The sound of the calls to prayer permeated through the window during the evening hours and again around midnight. When Daniel heard some footsteps outside the door a few hours later, he called out the Arabic word for water, which Ayman had taught him: ‘Ma! Ma!’

A punishment was promptly issued. A man came in, whipped him a few times on his back and disappeared again. Daniel remained standing, stretched out from the ceiling to the floor, all night long.

He fell in and out of consciousness and discovered at some point that the man in the corner was gone. When sunlight hit him in the early morning hours, he heard the call to prayer once again, along with the voices of children – the sound of boys’ high-pitched voices teasing him and shouting English words through the door behind him.

‘Are you thirsty? Do you want some water? Are you hungry?’

Then they giggled and disappeared. Daniel was so thirsty and tired that he drifted off into a dream state: he was breaking into a 7-Eleven and drinking the entire contents of the store – milk, water, cola. He ran from shelf to shelf like a dehydrated thief, chugging drinks in a frenzy.

The stone patterns in the tiles underneath him began to blur and take on animal forms. The ground was teeming with vermin and he started to urinate. He felt the warm flow trickle down his leg. He shifted slightly to give his trousers a chance to dry; that way no one would notice, he thought. But that was ridiculous, because there was no one there. Only the creatures on the floor, his thirst and the urine. The light outside disappeared. He heard the call for prayer and the sound of children once again. He was almost pleased to be so thirsty, as it made him forget how painful and powerless it felt to stand there, like a taut bowstring.

He had been there for twenty-four hours when Abu Hurraya returned.

‘I’m thirsty,’ said Daniel.

‘Relax, you’ll get some water,’ Abu Hurraya told him.

Daniel’s brain danced around in a chaotic frenzy; he pictured himself being unshackled from the ceiling, his arms falling naturally down the sides of his body as he walked out of the room on strong, dignified legs.

Abu Hurraya stood on the chair and loosened the chain from the ceiling: Daniel crumpled to the floor like a rag. His body folded underneath him, a corpse washed away by the ocean, and he was swept weightlessly into a soft world of darkness.

· * ·

Over many decades in Syria, torture had developed into an absurd art form. Creative and effective methods were given names which were familiar to most Syrians, even those who hadn’t been exposed to the regime’s prisons. Many could define ‘The Tyre’ or ‘The German Chair’, ‘The Flying Carpet’ or ‘Shabeh’.

Daniel had endured one version of ‘The Tyre’. The other version consisted of pushing the car tyre down over the head and legs to make sure the prisoner was unable to move away from the blows.

‘Shabeh’ was another well-known classic: the victim has his hands cuffed behind his back so that the chain hanging from the ceiling forces the arms painfully upwards. The method Daniel was subjected to, his hands tied above his head, was in fact a milder version of ‘Shabeh’. The word has no real meaning, but some believe it comes from the word shabih or ghost.

Thousands of Syrians had been tortured by the regime and in military prisons. Torture was generally more the rule than the exception for inmates. Under President Hafez al-Assad’s leadership from 1971 to 2000, torture became systematic, and this continued under his son, Bashar al-Assad, who took over the presidency from his father. Torture was the regime’s trademark, which lived on in the newly dominant Islamist strongholds in northern Syria. Former prisoners who had been imprisoned by both the regime and the rebels described how the Islamists’ torture methods were an exact copy of the techniques used in Assad’s prisons.

In the government’s notorious Sednaya Prison, just north of Damascus, the inmates, often political prisoners, were subjected to torture and humiliation. According to many eyewitness accounts and reports, prisoners often died from being tortured.

So it was no coincidence that Daniel was subjected to the same torture methods that his torturers had endured themselves. For instance, Abu Hurraya reported to Abu Athir, who had been put in Sednaya Prison in 2007 on charges related to terrorism, but was freed under President Assad’s amnesty at the beginning of the revolution.

Abu Athir, a slim man in his early to mid-thirties with shoulder-length hair and a very thick, full beard, was known as one of Sednaya Prison’s hardliners. He was a radical Islamist who fell out with other jihadists and Islamists because his narrow and ultra-conservative dogma left no space for any other versions of Sunni Islam. Immediately after his release in the summer of 2011 he formed the rebel group the Sunni Lions in Aleppo and became a familiar face among Syria’s armed factions during the civil war. In August 2012 his brother was killed and Abu Athir took control of his brother’s brigade, the Mujahideen Shura Council.

Abu Athir’s power grew significantly when he met ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq later that year, and he became one of his most fervent and vocal followers in calling for an Islamic caliphate. Some months later, following a split between the two factions Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS, he helped to ensure that fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra joined Baghdadi’s ISIS, and made sure his own faction also endorsed ISIS.

In May 2013 Abu Athir became part of ISIS’s Shura Council, a powerful organ under Baghdadi’s control. Abu Athir was in charge of media relations and was responsible for the recruitment of foreign jihadis, while at the same time serving as the trusted and influential Emir of Aleppo.

· * ·

Daniel’s body slumped against the radiator, heavy and useless. Not even the cup of water and the roll of bread with falafel and tomato that he had been given could revive him after hanging from the ceiling for a full day and night. He had eaten only the tomato – his mouth felt too dry to swallow anything else. He drifted in and out of a restless sleep, dreaming of a kung-fu master who beat him and ran after him, until some guards woke him again, heaved him up by his arms, and dragged him across the floor and back into the interrogation room.

‘If you don’t tell us who you are, we’ll hang you up for three days with no food or water. Then we’ll behead you and send a video home to your parents!’ a voice boomed at him.

Daniel lacked the strength to react. Instead he heard his own inner voice as he allowed his body to be led into another room.

Fuck, you can do whatever you like to me; hit the soles of my feet, whip my back, just don’t hang me up without water again … I’ ll die. I ’ll rot … I’ ll just fucking rot and wither away from this. I’d rather die.

The room resembled the one where he had previously been hung up, except that there was a rubbish bag full of Coke cans on the floor, a table and a broken wooden bed. A man held him up so he wouldn’t collapse, while the torturer grabbed a chain hanging from a hook on the ceiling. The torturer wrapped it around the handcuffs and padlocked it, locking the chain and handcuffs to the ceiling. Daniel was left standing once again with his arms stretched above his head. The torturer disappeared.

I can’t! I can’t! he screamed inside. I can’t stand here for three days and then die afterwards.

He looked around him. The table. It had been placed to make sure it was just out of his reach. His wrist. He could bite through his wrist so he could escape.

Water. He was so thirsty that his brain was about to dry out and flashes of visions and images flickered past. It required nothing of the guards to leave him hanging there. What if they forgot about him?