On 9/11, al Qaeda bit off more than it could chew.
Osama bin Laden figured that he was striking a blow against a paper tiger when he dispatched 19 hijackers to murder thousands of Americans in 2001. His view was not entirely baseless: The United States had responded only pusillanimously to attacks on its embassies and servicemembers in Aden, Beirut, Dar es Salaam, Mogadishu, and Nairobi. In bin Laden’s eyes, U.S. leaders were unwilling to launch protracted military operations even after bombings that spilled copious amounts of American blood.
It practically goes without saying that bin Laden severely misjudged how the Bush administration would eventually respond to the 9/11 attacks. The following decade was not a good one for al Qaeda. Some 100,000 U.S. troops occupied the jihadist enterprise’s safe haven in Afghanistan, and bin Laden saw most of his high-ranking deputies captured or killed before a SEAL team came knocking and put two bullets in his frontal lobe one night in 2011. As al Qaeda’s power waned, another radical Islamist group seized the moment. Since 2014, the preeminent face of global jihad has not been al Qaeda, but the full-time PR machine and part-time militant group known as the Islamic State.
While the stunning but ultimately short-lived successes of the Islamic State grabbed headlines in recent years, al Qaeda quietly rebuilt its global network and restocked its leadership. Under the command of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group has, for the most part, flown under the radar by temporarily backing away from mass-casualty operations. And now that the Islamic State has entered into its death-throes, al Qaeda is waiting in the wings to reclaim its place atop the jihadist heap. Many Americans may be surprised to hear that al Qaeda—some 30,000 fighters strong—is by far the largest rebel faction currently operating in the Syrian Civil War.
One American who knows all too well about al Qaeda’s influence in Syria is Matthew Schrier. The now 40-year-old photojournalist travelled to Aleppo in 2012 to cover the Free Syrian Army’s (FSA) battle against the government forces of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. After witnessing his fair share of action, Schrier hopped in a taxi and headed for the Turkish border. Just 45 minutes from safety, several militants from Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian al Qaeda affiliate, stopped Schrier’s car. The jihadists abducted the American at gunpoint and took him into captivity.
As Schrier details in The Dawn Prayer (Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison), the following seven months were a living nightmare. He bounced between six different terrorist prisons—enduring regular beatings and torture—before managing to escape through a cell window’s shoddily welded bars. Schrier’s story is, at face value, a gripping tale of fortitude and resilience. He endured horrors at the hands of jihadists that captives do not typically live to write about. In fact, his tale is in one key respect unique: No other Westerner held by al Qaeda has ever escaped captivity.
At times, The Dawn Prayer even reads like a thriller. While no American is safe in the hands of al Qaeda, for Schrier—not just American but Jewish, too—the stakes were particularly high. After al Qaeda affiliates abducted Daniel Pearl in 2002, militants released a video of his decapitation titled “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.” Schrier’s Jewishness, if discovered by his captors, essentially amounted to a death sentence. There would be no demands for a ransom payment.
For Schrier, keeping his Jewish ancestry a secret proves to be no small task. Tattooed on his back is a bearded Walt Whitman, an image that arouses suspicion because it loosely resembles a Hasidic Jew, at least to jihadists. Several weeks into captivity, the jihadists demand access to Schrier’s bank accounts. A security question on a bank website requests his mother’s maiden name: “Grossberg.” Schrier writes the name on a piece of paper, but none of his captors appear to notice its obvious ethnic connotation. And in a particularly frightful scene, Schrier is thrown into a cell with another American only to notice that his cellmate—Theo, a gentile—has etched a Star of David into the wall for no apparent reason. “Yeah, they don’t know what that is,” the hapless cellmate assures him, speaking of their captors. Schrier is less confident of this, to say the least.
While Schrier’s memoir boasts entertainment value—it is not only a page-turner, but also contains a surprising number of laughs—his story has weighty implications that are worth highlighting. The book aptly documents the shades of gray that have come to define the Syrian Civil War. The FSA, once portrayed by much of the Western media as some kind of 21st century incarnation of the patriotic colonists who took up arms against the British in 1776, turns out not to be so laudable after all. Before meeting Schrier, Theo once managed to escape from an al-Nusra prison in Aleppo and reach a nearby FSA checkpoint, but the FSA fighters merely handed him back to al Qaeda. Then the FSA fighters joined al-Nusra in torturing Theo.
When Schrier himself escapes, he comes across a group of armed jihadists several blocks away from the al-Nusra prison. Unsure to which rebel group they belong, Schrier asks for a cigarette. When one of the jihadists produces a pack, it becomes apparent that they are not religious fanatics given that smoking is haram. They turn out to be FSA, but in the absence of a cigarette they are not easily distinguishable from other militants in terms of physical appearance, or of political ideology for that matter. The Obama administration’s struggle to find palatable groups to arm appears newly reasonable. The fabled farmers and carpenters who took up arms against Assad in the opening months of the revolution are now dead or in prison.
Ostensible U.S. allies have not been deterred from funding unsavory groups, however—which puts America in something of an awkward spot. At one point, Schrier is temporarily transferred to an Ahrar al-Sham prison to be held on behalf of al-Nusra. Despite cooperating with al Qaeda, Ahrar al-Sham receives support from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar. Few would contend that the U.S.-Saudi relationship is anything but an unseemly marriage of convenience. But Turkey is a NATO member that hosts American nuclear weapons on its soil, while Qatar is home to Al Udeid Air Base, a facility that holds 10,000 U.S. servicemembers. The Syrian conflict is like a Rubik’s cube, offering no shortage of headaches for U.S. policymakers.
The Dawn Prayer does not seek to make political claims, but the memoir does so nonetheless—the most consequential of which may not even be fully apparent to its author. Schrier’s depiction of the regime troops with whom he is imprisoned is telling. The Alawites—a minority Shia sect that has run Syria from the presidency down for decades—became Schrier’s closest friends during his time in captivity. Remarkably, he still keeps in touch with some of them. Assad, who is a veritable butcher and war criminal, need not necessarily be at Syria’s helm, but given the shadiness of the FSA and the barbarity of al Qaeda and the Islamic State, it is difficult to envision any alternative to his regime’s continued rule for the country’s inevitably bleak future. The Dawn Prayer leads one to the conclusion that there is no suitable opposition.
Schrier was a prisoner in Syria for seven agonizing months but is now thankfully free. Some 18 million Syrians have been prisoners-of-sorts in their homeland for more than seven years. Sadly, they have no means of escape.
