Syria’s New Militant Leaders Told Me They Captured Austin Tice

In the fall of 2012, as I was planning out a reporting trip into Syria, one of the story ideas I hoped to sell on to editors back home involved retracing the itinerary of Austin Tice, a fellow freelancer who had disappeared somewhere in Syria about eight weeks earlier. One evening on a hotel balcony in Antakya, Turkey, I made the mistake of sharing my story idea with a Syrian hotel guest. He seemed friendly enough at the time, but 24 hours later, he was pointing a handgun at my forehead as his three friends filmed the scene on an expensive-looking video camera. Until that moment, I assumed they had brought the camera along because they too were hoping to advance their freelancing careers. 

Later that night, I escaped from these young men, who turned out to be mere amateurs in the terrorism world. But because professional terrorists had brought much of northern Syria under a kind of psychological control, as I did not quite realize at the time, my escape only led me to the local police — and from there, swiftly on to the top officials in the international al Qaeda organization. These are the people who have lately overturned Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria. They now rule the country.

The Austin Tice matter came up again about eight weeks after my “arrest,” to borrow my kidnappers’ term. By this point, I was lying at the feet of an interrogator in the basement of the Aleppo eye hospital. Upstairs, in the hospital lobby, Jebhat al-Nusra, as the Syrian al Qaeda franchise wished to be known, had improvised a not-entirely-fake city hall, in which they issued permits and tried to sort out disputes among neighbors. All the important business took place downstairs. Down there, in a warren of rooms well-insulated from the barrel bombs, they had kitted up a prison, a mosque, a dormitory for foreign fighters, and a torture suite that the younger members referred to (half-kidding?) as “our room of death.”

The interrogator who brought me into this room imagined himself the sort who had seen through every enemy stratagem long ago. “The CIA lost another agent in Syria a few weeks ago,” he said, shouting to make himself heard over another interrogation that was occurring a few feet away. “We know that they sent you here to look for him.” In those moments, my hands were cuffed behind my back. My eyes were covered by a blindfold. The interrogator was pressing his boot into the back of my neck. As he couldn’t remember the name of the lost agent, he asked me to supply it, which I did. “Yes, Austin,” he shouted into the darkness. “We have him, too.”

As far as I could tell, my interrogator inhabited a parallel reality in which every few minutes the CIA dispatched a new flock of agents into Syria. He dwelled there along with the dozens of other interrogators and foot soldiers with whom I had discussed the CIA’s doings in Syria to date. According to them, the CIA had gotten wind of a resurgence of Islamic feeling in Aleppo. It had sent in Austin and I — and was paying 10,000 traitorous Syrians — to stomp it out. 

About the CIA, I felt they were all nuts. But I had watched a certain harrowing Austin Tice video more than once. In that video, the last time the world heard from him, armed men lead him along a mountain path. He is in a blindfold and handcuffs. The men around him are calling out the greatness of God. “O Jesus, o Jesus,” he is saying — to himself, perhaps, or, possibly, to the heavens. I knew from my own experience that this is the state of psychological compliance into which my captors liked to bring their victims. For this reason, when the interrogator said that his group had Austin, I was inclined to trust him.

In September of 2012, when that video appeared on the internet, observers in the U.S. — noting the captors’ robes, which recalled the mujahideen of Afghanistan rather than those of Syria — judged the video a fake. In their view, it had been cooked up by the Syrian government in order to paint the revolutionaries as America-hating terrorists. Yet, within a few hours of my arrival in the eye hospital basement, it was clear to me that flowing white robes were status symbols among the Jebhat al-Nusra high command. That sort of clothing suggested that the wearers were not Johnny-come-latelies to al Qaeda, as most of the Aleppo fighters were, but had rather been with bin Laden in Afghanistan. 

Though this interrogator struck me as too low down in the hierarchy to have specific information about Austin, I was inclined to trust his intuition because of the details in that video. The way the man who led Austin made him kneel by pushing the chain of this handcuffs towards the ground, the way Austin pressed his forehead into the sleeve of the man who did this, the weakness in Austin’s voice as he begged his captors for mercy — by this point in my captivity, I had been there and done all of that. 

