A Disappearance in Damascus (21 page)

PART ONE

AHLAM WONDERED WHAT TIME
it was, if it was day or night. She had spent two days in her cramped isolation cell, dreading what they were planning for her. Her cell was not wide enough to stretch out her arms fully, nor long enough for her to lie down, but the guards weren't letting her sleep anyway, and the fluorescent lights never switched off.

When they first brought her to the intelligence headquarters in Sayeda Zainab, a motorcycle escorting the station wagon with another car following behind, she was taken directly to Abu Yusuf's office. He was at his desk. She went to sit down.

“No, stand,” he said. She stood back up. “Who was that blonde woman in your apartment?” he asked.

“She's a professor at a university in Vancouver.”

“You think I don't know that! I know everything about her.”

He took out his pistol, setting it in front of him on his desk. “We allowed you to open your school, to meet foreigners. Now it's time to pay up.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

He mentioned the name of an American correspondent who reported on the refugees in Syria. “We want you to go to work for her. See who she's talking to, what questions she's asking. And we want you to give us reports on the foreigners working for the UNHCR. Weekly reports.”

“No.” The word that would become her mantra.

“Take her to the next room,” he said to one of his men.

She was led out of his office and allowed to sit down. The agent who had taken her from her apartment stood there, looking unhappy. He looked like he was feeling guilty, she thought. Some minutes later—perhaps Abu Yusuf had made a phone call—she was brought back into his office.

He repeated his demands: the journalist, the UNHCR. Weekly reports.

“Listen,” Ahlam said, attempting reason. “I can't just ask a journalist if I can work for her.” She tried to explain that this was not the way such things were done. “The journalist asks for you, you don't ask to work for her. She will become suspicious. I will be taken for a fool.” And, she added, the foreigners at the UNHCR were just humanitarian workers, so she wouldn't spy on them.

“You're a traitor,” he snarled. “You betrayed Iraq by cooperating with American forces. Now you are trying to do the same in Syria.” He waved to his men.

They blindfolded her, took her outside and put her in a car. She couldn't tell in which direction they were driving. Finally, they stopped.

“You're at Douma Prison,” someone said, “where you belong.”

But they didn't let her out.

“Why is it taking so long?” she heard the driver ask.

“We're waiting for permission.”

It struck Ahlam that the prison wasn't expecting her, that this was Abu Yusuf's idea.

Finally permission came through. She was taken from the car and led down a set of stairs into a basement. In an office a guard took her purse and her phones, and removed her blindfold. He wanted to take the cord from her neck with the picture of her son. “No,” she said, clutching it. “You're not taking that.”

The guard was an older man with grey-black hair. Tall and big-boned, an imposing figure, yet with something humorous or human about him, a broad open face. His name was Sadiq, he told her. “Look,” he said, “anyone who sees that will take it from you because they will think you might hang yourself with it. So if you want it, hide it.” She tucked it under her shirt.

On her third day in the isolation cell, the door opened. She was blindfolded and handcuffed and marched down a hallway, turning right down a longer corridor. Though she could see nothing, she would later come to understand that hers was one of a row of eight or nine isolation cells, and that the longer corridor held the larger multi-person cells: on her left she was passing a cell for female prisoners next to a similar cell for male prisoners; and next to that another cell whose purpose, for some time, remained mysterious. When the guards reached the end of the corridor they ushered her into the final room. As she entered she heard the voice she already knew meant trouble.

“We hear you want to spy on our country,” Abu Yusuf began. “We hear you want to destroy us.” He walked over to
the chair where the guards had set her down and began kicking her feet, hitting her arms. “You're a criminal. You don't deserve to live. We give you shelter and peace. We give you food that deserves to go to my people. We let you make your living. And this is how you repay us.” He slapped her so hard that she was knocked from her chair. She pulled herself up and felt for the chair, then sat back down as if nothing had happened.

“She's not affected by my slaps,” he said, whether to himself or an onlooker, she could not tell, “so maybe she will be affected by this.” Moments later a stick sliced across her shoulders. Even then she would not give him the satisfaction of any reaction.

He recounted his favours to her: permission to work, permission to open a school. When she had gone to him the previous summer to ask permission to run the school, he had said, “You seem like a poor woman, so why do you give these lessons for free?”

“To serve the community and take the children from the street and educate them. That's all.”

“Good point,” he had said. “And we will support you in that. But we will need your help in the future.”

“I'm at your service.” She had not known that this was what he had in mind all along.

Now, bringing up the school again, he said, “If all you are doing is teaching girls then why are all these security agencies interested in you?”

Why indeed? Before he had thought of her as a simple woman, a refugee, no one of consequence; now he seemed to have the idea she was all-powerful.

The journalist, he repeated. That's all he wanted—for her to spy on the journalist the way she had spied for the Americans. Then she would be released, free to go.

“I'm sorry,” said Ahlam. “I can't do what you ask.” She had the feeling that he had promised to deliver a prize, to turn her into an informant, and her refusal was somehow personal: a humiliation, a failure in front of his superiors. If that was so, it made him a dangerous man.

