[Dialogue shortly after photo of Padnos at his home in New England]: "“Your practice of Islam is exactly the same as ISIS — you admire the same scholars and interpret the Quran just as they do?”
“Yes,” they agreed. “All of this is true.”...
ISIS commanders' "religious learning was beyond question." [7th parag. below photo of Padnos jihad clothing]
ISIS commanders' "religious learning was beyond question." [7th parag. below photo of Padnos jihad clothing]
[4th parag. above photo of Padnos and his mother]: "I had stopped being surprised when
Nusra Front commanders introduced their 8-year-old sons to me by saying,
“He will be a suicide martyr someday, by the will of God.” The children
participated in the torture sessions. Around the prisons, they wore
large pouches with red wires sticking out of them — apparently suicide
belts — and sang their “destroy the Jews, death to America” anthems."...
10/29/14, "My Captivity," NY Times Magazine, Theo Padnos. "Theo Padnos, American Journalist, on Being Kidnapped, Tortured and Released in Syria"
[7th parag. above photo of Padnos' jihad clothing]: "The
real issue between the Nusra Front and the Islamic State was that
their
commanders, former friends from Iraq,
were unable to agree on how to
share the revenue from the oil fields
in eastern Syria that the Nusra
Front had conquered.
On the one hand, I was pleased by this. It made the
men despise each other. Had their armies reconciled, I would have
become the prisoner of a reunited fundamentalist organization under the
command of the stronger of the leaders, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the
Islamic State. Even before the recent beheadings, I was unenthusiastic
about this prospect....In
addition, the fighters told me, both sides believe that 50,000 years
ago, Allah decreed that they should die in exactly this way, at exactly
this instant in history.
For
the moment, however, the Islamic State seemed to have the edge in the
recruitment battle. Many of the Nusra Front soldiers told me that over
the previous months, their siblings and cousins had been fighting for
the Islamic State. The pay was better. And the Islamic State, a stronger
army, had won victories across eastern Syria and Iraq. Once, during my
time in Deir al-Zour, the commanders put me in a cell with five
disfavored members of the Nusra Front. These prisoners were accused of
having defected or wishing to defect to the Islamic State. They denied
this, but when the guards were far away, they told me that any Nusra
Front fighter wishing to become an Islamic State fighter had only to
make a few phone calls. He would be required to whisper certain words
about the greatness of Baghdadi. In that instant, the fighter’s history
would be forgiven. The next day, he would meet his new commanding
officer in a mosque or a restaurant. He would be given a new name and a
new cellphone, and his life would begin again....
 |
| 2005 in Yemen |
It
was clear, even to the foot soldiers, that our voyage was no “glorious
operation on the path of God.” Its purpose probably wasn’t to retake the
Golan Heights either, though rumors to this effect had circulated
through the caravan. It was nothing less than an abandonment of the oil
fields, the military bases, the prisons and everything else the Nusra
Front had worked to control for some two and a half years....
One morning in August, when the fighters guarding me were asleep, I took
a bag of trash into a courtyard as I normally did....A
half-hour later, having stuffed the Vermont manuscript deep into my
jihadi trousers, I tiptoed out.
[1st parag. below photo of Padnos' jihad clothing]: By
this point, I knew better than to seek refuge among the “moderates” of
the Free Syrian Army. I asked a passing motorcyclist to take me to a
hospital. At the hospital, a dour-looking man greeted me. “I am a
journalist,” I said. “From Ireland. Please, you must help me. I love the
Syrian people.”
“Don’t
worry,” he said. “I am the F.S.A.” He admitted me to an inner room. “No
one comes in here without my leave,” he said. “You can relax. You are
safe.” I asked if I could contact my family. “Of course,” he said. The
easiest way, he said, was for me to send an email. But the man with the
computer’s password was away. It would take just a few minutes for him
to get to the hospital. Did I need tea? Medical attention?
The F.S.A. soldier stepped out. Ten minutes later, he returned, beckoning me with the index finger of his right hand. He seemed to do it in slow motion, as a jailer might summon an innocent prisoner to his execution.
The F.S.A. soldier stepped out. Ten minutes later, he returned, beckoning me with the index finger of his right hand. He seemed to do it in slow motion, as a jailer might summon an innocent prisoner to his execution.
