I realized that I needed to be prepared for this detention to continue for a very long time, or even to end in tragedy. I had to stay in shape, physically and mentally.
Reporting the Arab Spring
It’s difficult to write this kind of testimony because it’s so full of traumatic memories and intimate suffering. Nevertheless, it is important to document the story so that the world knows what happened. That’s why I’m forcing myself to write.
I started working as a journalist in 1999. In 2002, I left France and started covering conflicts abroad on a freelance basis. I first covered the war in Iraq, and moved to Baghdad several months before the American invasion. I lived in Baghdad for two years and covered events in the country for a total of five years.
The Arab Spring was another important page in my life, both personally and professionally. From Egypt to Libya to Yemen, I covered them all. But the Syrian revolution is probably the one that has had the biggest impact on me. Syria was the first Arab country I visited when I was a very young adult. I feel a very special attachment to this country. It’s also the country where I discovered the meaning of dictatorship. Ever since my first visit, in the days of Hafez al-Assad, I have understood the political violence that reigns there.
So, of course, as soon as the revolution broke out in Syria, I rushed to cover it. In September 2011, I became the first Western journalist to travel to the country clandestinely. Then in February 2012, I travelled to Homs via Lebanon. My third trip took me from Turkey to Aleppo. That was in July 2012, at a time when fighting was raging in the city. During my fourth visit, I covered the siege of al-Qusayr by Hizbullah and the Syrian army, and the town’s martyrdom.
My fifth visit was my last. My objective was Raqqa, a major city in the east. The city had fallen from the regime’s control. It was the first provincial capital to fall, and I wanted to see how the rebel alliance which had captured it was managing it. There were also jihadist groups among these rebels. I wanted to see how they were governing. Then I planned to go to Deir ez-Zor. But I never got there.
I could see the city’s halo of light on the horizon. I set off running across the desert. At every moment I expected to hear gunfire and feel bullets whizzing around me. But nobody saw me.
Abducted in Raqqa
I arrived in Raqqa after a long drive from Turkey. I got down to work and started meeting local people, talking about their past and their vision for their future. The situation was still very volatile. The joy at the fall of the regime was tempered by the scale of the challenges ahead, but the atmosphere was positive nonetheless.
The mayor of the town, an interim leader elected just after its liberation, had disappeared. Later I received confirmation that he had been captured by ISIS. He was never released.
I had no idea that the same thing could happen to me. As a journalist, I had already covered other kidnappings, but I wasn’t investigating the mayor’s disappearance.
Then it did happen to me. I was crossing a street, in broad daylight, and a car stopped in front of me. I realised straight away what was happening. Three hooded men rushed out of the car and pounced on me. I couldn’t escape. They grabbed me and threw me in the car and drove away.
I was pushed between two armed men in the back seat. They handcuffed me and covered me with a cloth or blanket. We passed all the militia checkpoints. I understood then that I was in the hands of a powerful group. After about fifteen minutes, the car stopped and they let me out. They led me into a house. When they took off the handcuffs and blindfold, I discovered that I was in a small bathroom. This would be my first cell. There were bars on the windows.
22 June 2013 was the first day of my captivity.
I remember the first few hours alternating between moments of great optimism and deep depression.
In the evening, a jailer brought my first meal. A few slices of bread, rations of processed cheese and a tomato. My throat was so tight I could hardly swallow.
My brain was racing. I felt I had to develop strategies. To understand. To know. I also realized that I needed to be prepared for this detention to continue for a very long time, or even to end in tragedy. I had to stay in shape, physically and mentally. How could I keep going? I danced, alone in my cell, with imaginary music in my head. And to keep my brain working, deprived of any occupation or distraction, I recorded every detail about my jailers. I gave them ridiculous nicknames to help me recognize them.
Among my thoughts was the desire to escape. I soon noticed that the bars of my cell didn’t seem very strong. I thought I’d be able to break them. But it was risky. I was still hoping that the contacts I’d made in town would manage to put enough pressure on my captors to release me.
Finally, on the third evening, I decided to try my luck. My jailers had provided me with what I needed, and what I had asked for: a chair to reach the window and a broom to pry it open. I started to force the bars. They resisted. I realized I didn’t have the strength. The bars were much stronger than I’d thought. I gave up.
But one of the bars was visibly twisted after my attempts to break it. I tried to straighten it, but couldn’t. I wept with rage. If the jailers noticed the twisted bar, they would understand what I’d been trying to do, and I’d be punished. But the bar wouldn’t straighten. I was doomed to break it. I redoubled my efforts, and finally managed to remove it. The window was free. I was able to climb through.
I could see the city’s halo of light on the horizon. I set off running across the desert. At every moment I expected to hear gunfire and feel bullets whizzing around me. But nobody saw me.
