The hospital had served as the unofficial prison of various rebel factions since the war had begun. The rebels were fighting among themselves for control of the area and there were periods when several factions shared the hospital buildings between them, so prisoners of Jabhat al-Nusra were in one wing, while ISIS prisoners were held in the other.

The prison was at that time under the daily leadership of the ISIS head of security in Aleppo, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Ubaidah al-Maghribi. The surname al-Maghribi indicated Moroccan ancestry, but he was by all accounts a citizen of the Netherlands. In a picture that was taken of him before he went to Syria, his almost feminine features are remarkable: a narrow face with a beauty mark on his left cheek and curved, full lips; round, dark, smiling eyes under bushy eyebrows; clean shaven with short hair, slim and tall.

Once in Syria, he had let his beard grow, but it was thin and barely covered his chin and cheeks. He never shouted and spoke in a friendly manner in several languages, including Dutch, French, English, German and Arabic.

According to several sources, Abu Ubaidah had studied computer engineering at the University of Amsterdam and now held a senior position in the ISIS organization. He had apparently married and had a child in Syria, all while holding prisoners in the basement of the children’s hospital.

· * ·

‘Psssst, Daniel … Daniel …’

He woke up and looked straight at two western-looking men. One of them had short grey hair, while the other had longish, tousled brown hair.

They looked at him with concern in their eyes and introduced themselves as the French journalist Didier François and freelance photographer Edouard Elias. Didier was in his early fifties and an experienced correspondent, while Edouard was in his mid-twenties like Daniel. The Frenchmen already knew his name. They had heard Daniel screaming while someone had been shouting his name.

‘We could hear that they were treating you very badly,’ Didier remarked. Didier and Edouard had been kidnapped only four days ago and had no visible bruises.

Daniel felt a paradoxical relief that he was no longer the only westerner. The presence of the Frenchmen could be his chance of survival, since the more foreigners there were the more focus there would be on finding them, he thought. And he had been longing for human contact with someone who spoke English.

‘I was captured three weeks ago,’ said Daniel and he told them briefly about what his torturers had done to him.

The sight of Didier and Edouard brought home to him again how dehydrated, emaciated and bruised he was. He had been reduced to a defenceless, dirty animal and he sensed that his wretched physical and mental condition was disheartening to the newcomers. The Frenchmen didn’t say much, as if Daniel were the symbol of what could happen to them. He could well understand their reaction.

When Didier asked him for advice on how to stay active while they were locked up, the mood softened a little and Daniel showed them a couple of abdominal and back bends that they could do to keep their bodies in shape.

After a few days they were all moved to a small boiler room further down the corridor. Two cisterns filled most of the room, but they were allowed to take their blankets with them and they were fed at noon and 6 p.m. Daniel was struggling with the open wounds on both his wrists and with his violent diarrhoea, which he had to control somehow, because there was no toilet in the boiler room.

When the prison guards knocked on the door and shouted hamam, the prisoners got to their feet and put on their blindfolds. They grabbed a water bottle with one hand and held on to each other’s shoulder to walk single file to the toilet. When they got there, Daniel hurried to use the toilet and fill his water bottle while the guards pounded aggressively on the door.

After only a few days in the cistern room, they were moved back to the large basement room. Daniel became increasingly ill and couldn’t keep anything down. He was lying on the floor and could feel pain all over his body, when a prison guard came in.

‘Do you think we can get a million dollars for you?’ he asked.

Daniel momentarily forgot his discomfort. The question was the first indication that the kidnapping could be about money and that he wouldn’t be sitting in this basement for ever. He remembered that his insurance would pay only five million kroner (about £530,000), but that was secondary right now.

‘I don’t know, but maybe,’ was his response. Daniel had been given a glimmer of hope to cling to.

The three western prisoners were soon separated from each other. Edouard was to remain in the basement room, while Didier and Daniel were moved to a smaller cell. There were already a couple of Syrian prisoners in the small cell, and this one didn’t even have a toilet.

For Daniel, the following days were a living hell.

He was terrified of what the guards might think of doing to him if they had to constantly take him to the toilet because of his diarrhoea. He didn’t dare knock on the door and ask permission to go. Suddenly he noticed faeces leaking out through his trousers and down on to the blanket. He tried to act like it was nothing, but when one of the Syrian prisoners smelled Daniel’s diarrhoea, he immediately hammered on the door and shouted to the guards that he didn’t want to sit in that stench.

The guards hustled Daniel out to the toilet, where he was ordered to wash himself and put on a clean pair of trousers. Then they put a large, empty yoghurt container into the cell, which Daniel was supposed to use as a toilet. But the bucket wasn’t deep enough and his faeces splattered out over the wall.

The other prisoners were irritated and so were the guards. When one of them, a short, fat man, discovered faeces on the wall, he went berserk and hit Daniel on the head and shoulders with a stick.

He then took Daniel to the bathroom, where he drew his pistol and pointed it threateningly at Daniel’s face.

‘You have to pull yourself together,’ said Didier to Daniel afterwards, with reference to the fact that the smellier and the more frightened and submissive he became, the more he was reducing himself to an animal that the guards thought they had the right to beat.

He was so weakened by the beatings and the diarrhoea that he often fainted when he stood up and he didn’t have the strength to eat. Didier hid flat bread for him under the blanket and asked for diarrhoea pills.

But it was the wounds on his wrists that most worried Daniel. He was terrified that they would become infected, that he would get gangrene and die. The bracelet of pus and fluid hardened, fell off, and became slimy again. He tried to protect his wrists from the hairy blanket he was lying on by placing a piece of fabric between it and his hands. When he finally dragged his body to the toilet, he held back from washing afterwards for fear of germs and just shook himself dry.

The fat little man often came to visit, sometimes with food and a young boy – whom he was clearly looking after and who could be heard shouting nonsense out in the corridor – and at other times just to amuse himself by humiliating Daniel.

‘Make a noise like a dog!’ shouted the fat man, who laughed loudly when Daniel barked.

‘Make a noise like a donkey!’

Daniel didn’t dare disobey.

‘When I say “Daniel”, you say “jahass”,’ came the order.

‘Say it as if you are sad,’ he continued and Daniel said ‘jahass’ in fifteen different ways.

‘As long as they don’t beat me again,’ he thought as he went through all the sounds of the animal kingdom.

He had become a dog himself, one that did what it was told, and lay down on his back with his legs over his head. He was afraid of shitting in his trousers in front of the little fat man.