In
the front hallway of the hospital stood a group of about 15 Nusra Front
fighters, Kalashnikovs dangling from their right hands. No one spoke. A
few seconds passed, and then someone said in a barely audible voice,
“Come, American.”
They
drove me back to the villa. They hit me a bit in the car, and then, on
arriving in the living room where the guards had been dozing an hour
before, they flung me onto the carpet. The Man of Learning sat
cross-legged on a sofa. “Who has handcuffs?” he asked. Someone cuffed my
hands. The Man of Learning grinned. “You are a Nazarene liar and a
sneak, Bitar,” he said. “This afternoon, I will execute you by my own
hand.”
I spent much
of the following weeks locked inside a bedroom in the villa....As I waited for
something to happen, I sat by a window and worked on my Vermont novel....
[7th parag. below photo of Padnos' jihad clothing]: Earlier,
in March, the Nusra Front commanders in Deir al-Zour put a pair of
Islamic State commanders in the cells on either side of mine. Because
their religious learning was beyond question, the jail administrators
allowed us to speak, provided it was about Islam. During this period, I
occasionally brought up the “You killed my men, I must kill yours” logic
in which the Muslims of the region seemed trapped. My cell neighbors
were well placed to have an opinion. Abu Dhar, on my left, previously of
Al Qaeda in Iraq, subsequently of the Nusra Front, lately of the
Islamic State, had been a weapons trafficker. Abu Amran, on my right,
had the same credentials and bragged of having been responsible for
explosions that killed dozens — perhaps hundreds — of Syrians and
Iraqis.
“But
surely,” I said, “this violence is not good for Islam.” They
temporized. In their view, the fight between Baghdadi and the Man of
Learning amounted to mere childishness. Abu Dhar and Abu Amran were
almost too embarrassed to speak of it. Yet the explosions and sniper
killings that both groups espoused were justifiable — even wise....
The battle against his
forces was just a skirmish in the great global combat to come, in which
the believers would prevail against the unbelievers.
“After we conquer Jerusalem, we will conquer Rome,” Abu Amran told me.
“No one is trying to conquer you,” I said.
“Why do you want to conquer everybody?”
The
conquerors had come to Syria in the past, Abu Amran answered. “They are
sure to come again.” He spoke of
the oil fields over which the West
slavered, the archaeological treasures and the rise of Islam, which the
world’s governments — all of them unbelievers, especially the Middle
Eastern ones — could not abide.
“If
Obama bombs the believers here, we will bomb you there,” Abu Amran told
me....Over the last 22 months, I had stopped being surprised when
Nusra Front commanders introduced their 8-year-old sons to me by saying,
“He will be a suicide martyr someday, by the will of God.” The children
participated in the torture sessions.
.
Around the prisons, they wore
large pouches with red wires sticking out of them — apparently suicide
belts — and sang their “destroy the Jews, death to America” anthems in
the hallways. It would be a mistake to assume that only Syrians are
educating their children in this manner. The Nusra Front higher-ups were
inviting Westerners to the jihad in Syria not so much because they
needed more foot soldiers — they didn’t — but because they want to teach
the Westerners to take the struggle into every neighborhood and subway
station back home..
They want these Westerners to train their 8-year-olds
to do the same. Over time, they said, the jihadists would carve
mini-Islamic emirates out of the Western countries, as the Islamic State
had done in Syria and Iraq. There, Western Muslims would at last live
with dignity, under a true Quranic dispensation.
During
my discussions with senior Nusra Front fighters, I would force them to
confront the infinity of violence that this dream implied. “O.K.,
perhaps you have a point,” they would say.
“Anyway, we only want to
dispense with Bashar. We must build our caliphate here first. Provided
the West doesn’t kill us, we won’t kill you.”
“Will your caliphate have schools?” I would ask. “Hospitals? Roads?”
“Yes,
of course.” But not one of them seemed interested in repairing the mile
after mile of destroyed cityscape encountered during any voyage in
Syria. Not one seemed interested in recruiting teachers and doctors — or
at least the kinds of teachers and doctors whose reading ventured
beyond the Quran. They wanted bigger, more spectacular explosions. They
wanted fleets of Humvees. Humvees don’t need roads....
[Last parag.] I later learned that the Qataris helped engineer my release, as they
have for others kidnapped in the region. But in those first moments, it
felt to me that I had escaped from Al Qaeda by an incalculable miracle."...
