‘Helloooo Daniel. We’ve missed you. Where have you been?’

His tormentor, Abu Hurraya, stood in the doorway, handcuffs at the ready.

· * ·

A piercing pain jolted Daniel’s body. The handcuffs had been tightened so much that they cut into his skin, while the torturer led him to a water pipe that ran vertically between floors.

‘Welcome back!’ shouted Abu Hurraya.

Daniel’s escape had been a total failure. He had been driven back to the building where he’d been detained. The biscuits and water had been only a fleeting pleasure. Ultimately, someone had called Abu Hurraya. Maybe they didn’t dare take the risk of helping a foreigner. Perhaps the locals were also afraid of ending up like him.

Abu Hurraya’s men put shackles around his left ankle and locked it to the pipe, while his upper body was fastened to the pipe with thick chains. A prison guard put a plastic fastener of the type electricians use to hold cables together around Daniel’s neck and tightened it. The plastic strip pierced his skin in the same way as the handcuffs. He had difficulty breathing and soon passed out, so the guard took it off.

The following three days he spent chained to the pipe merged into a blur. He had reached a state of total exhaustion. Three weeks had now passed since he had been captured and he was starving, thirsty and urinating in his trousers. His body simply couldn’t take it any more. The heavy chains forced him into an awkward, half-standing position. The kicks and blows that he regularly received to his ribs no longer hurt, but the handcuffs did. It felt as if the metal had cut through his skin and was now directly scraping against his open wounds.

The guards turned up in groups and egged each other on, shouting and screaming that he was going to die. They played games in which they kicked, beat and whipped Daniel across the chest until he finally confessed that he was a spy, which they so badly wanted to hear.

Daniel fainted. When he woke up, he thought he was at home with his grandmother at her yellow house in Hedegård. Then he lost consciousness again and dreamed that he was going to be killed by gunfire out in the cornfield.

At one point he stirred at the sound of chairs scraping around him and he could hear an unfamiliar, deeper, slightly older voice. Maybe this was who the others had been waiting for. Maybe now he was going to find out what real torture felt like.

The voice spoke Arabic with a different and lighter tone. The older man suddenly moved towards Daniel and loosened the chains, so he could sit. Daniel wept with joy. Tears streamed underneath the blindfold and down his cheeks as he slumped on the floor. It was confusing to think someone was being nice to him.

‘Water,’ asked Daniel.

The kind man filled a water bottle, which Daniel finished, then asked for more. Daniel was also given a couple of puffs on a cigarette – the other captors usually didn’t smoke. He knew that the man was sharing his cigarette out of kindness, without his superiors’ knowledge.

Daniel ate what seemed like life-saving biscuits until his mouth was dry and he had to drink more water. Then, lying on the floor, he drifted into a nightmare-free sleep. He awoke to a beating by Abu Hurraya. The friendly man had disappeared, leaving only the torturer in his stead.

Abu Hurraya ordered him to stand on one leg, but Daniel could not and collapsed on the floor. Then he had to lie on his back and stretch his legs backwards over his head and get up on his feet again. Abu Hurraya opened Daniel’s trousers, pulled them down and pressed something that felt like a candle against Daniel’s buttocks. Daniel was on the verge of fainting from fear. Abu Hurraya spoke Arabic and Daniel sensed that he was talking about his genitals while he squeezed one of his testicles very tightly.

Daniel screamed and the fear turned into rage. He wanted to kill him. It was the first time that he had ever wanted to kill someone.

‘Daniel jahass!’ shouted Abu Hurraya, using the Arabic word for donkey or mule, while he pulled Daniel’s trousers up again and disappeared.

Daniel pissed himself and someone came to mop up the floor.

· * ·

It was the middle of the day and the heat was rising from the asphalt. Daniel was led out of the building blindfolded and thrown into the back of a box van. Soon, more prisoners were piled into the van on top of him.

They all reeked of sweat and their weight pressed on to his hands, making his handcuffs dig even deeper into his raw flesh. He tried turning to spare his wrists, while the van bumped along, but it hurt so much that he decided he would rather be knocked about.

When the van stopped, he was led into a room with a toilet. A chain was hung around his neck and chest and he was locked to a sink. He enjoyed his solitude away from the busy foyer, where he had felt he was constantly being watched. In the following four days he drank foul-smelling but vital water from the toilet bowl. No water came out of the tap.

The pain from the handcuffs permeated his sleep. In his dreams he lived in a cycle of failed escape attempts. He ran into things, couldn’t get up, fell down; people lied and laughed and wouldn’t remove his handcuffs as they had promised.

He woke up in pain and shifted his position from right to left without finding relief.

It was around 10 June when a prison guard came to move him again. His next destination was to be the basement of the torture centre where some other western hostages were already being held captive.

The Hostages under the Children’s Hospital

Daniel was standing in front of a mirror that hung on the wall in the toilet of his new prison. The handcuffs and the blindfold had finally been removed and he had been given some clean clothes. He was looking at himself for the first time since he had been kidnapped twenty-four days earlier.

The skin around his eyes was not just blue, thought Daniel, but black as the night. There were marks that hung like a chain of oblong, grey beads around his neck, testifying to his suicide attempt. He leaned over the sink towards the mirror and looked himself deep in the eyes. There was no life in them. His cheeks were white and sunken. It was like looking at a dead man. He realized that the water he’d been given in the last few days might have actually saved his life.

Because of the blindfold, he hadn’t seen his hands since he had been caught in the cornfield and had smoked a cigarette in the banqueting hall with the boys in the Arsenal jerseys. They had swollen to twice their normal size, as if he were wearing ski gloves. When he went to wash the wounds on his wrists, he understood why the pain was so excruciating. Through a bracelet of reddish-brown gunk in the wound, he could see his bones and tendons. He tried to clean the wounds and washed the smears of blood and dirt off his body, which stank of stale sweat and fear. Then he put on the clean blue underpants and the camouflage uniform that the guards had given him.

Daniel was led into a large basement room. A heavy black metal door separated him from the corridor. The whitewashed walls of the cellar were made of concrete and the only sunlight that reached down into the room came through a small window in the toilet. Clinical white tiles covered the floor.

Daniel was able to walk freely around the room without a blindfold or handcuffs, and he had been given a blanket and a water bottle. He was fed a couple of times a day. He tried to get body and soul together again. He’d had ongoing gastrointestinal distress, which was made no better by the new, luxurious surroundings, even though he could now clip his nails and keep himself reasonably clean.

· * ·

It was the torturer Abu Hurraya who had delivered Daniel to the basement of the building, which was known as the children’s hospital in Aleppo.