A Letter From Theo Padnos
Don’t do it. In the name of god, forget it. You dummies! Stop thinking what you’re thinking. Choose poetry, for heaven’s sakes. Can’t you choose chess? Cricket?
You insist? I thought you might. Very well then. In that case, I want to share something of what I know, not that you’ll listen.
Here are some traveler’s tips I picked up during my twenty-two month voyage through the Jebhat al Nusra prison system in Syria.
I suggest, in the first place, that you memorize something long from Shakespeare before you go. There will be nothing to read in your jail cell. Eventually, you will long for a rich and complicated poem. There will be snippets of “Oops, I Did It Again” in your brain. You’ll be surprised by how little actual literature you will find. I recommend “Song of Myself.” It has a positive, upbeat tone, and the author considers the present moment to be a tiny, forgettable blip in the vast and gorgeous architecture of time. In prison, you’ll want to take the long view.
Here’s another tip: after they arrest you, you will find yourself playing the moments before your arrest back to yourself, over and over. Just how, you will want to know, did things go so horribly wrong? The people around you will know what the real problem was. I suggest you listen to them.
During my time as a prisoner in Syria, I learned that all prisoners were thought to have committed a black, unforgivable crime. Everyone you speak to will think this of you and eventually, you will think so, too. Go on, give in to these thoughts. Anyway, you won’t really have a choice.
At first, of course you will think yourself innocent. You will plead your case to the other prisoners. But they cannot forgive you even if they wanted to. You are wasting your breath. Later you will plead with visitors to your cell. Everyone does so. It would be odd if you did not. But only the highest, top-most commanders can give you what you want and they will not come to you in a thousand years.
Meanwhile, the foot soldiers and the middle management commanders will never let you forget what you’ve done. “How will you atone?” they will ask. But it is a joking question, one to which there is no answer, and they ask it only to see you stammer and beg.
Anyway, as I was saying, they will know you by your crime. This is true of all prisons I’ve been in, not just those in Syria. You are your crime. Your crime is you and the other prisoners are their crimes.
Things are different in Syria, however, in this respect: you will not know, at first, what your crime is. Many, many people are arrested in silence. The newcomers arrive in the cell with plastic zip ties around their wrists, a bandanna over their eyes, and a half dozen toughs pushing at their heads and kicking their legs. The door slams. “What did I do?” the person exclaims.
The first thing the prisoner discovers about his crime is that, whatever it was, it was so plainly wicked, and so inhuman that the prisoner isn’t fit to look a respectable person in the eyes. “Face against the wall!” the commanders will say when they pass you on the hallway, or “Head down, eyes on the ground!” You will do as you are asked. If you hesitate, someone nearby will teach you – usually by means of a blunt instrument – not to hesitate.
The unforgivable thing the regime soldiers with whom I was imprisoned did was being regime soldiers.
They should have defected. They should have run away to Turkey or Lebanon. Instead, they chose to bear arms for Bashar. Not many such prisoners survive the Jebhat al Nusra jails.
In some of the prisons in which I lived in Syria, I met prisoners accused of speaking impolitely to women in the street. To our captors, these prisoners had committed the crime of losing themselves in lust, of having forgotten the immanence of god, and as a consequence of this forgetfulness, of carrying on like animals. Animals, the Jebhat al Nusra commanders often told us, could be traded of slaughtered or set free, according to the whim of the animal’s owner.
The prisoners accused of acting as regime thugs had committed the crime of valuing dirty cash over Muslim lives. This too was an unforgivable crime. What kind of filth would you have to be to sell out your co-religionist for a mess of worthless Syrian lira?
The people who supported the ISIS chief, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, were, for their part, enemies of Islam. Did not Baghdadi kill Muslims? Was he not a creature of the Americans, deployed by their spy agency, to hoodwink simple Muslims and to provoke them into unconscionable crimes? He was. His followers, if they had killed, and many of those in my prisons had killed, could not be forgiven.
As for me: my original sin was simpler than the rest. In the eyes of almost everyone I talked to, pro-regime, anti-regime, over twenty-two months in the North, the East, and the South of the country, my crime was that I had come to Syria. This was the black thing in my past, the act of self-involved idiocy no one could understand, my original sin. I couldn’t explain it away. I couldn’t deny it. I was guilty.
Accordingly, every few days, a commander or a foot soldier, an ISIS fighter or Jebhat loyalist would come to me with the frankest kind of bewilderment in his face. He would search my eyes. Maybe he would smile a bit. He would shake his head slowly and then ask, using the same words everyone else had used, “what on earth brought you to Syria?”
At first, I answered the way any journalist would answer: I came to tell the world about the disaster occurring in Syria, I would say. I would say that I came to stand up for the Syrian people, and to be a part of history and because reporting was my job. This answer often brought a sharp smack across the back of my head. If the person I was talking to was holding a handgun, as was often the case, my questioner would clock me on the skull with the butt of the gun. “Everyone on earth knows what’s happening in Syria,” the person would say. “Why did you really come?” Another typical reply to my “I came for the story” line: “you think we don’t have journalists of our own?” And the reply that came from calmer, friendlier commanders: “regardless of your intentions, the information you turn up here will end up in the hands of the US military. We cannot let that happen. Since we cannot trust you not to talk when we let you go, we cannot let you go.”
I could list a half dozen further rejoinders. But what would be the point? The most powerful, most well-informed military formations among the rebels in Syria do not want independent journalists in their areas. If they catch you – when they catch you – they will have a dozen replies to every one of your pleas. It won’t take you too long to understand the reality of the situation. They control the land. You made a terrible error in traveling there. It’s quite possible the error will cost you your life.
In the end, I found myself persuaded by the logic of my captors. They do indeed have their own journalists. Bilal Abdul Kareem, to mention a rebel-allied journalist, is taking risks no sane, mainstream journalist would take, is providing riveting, often heartbreaking footage, and has interviewed rebel commanders on camera who’re likely to be leading the jihad for generations to come. Who can do better than this? The Syrian regime has similarly well-placed journalists.
Also: the rebel commanders are right to point out that people in Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan have been watching the American military blow up their neighbors for more than a decade. Syrians have watched the killing on TV. Now it’s happening to them in real life. They are supposed to greet Americans who pay taxes to this world-bombing government in peace?
I know there are many peaceful people in these places who long to reach out to foreigners. Yet the neighbors of these peaceful people are stronger. It’s the neighbors you need to worry about. They are longing for revenge.
My dear journalist friends: in the regions the Syrian government does not control, you will not be met in peace. The men here (the powerful, worrisome ones always are men) won’t greet Americans – particularly those who come with fancy cell phones and expensive shoes, for the purpose of ferreting out information – in peace for the next fifty years. If you want to live, you will stay away.