======================
Padnos thought he knew his "way around the Arab world." His capture took place after he'd settled in Turkey in Oct. 2012:
"The
cruelty of my captors frightened me, but my bitterest moments in those
early weeks came when I thought about who was most responsible for my
kidnapping: me.
I
believed I knew my way around the Arab world. In 2004, when the United
States was mired in the war in Iraq, I decided to embark on a private
experiment. I moved from Vermont to Sana, the Yemeni capital, to study
Arabic and Islam. I was good with languages — I had a Ph.D. in
comparative literature — and I was eager to understand a world where the
West often seemed to lose its way. I began my studies in a neighborhood
mosque, then enrolled in a religious school popular among those who
dream of a “back to the days of the prophet” version of Islam. Later, I
moved to Syria to study at a religious academy in Damascus. I began to
write a book about my time in Yemen — about the mosques and the reading
circles that formed after prayer and the dangerous religious feeling
that sometimes grew around them.
At
the beginning of the Syrian civil war, I wrote a few articles from
Damascus, then returned to Vermont in the summer of 2012. Just as the
Islamists were beginning to assert their authority in Syria, I began
pitching articles to editors in London and New York about the religious
issues underlying the conflict. By now, I could recite many important
Quranic verses from memory, and I was fluent enough in Arabic to pass
for a native. But these qualifications mattered little. The editors
didn’t know me; few bothered to reply. Perhaps, I thought, if I wrote
from Syria itself, or from a Turkish town on the border, I’d have better
luck. On Oct. 2, 2012, I arrived in Antakya, Turkey, where I rented a
modest room that I shared with a young Tunisian. I tried pitching the
editors again. Still nothing....
By this time, despite its
aggressive bombing campaign against the opposition and the civilian
population, President Bashar al-Assad’s military government was losing
ground....On TV, Islamic preachers railed
against the Syrian government: Those who helped it would have their
flesh cut into bits, then fed to the dogs. The government, for its part,
warned that in areas of the country under opposition control, fanatical
Islamists, possibly in the pay of the Israelis, were sneaking in from
Iraq and Libya. The main opposition group, the Free Syrian Army, founded
by former Assad generals and considered moderate by many in the West,
had taken over the two most important border crossings north of Aleppo....
Anyone who has lived in Syria knows how bitter the divides are
between the pious and the secular, the Assad loyalists and the
dissidents, the well connected and those who struggle to get by. It
would be impossible to plot these divisions on a map, because they often
run through families, even individuals. Nevertheless, by the autumn of
2012, a traveler might have oriented himself by them:
Most who lived
east of the mountain chain that runs from the city of Homs toward the
Turkish border were Sunni opponents of the government;
most who lived in
the mountains or to the west were Alawite supporters of Assad.
As
I walked, I envisioned myself traveling along these fault lines. I
would stop into villages and interview people, telling the story of a
nation with many identities, dissatisfied with them all, in trouble,
wanting help....
My
experience in Arab countries ought to have given me pause.
After I
published my Yemen book, I changed my name from Theo Padnos to Peter
Theo Curtis, worried that the book might make reporting from the Middle
East difficult. I knew how Westerners were often viewed. But I had done
all my studying under the eye of military governments, in places where
the secret police listened to every word uttered in every mosque.
I had
never set foot in a region where only a militant Islam held sway.
Things
are different in such places.
Almost immediately, I fell into a trap.
One
afternoon in Antakya, I met three young Syrians. They seemed a bit
shifty, but not, as far as I could tell, more militantly Islamic than
anyone else. “Our job is to bring stuff from here to the Free Syrian
Army,” they told me. They offered to take me with them. Thinking I’d be
back in a few days, I told no one, not even my Tunisian roommate, where I
was going.
We
slipped through a barbed-wire fence in the middle of an olive grove. I
looked back toward Turkey. So far, so good. My Syrian friends led me to
an abandoned house that I could use as a kind of field office. The next
morning, I helped the young men straighten up the place, cleaning the
floors and arranging pillows in an orderly row on a rubber mattress.
They sat me down in front of a video camera and asked me to interview
one of them, Abu Osama. When we were done, the cameraman smiled, walked
across the room and kicked me in the face. His friends held me down. Abu
Osama stomped on my chest, then called out for handcuffs. Someone else
bound my feet.