I ran until the sun began to rise on the horizon, when I reached the outskirts of Raqqa. Dogs were barking. Finally, two men came out of a house. They were wearing pajamas, and were clean-shaven. I asked them for help. They took me to the local police station. It was run by ISIS.
This would be the worst day of my life. A day of punishment. I was transferred from one torture room to another. I was beaten, tied up, hung up, and beaten some more. In the adjoining rooms, I heard others being tortured. I found myself in nothing less than a torture factory.
The nightmare ended only when the sun set and my body no longer responded. Before taking me back to my cell, two jihadists playfully pretended to execute me. The pain was so great that I asked them to shoot. They were disappointed.
In the cell, I was shackled. My hands and feet were tied together, and I was fastened to a pipe on the wall. For 11 days and 11 nights I was tied up and rolled on the floor.
Then one morning at dawn they took me out of the cell. My blood pressure was very low from not having moved for so long. I wasn’t able to stand. I must have been terrified. I lost consciousness.
Spinning in a Vacuum
Eventually I was tied up, blindfolded, and put in the boot of a car with another French journalist, Pierre, who had been captured a few hours after me. We drove for most of the day and then arrived in Aleppo, at the ophthalmology hospital, which would be my second place of detention. In all, there would be around ten such places, between Raqqa, Aleppo, the province of Idlib, then Raqqa again. I was always transported in uncomfortable conditions, in the back of cars, lorries or pick-ups, always tied up and blindfolded. And I wasn’t alone. In these places of detention, over the long months of captivity, I discovered other hostages. In the end there were 25 of us locked in two adjoining rooms, 19 men and six women, all Westerners, either journalists or humanitarian aid workers.
On my very first evening in Aleppo, I was visited in my cell by a contemptuous French jihadist, who enjoyed intimidating me. I would later learn his nom de guerre was Abu Omar. The world would learn his real name after the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels: Mehdi Nemmouche. He was the first of my jailers to leave Syria and return to the West to carry out attacks.
I lived in the basement of this hospital that had been transformed into a prison and torture chamber. During the summer, a routine was established. The nights were rough. We heard the screams of the tortured from al-isha to al-fajr, from the evening prayer to the dawn prayer. The jailers had fun with us. They played jokes on us, depending on their mood. Most of the time, it was in the middle of the night that they came to assault us. And outside, the war went on. During the six weeks we were detained in that place, we were subjected to seven aerial bombardments, one of which tore open the window of the toilet we were being taken to. The bombing probably killed several jihadists.
I met several of my co-hostages there. One of them had been tortured so badly that he looked ghostly, and I was frightened the first time I saw him. This is also where the negotiations for our release began. We made videos for our families and answered secret questions to prove that we were alive. “What is the name of the horse your daughter rides?” “Fritzi.”
I didn’t sleep well. Red patches developed on my back, but I couldn’t work out whether they were parasites or a dermatological manifestation of stress. We were then infested with bugs.
At the end of August, we were moved to another location, an industrial carpentry workshop in Sheikh Najjar, outside Aleppo. It was there that we encountered three British jihadists who several of my co-hostages, including Jim Foley and John Cantlie, had met months earlier: they had nicknamed them the Beatles. Now they were panicking. Their savagery is formidable, they warned us. The Beatles have a high regard for jihad. They are keen on ‘staging’. They organise video shoots of ‘proof of life’ in orange pyjamas against a black flag emblazoned with the shahada in white letters. For one of those videos, they even cut our hair. As a survival reflex, I thought I was at the hairdresser’s, and told Jihadi John “one millimetre down, two millimetres around the head.” The French are always very bad customers!
Food had always been limited, but now the hunger was really becoming a problem. The rations were ridiculous. Only a little rice and a slice of bread per person. And sometimes there was nothing at all, like on September 11. Abu Omar came to see us in our cell to taunt us: “Today’s a holiday, guys. I don’t work. No meal.” And then he departed, leaving us with empty stomachs.
These days were also marked by boredom. There was nothing going on. There was nothing to do. Only the brain spinning in a vacuum. We spent long hours thinking, reclined in a corner, or sleeping, to forget the dark thoughts in our minds and the hunger pangs in our stomachs.
On Christmas Eve, we were promised that we would be released. We were all moved once again, our wrists tied behind our backs with tie-wraps. They hurt. We complained that they were too tight. One of the jihadists went round the complainers and tightened them even more.
So we arrived in a new basement, in a rural area that we thought was in the province of Idlib. At first, conditions improved and our food rations increased. But then we heard fighting. Our captors hardly appeared any more. There was nothing left to eat. The rebel factions had gone to war against ISIS, driving it out of the Idlib and Aleppo regions and confining it to the province of Raqqa.
Aren’t We Stopping?