The next day she was again taken from her cell in solitary, marched down the hallway, turning right down the longer corridor to the interrogation room at the end. This time Abu Yusuf had the letters of commendation she had received from US officials in Iraq, which had now been translated into Arabic. Months ago, she had hidden these documents, but when the agents had searched her apartment while she waited for them to take her away, they'd wasted no time finding what they were looking for: a child's schoolbag at the bottom of the doorless closet piled high with a hundred other objects. As if they'd somehow known exactly where to look.

These testimonies were essential to her refugee claim, but she knew that in the wrong hands they could also be dangerous. The first letter, from April 2005, was from Major Daniel J. Barzyk, a civil military affairs officer who praised her “tireless efforts” to help the poor and disadvantaged through her work as deputy director of operations at the General Information Center. He recommended she be sent on an outreach mission to the United States as an “Ambassador for Hope” to coordinate aid efforts and “raise awareness of the dire conditions that many people in Baghdad are living in.”

The second letter, from May 2005, was from Ahlam's supervisor, Captain Cinnie L. Mullins, head of the Iraqi Assistance Center–Baghdad. It called her a “creative and original thinker” with “a great deal of common sense that she applied to finding solutions to the problems of the Iraqi people.” The letter ended with a request: “Please assist her endeavor to secure aid to improve schools, increase housing and care for the orphaned, handicapped and displaced people of this once great land.”

The third and last letter was dated August 2005. Major Adam Shilling reported that she had been kidnapped the month before while on her way to work, released one week later after “suffering physical abuse resulting in several long-term injuries.” He noted that ongoing threats to her, her family and co-workers meant she could no longer work for them and was planning to leave Iraq. “Please render whatever assistance you can to her and her family.”

Here was proof, Abu Yusuf said, of her collaboration with the enemy. “You helped them invade Iraq and now you are helping them invade Syria. You are their spy in Damascus.”

The same words that been used when she was kidnapped: you're a traitor, you're a spy. Hearing the accusations, blindfolded as he beat her viciously about the head, or on the shoulder that had been injured during her kidnapping, as if he instinctively sensed her weakness, she flashed back to those days when she had wondered if she would live or die. She answered his demands the same way she had answered her kidnappers: no, no, no.

The interrogations continued daily and the demand was always the same: “We want you to gather information on the
journalist.” She was to go and offer her services as a fixer, and report back.

He knew all about her work for Al Jazeera English—they had been listening to both of her phones. Fortunately she still had the list of questions the Al Jazeera journalist had given her to ask inside her purse: nothing more than a boring inquiry into Swedish asylum laws. But he had not yet discovered her work for Human Rights Watch. It was just the sort of thing he wanted, concrete proof of treachery.

He said she was a spy for the Mossad, for the CIA. “Just confess and you will be released.” But she remained silent, accepting his blows without a murmur, ignoring the instinct to flinch or show pain, knowing that to give in on any one point would be to start a process that would never end.

In one session she tried to explain that working for journalists was just a sideline, something she did because she spoke English and knew a lot of people. That her real work was helping Iraqis.

“Yes, we hear you are some kind of Mother Teresa.” His voice had a mocking tone.

Ahlam had heard of the work of Mother Teresa and respected her; it was an insult to compare them. “Don't call me that! I am nothing next to that great woman, God bless her soul.”

“You're so tough even your husband is afraid of you. That's why he ran away!”

“I'm tough? If you're so tough, why did you have to send three men to follow me around?”

She heard a deep belly laugh coming from somewhere behind her. Normally Abu Yusuf was alone, but on occasion another man joined them in the interrogation room. She
was unable to see his face, but unlike Abu Yusuf, who called her bitch, slut, whore, he addressed her respectfully.

“Is there anything you need?” he asked her once.

“I need to know about my children,” she told him.

“Don't worry about your children,” he said. “Your children are fine.” But she didn't know whether to believe him.

Maybe it was a case of good cop/bad cop. Or maybe the man who laughed out loud was Abu Yusuf's superior. If so, it was looking bad for him.

“Why did I send my men to follow you?” Abu Yusuf retorted. “Because you're a traitor! You were working for the Americans.”

And on and on. From her cell in solitary, she prayed, meditating on her children and on staying strong. With the exception of three days when she was denied food and water for being “uncooperative,” she was fed three times a day from the prison kitchen. In the morning, white cheese and bread. Lunch, bad watery soup, which she refused to eat, and bread. Dinner, a boiled egg or halaweh, a sugar and sesame sweet. If they were feeling generous, a tomato or boiled potato.

The guards were aggressive, shouting, “What do you want?” if they spoke to her at all. Only Sadiq, who had warned her to hide her pendant of her son, treated her with respect, asking, “What can I do for you, sister? I know you don't deserve this.”

Twice a day he took her down the hall to the toilets. Finally she told Sadiq she had only one kidney, from birth, and had to go more than two times a day. He went to the warden to get permission; and after that he took her three times: morning, noon, afternoon.

It may have been this report that Sadiq made about her kidney that convinced the warden to move her out of solitary confinement. Or it may have been that Abu Yusuf was tiring of the daily beatings and interrogations that went nowhere. Because after thirty-three days of interrogation she was moved.