The cameraman aimed a pistol at my head.
“We’re
from Al Tanzeem Al Qaeda,” Abu Osama said, grinning. “You didn’t know?”
He told me I would be killed within the week if my family didn’t
provide the cash equivalent of a quarter kilogram of gold — which the
kidnappers thought was about $400,000 but was actually closer to $10,000
— the sum to which he was entitled, he said, by the laws of Islam.
Despite
the video and the ransom demands, these kidnappers were amateurs. That
night, I slipped out of the handcuffs that attached me to one of the
sleeping men. In the soft sunlight of the Syrian dawn, I sprinted past
walls covered in graffiti, through a cemetery and over a median strip,
then stopped a passing minibus. “Take me to the Free Syrian Army right
away,” I said. “This is an emergency.”
When
I arrived at the F.S.A. headquarters, I appealed to the officers in the
most desperate terms. They argued a bit among themselves, then took me
to an Islamic court, where a judge questioned me and remanded me to a
cell that had been converted from a Turkish toilet....
.
.
Ten
minutes later, the F.S.A. officers returned, accompanied by my
kidnappers, and I was trundled into a car and taken to an F.S.A. safe
house. There I was placed in a hole in the ground. Was I six feet below
the surface? Only three? I didn’t know. Officers threw dirt on me,
laughing and shouting insults. Someone jumped down and landed on my
chest. Someone else beat me with the butt of his Kalashnikov. One
officer insisted that I reply to his questions by yelling out, “I am
filth, sir!”
A
few days later, the F.S.A. transferred me to a group of Islamists, and I
had my first lesson in
how to distinguish Islamist fighters from the
Free Syrian Army:
The fundamentalists think of themselves as the
vanguard of an emergent Islamic state.
They torture you more slowly,
with purpose-specific instruments. You never address them as “sir,”
because this reminds everyone of the state’s secular military. When the
Islamists torture you, they prefer to be addressed by a title that
implies religious learning. For the younger fighters, “ya sheikhi!” (“o, my sheikh!”); for the older ones, “emir.”
[2nd parag. below picture of Padnos in fetal position]: The F.S.A., it turned out,
had given me to the Nusra Front, or Jebhat al Nusra, which was using
the Children’s Hospital in Aleppo as a headquarters and a prison. During
my first days there, I couldn’t believe that what was happening to me
was actually happening to me. My mind kept replaying the hours just
before and after the young men I met in Turkey attacked me. It seemed to
me that I had been walking calmly through an olive grove with Syrian
friends, that a rent in the earth had opened, that I had fallen into the
darkness and woken in a netherworld....
When the emirs came to my cell, they often stood in a semicircle over my
mattress, muttered among themselves, dropped a candy wrapper or a used
tissue on the floor, spit and then left without saying a word....
The
leader — I’m not sure who it was, I couldn’t see — carried a heavy
stick and a cattle prod. As I lay there, he hit me across the back of
the head, then strolled around the room reciting prayers.... He would shock me with the cattle prod....Toward the end, I heard the leader approach and braced
myself for another blow. It didn’t come. Instead, he knelt close to me
and whispered in my ear: “I hate Americans. All of them. I hate you
all.”...
I was then, and remain now, more than willing to say good things about Islam.
When
religious authorities or higher-ranking Nusra Front members — anyone
with bodyguards — came by my cell, I sometimes recited verses from the
Quran. These were verses that I loved, and the visitors seemed pleased.
But the net result of these recitations was...nothing. Eventually,
one of the more educated guards explained to me that
as a Christian and
an American, I was his enemy. Islam compelled him to hate me.
“Does it really?” I asked.
Yes,
he said. America had killed at least one million Muslims in Iraq.
Anyway, the Quran forbade amicable relations: “O you who believe!” this
guard would recite.
“Do not take the Jews and the Christians for
friends.
They are friends one to another. And whoso among you takes them
for friends is indeed one of them.”...
My guards spent the
first 10 minutes trying to get me to accept Islam. Then they gave up.
Then they asked if I could introduce them to single women from a Western
country....