We were moved once again. We were put in the back of a vehicle and driven for three nights in a row. We were handcuffed together in pairs and dressed in orange pajamas to prevent us escaping. I was handcuffed to Jim Foley. We spent a total of two weeks handcuffed to each other.
During the first night, as we were driving through a village, the pick-up I was in suddenly swerved. I felt a jolt. We hit something, and then drove over it. The two jihadists in the front seat recited an Islamic phrase.
“What was it?” I asked the French jihadist guarding us.
“It was a child,” he replied.
“Aren’t we stopping?”
“No.”
After several transits, we were all returned to the prison on the outskirts of Raqqa which had been my first place of detention – a former oil site in the desert. The 19 of us were crammed into just under 20 square metres.
A new routine set in, with regular visits from the Beatles. They became increasingly violent. Angry that the negotiations were not progressing quickly enough, they decided to treat us badly in order to put more pressure on our relatives and the authorities in our home countries.
At the end of February, things seemed to speed up. The Beatles had apparently reached an agreement for the release of a Spanish journalist. But they wanted to be taken seriously. They wanted to send out the message that if they were capable of freeing their hostages, they were also ready to execute them.
On the same day, a Russian hostage, Sergei, was extracted from the cell. Sergei was a man who told us he had come to help, but we never quite understood what he was after, because he spoke only Russian and had been driven mad by the torture he had suffered during the first months of his captivity. Now the Beatles shot him in the head. They came and showed us photos of his body on their laptop. They forced us, one after the other, to look at and describe aloud the gaping wound in his skull. I later learned that they emailed this photo to my wife to speed up the negotiations.
Two more sets of negotiations were held. Every fortnight, a small group was released. First the women, who worked for a humanitarian NGO, were set free, and then two other Spanish journalists. The Beatles turned up the pressure. The freed hostages had to bear the physical marks of the mistreatment they had received. They had to tell people after their release that the hostages who remained behind were living in horror, and that it was urgent to meet the kidnappers’ demands.
Finally, we too were let go. I and three other French journalists were taken to the border by an old Tunisian jihadist. From there, Turkish soldiers took us to hospital, and then to the police, who took us back to hospital. While I was there I met a Syrian refugee who annoyed me by justifying my captivity, explaining that all foreign journalists in Syria were spies. Poor guy. The dictatorship had twisted his mind.
The Turkish police didn’t understand our lack of papers, and put us in a cell for the night. Early in the morning, a team from the French embassy found us. We made a quick phone call to the President of the Republic, and then to our families. And the Turkish police let us out.
The nightmare was over. It had lasted 300 days.
I plead the cause of the Syrian Revolution to Western audiences who see it only in terms of the terrorism associated with it. I visit prisons, schools and conferences to explain that violence is not fated, and that revenge is the worst response.
Justice is the Only Answer
For me, it was over, but for others, it was just beginning.
A month after my release, a terrorist opened fire in the Jewish Museum in Brussels, killing four. The perpetrator was arrested. I recognized his face in the photos released by the media – he was one of the jihadists who had tortured me, one of my former jailers!
About fifteen western hostages were still in captivity. I kept in contact with the families, trying to reassure them, sometimes awkwardly. And we regularly heard the good news that another had been freed. Then we called each other; sometimes we met up with each other. We celebrated the joy of our return to freedom.
But in August I awoke to terrible news. The images of Jim Foley’s execution were all over the media. The Beatles had killed him. Following in the macabre footsteps of their role model, Abu Musab az-Zarqawi – the de facto founder of ISIS, who had beheaded Nicholas Berg ten years earlier in Iraq – they had posted film of Jim’s death on the Internet. And now they were threatening another of my former comrades in misfortune.
From then on, there was no more good news. No more phone calls came announcing a release. On the contrary, with the same metronomic rhythm, videos of executions appeared on the Internet. All my old friends were murdered, one after the other. All except one – my dear John Cantlie, who was used by his torturers for their propaganda, and who ended up disappearing – he is now presumed dead, although we don’t know where or when he died.
But still it hadn’t ended. After the 13 November 2015 attacks in Paris – which killed 130 people – and then after the 22 March 2016 attacks in Brussels – which killed 32 – I again saw photographs in the media of faces I recognized. Some of my former jailers had taken part in these attacks.
Since then, I have continued on my path. I plead the cause of the Syrian Revolution to Western audiences who see it only in terms of the terrorism associated with it. I visit prisons, schools and conferences to explain that violence is not fated, and that revenge is the worst response. Above all, I speak out in court, facing those of my former captors who are on trial. I confront them with the harm they have done to me, to my friends and beloved ones, and to the people of Syria and Iraq.
Justice is the only answer.
The Author
(Nicolas Hénin is a French journalist and author of the book “Jihad Academy”. He was held hostage by ISIS for 300 days in 2013 and 2014.)