up, returned me to the boiler room the following day, read my false confessions out to me, then made me sign them. “If so much as a word you’ve said here is untrue,” he said to me on that occasion, “we’ll put a bullet through your skull.”

Over time, it dawned on me that my captors much preferred their fictions to the real world. And were their fictions so false? When those men gathered in their candlelit rooms, stood shoulder to shoulder, in that room anything seemed possible. The blood on the floor was certainly real. The prisoners’ agony and regret were real. There was holy justice. There was revenge. An unearthly power — electricity, yes, but something else — crackled and danced in the air. It was visible enough. It made the enemies of Islam writhe and jerk in their handcuffs. 

In the eye hospital, in the early days, everyone understood that al-Shara and Adnani saw further than the other revolutionaries, could produce longer, more appropriate quotations from the sacred texts, and read the will of God more astutely. Only they, I assumed, had the authority to make the realm of clear-sightedness and revenge live. The more blood those men spilled, the more they spread justice and wisdom across the earth. 

Nowadays, I know that as the eye-hospital commanders were learning how to build out their dream for Syria, far away, in the White House, foreign-policy specialists were preparing to inflict their own fantasy on the nation. In a New York Times article that appeared at about the time that I was having my reckoning, an anonymous U.S. official spoke of a “cataract of weaponry” flowing into Syria. I know now that the scheme this person referred to, Operation Timber Sycamore, was directing what would eventually turn out to be a billion dollars’ worth of weaponry, that if not sent directly into the hands of my captors then into the hands of their cousins down the street. In the eye hospital, the young men took to carrying their American M-16 style rifles into the cells. They referred to these as “the Americans.” 

In January 2013, the time-of-justice fantasy emerged from the eye hospital in the form of pickup sized packets of believers. Did those packets belong to ISIS? To al Qaeda? After my release, I discovered that this question interested journalists in the West. But why? It had no relevance to those of us in the way of the pickups. Those pickups were propelled by the power of belief. The pickup drivers who had given themselves to the fantasy most totally were the natural leaders. They moved up quickly through the ranks, as in any cult. The doubters got with the program or disappeared.  

Thanks to the social networks, I have been able to stay in touch with some of the pickup drivers I came to know in the Aleppo eye hospital. The ones with whom I speak most often weren’t at all surprised when the Assad government collapsed last December. For them, the event was an act of God — therefore wondrous and unaccountable. 

The pickup drivers with whom I happen to chat most often no longer have much confidence in the former leader of our grimy Aleppo jail, al-Shara. In their view, in making nice with the Israelis and the Americans, he has frittered away whatever power he once had. They think he might well have gone over to their side altogether, in which case, it would no longer be possible to think of him as a Muslim at all. In which case, he would be an apostate. In which case …

These pickup drivers are of the opinion that the nationwide awakening to God about which they used to preach to me caused the fall of Bashar al-Assad last December. It caused the collapse of the notorious government prison system, and a new era of political freedom in Syria. In their view, that coming out to God has only just begun. It is likely to unfold in fits and starts, according to God’s will, as they see it. In any case, it never had much to do with Adnani or al-Shara. For them, the coming out has always been a matter of learning to see by the light of the Koran. Whenever all the Syrian Muslims learn to see like this, they believe, that’s when God will wash away the nation’s deeper, hidden problems. 

The worst of the recent violence in Syria remains the massacres that occurred in March of this year, when a call to jihad which went out over minaret loudspeakers across Syria, summoned as many as 200,000 fighters, according to this report, to a battle in the Syrian Coastal Mountains, the Alawite homeland. They came in columns of pickup trucks. This Reuters investigation shows that a mixture of government-led forces and irregulars killed some 1,500 members of the Alawite sect during those attacks.

The latest round of violence in Syria began on July 13, when a familiar mixture of government forces and irregulars, sometimes operating independently and sometimes in coordination, descended on the Druze capital, Suweyda. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says that some 1,120 Druze were killed during these attacks. Defense and interior ministry personnel, the observatory claims, “executed” 194 of these victims.  

Who are these killers, really? This figure, clad in the ISIS regalia, is announcing that a brigade of monotheism is proceeding to Suweyda in order to “cleanse away the filth” of its Druze inhabitants.

Perhaps the monotheism brigade was responsible for shooting some hospital workers in Suweyda. Perhaps it was an allied group. In the old Syria, a crime like the massacre of a family of eight people — one of whom, Hosam Suraya, was American — would be murder. But when the pickup trucks are filled with seers, killings of this kind are the will of god. 

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For a few brief, alarming moments in 2014 and 2015, Adnani served as the Islamic State’s supreme commander for all of Syria, officially the sheikh of general affairs. In those days, his feeling, for whatever it’s worth, was that Muslims everywhere, regardless of their local permission structures, should seize the day: “Kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French,” he advised. “Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict. Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for the same ruling applies to them all.…” A drone strike in 2016, probably directed by the Pentagon, sent him to the realm beyond our senses. For his part, al-Shara has prospered. After he let me go in the summer of 2014, he threw himself into the work of a civic administrator in the northern Idlib Province. He — or his middle managers in Jebhat al Nusra, or some combination thereof — appears to have killed most of the people with whom I was in prison. I am in touch with about 20 families who continue to search for news of their missing relatives. 

On the surface of things, it seems that a new era is dawning in Syria, but in my opinion, the news we’ve seen lately show that Adnani’s spirit, mixed in with the al-Shara of old, is alive and well and calling out from central Damascus. Whether or not we can see what’s going on is another matter.