Over the following two years, I lived in 13 separate prisons in every corner of Syria. Eventually, I came to see that a single architecture governed the design of all of them. Upstairs, there was always a public-facing room in which the Jebhat al-Nusra men lounged, met reporters, and discussed the many ways in which ordinances could be made to harmonize more truly with the Koran. The collective prayers, the torture, and the indoctrination of the foot soldiers always occurred downstairs, in the darkness. Often, only candles lit those rooms. 

Over time, I came to see why the commanders were building up these underground realms. In their view, Syria was an earthly paradise, overflowing with riches, yet for centuries, the enemies of Islam had been conniving to destroy it. Specifically, we came to plunder the natural resources (to “rape the land” as the Jebhat al-Nusra men put it), to have our way with the women of Syria, and to poison the Syrian people against Islam. Thus Jebhat al-Nusra’s mission: to round up the Alawites, the Shia, the Christians, whatever CIA agents could be found, and everyone else they judged to be alien and hostile to the paradise. In prison, the Jebhat al-Nusra men gave all of us names that corresponded with our essential function in life. For the first six months of my prison life, I was “Filth.” Others were “Insect,” “Rat,” and “Cur.” When many of us were confined to a single room, our name was “You Germs.” Jebhat al-Nusra’s higher purpose, as the soldiers often reminded us, was to restore the law of God to the Land of Sham, to use their word for the Levant. Over time, I heard the verse in which God sets out the sanction for those who bring corruption into the land often enough to know it by heart. That sanction is death, crucifixion, or a cutting off of the hands and the feet.  

Because “al nusra” means “the victory” and because the Surah of Victory so often echoed through our prisons, during my second year in Syria, I made a point of pressing my captors to explain what victory meant to them. By the summer of 2014, they — and that half of the Jebhat al-Nusra army that had lately decided to call itself the Islamic State — controlled an area the size of France. To me, their laws seemed very Islamic. Could they not be satisfied with what they had? This line of questioning almost always ended in my captors casting incredulous grins at me. Their goal was victory over the regime in Damascus, to be followed by victories in Jerusalem and Rome — or death, which would be its own kind of victory. Did I not know this?

I did know that this was the official line. I was a doubter. By this point, it was clear enough, at least to me, that they were involved in a perpetual labor, which they loved, returned to every few hours, and would never abandon. Sometimes it involved the blowing up of enemy checkpoints, and sometimes it required them to scour the neighborhoods in search of infiltrators. I heard them at their work most often during the torture sessions. Over the course of two years, I’m sure I listened to a thousand of them. Often, the commanders invited their pre-teen kids, grandfathers, and clusters of foreign fighters to witness them at their work. Often, many victims were tortured at once. In my opinion, everyone who spent time in those rooms understood that the victories the Jebhat al-Nusra men produced there occurred because the enemies could be seen lying prostrate on the floor, or hanging by their wrists from hooks in the ceiling. Jebhat al-Nusra’s victory was in the unity of purpose those moments produced, in our screaming, and in the way that collective terror of that kind has a tendency to divorce a candlelit room from earthly time. 

Back when I was living with them, my captors were happy to proclaim that the Land of Sham, which also includes Israel, was beset by a pair of enemies. In the first place, Jebhat al-Nusra meant to dispense with Syria’s 4 million Alawites, whom they referred to as “our Jews.” Later on, after they had conquered Damascus, they would confront the more powerful, more ancient, more numerous enemy, namely Jewish people in general. 

As far as I can tell, the reporters in Damascus now are as taken with the “we want Syrian law to be more Islamic” line of talk as they were when they visited these men in the Aleppo eye hospital. In my opinion, if the reporters really wanted to get to the truth of things, they would begin by asking Ahmed al Sharaa, aka Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — the leader of the group that toppled Assad — what became of Austin Tice and why.

Beneath al Sharaa’s palavering, there lies a philosophy of pest extermination. Is this a sound notion on which to build up the future of a nation? It doesn’t seem so to me, but it’s clearly too late for regrets.