I
didn’t know it at the time, but the Nusra Front was losing its war with
the Islamic State, the group often referred to as ISIS. From
conversations with guards and other prisoners, I gleaned that the two
organizations were about equal in strength and that under no
circumstances would the Islamic State be allowed to touch the oil
fields, the real prize in Syria’s east. But in mid-June, when I was
allowed to watch TV for the first time since my capture, I saw a map
covered in Islamic State logos. Soon, the Nusra Front stopped
construction on a prison it was building next to my cellblock. “Why?” I
asked a guard.
“You’ll see,” he said....
After traveling several hundred miles, our train of
pickups and Kia Rios arrived at a ridgeline bunker about 20 miles east
of Damascus. A detachment of Free Syrian Army soldiers held the
position. They welcomed us, but with no special warmth....
How was I to communicate with the F.S.A.? At the outset of our journey,
the Man of Learning told me that I was never to talk to outsiders. That
morning, I decided to take a risk.
The F.S.A. soldiers were heating up their tea. “Hey!” I said to them. “What’s your news? Peace be upon you.” They returned my salaams. One asked where I was from.
“I’m
sorry,” I said. “I can’t talk to you.” They gave me a cup of tea, and
the five of us drank in silence. Then another soldier repeated the
question.
“From far away,” I replied. “How about you?” They were all from around Damascus.
“Have you come to Syria for the jihad?” someone asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m a civilian, a journalist.”
“How long have you been with Jebhat?” he asked.
“Almost two years,” I said....
“I
studied Arabic for two years in Damascus,” I said. “I love the Syrian
people.” He nodded....
I
returned to the F.S.A. troops. One told me that his unit had recently
traveled to Jordan to receive training from American forces in fighting
groups like the Nusra Front.
“Really?” I said. “The Americans? I hope it was good training.”
“Certainly, very,” he replied....
After a few moments, I asked, “About this business of fighting Jebhat al Nusra?”
“Oh, that,” one said. “We lied to the Americans about that.”...[2nd parag. above photo of Patnos in New England home].
I
was curious about the futures of the five people now responsible for
looking after me. What if they retired from military life, I asked, went
home and promised to obey the Islamic State in the future? Would the
group still wish to kill them?
“Of course,” they said.
“Really?” I asked. “But why?”
“Because we are Jebhat al Nusra,” they replied.
I
knew the answer to the next question but asked it anyway. “Your
practice of Islam is exactly the same as ISIS — you admire the same
scholars and interpret the Quran just as they do?”
“Yes,” they agreed. “All of this is true.”
“And it’s true,” I said, “that when you joined Al Qaeda, in the early goings of the revolution, ISIS did not exist?”
“Yes, this is so,” the fighters agreed.
“And now they’re hoping to kill you?” I asked.
They shrugged their shoulders. “Yes.”"...
[7th parag. above photo of Padnos' jihad clothing]: The real issue between the Nusra Front and the Islamic State was that
their commanders, former friends from Iraq, were unable to agree on how
to share the revenue from the oil fields in eastern Syria that the Nusra
Front had conquered."...
Image above: "Padnos in 2005 in Yemen, where he studied Arabic and Islam. Credit From Theo Padnos"
Image above: "Padnos in 2005 in Yemen, where he studied Arabic and Islam. Credit From Theo Padnos"
========================
Among comments at NY Times:
======================
"Ponderer Mexico City 2 hours ago
=====================
"Ponderer Mexico City 2 hours ago
So much for McCain's tiresome yowling about arming the Free Syrian Army "moderate" rebels....The "moderate" Muslims
certainly seem complicit with the atrocities of their "extremist"
brethren."
=====================
"Tony California 2 hours ago
What this story makes clear is that there are no
"good guys" in the Syrian conflict. Much as many members of Congress
and the public want us to support this side or the other, these will
only be alliances of convenience. One side needs our weapons to defeat
the other side so that its own brand of harsh Islamic rule may hold
sway. Those same "allies" when given control of the reins of power
after Assad's eventual defeat and death will not be secular or Western
oriented like Assad, they will however, like Assad, spread death and
destruction throughout the region (and possibly even here). Unlike
Assad, they'll do it in the name of Islam. These are the alliances the
hawks and chicken-hawks in Congress are aching for. I'm not saying we
shouldn't ally ourselves with the least bad group, but we shouldn't
harbor any illusions that they too won't turn on us in a heartbeat."
=============================
"Theo Padnos has written for The London Review of Books, The New Republic and other publications. This is his first article for the magazine."
.
