CAMEL BLUES
INTERLUDE 02
ADANA DEPORTATION JAIL, TURKEY—My tour of Turkish prisons was coming to an end. I’d spent the last week frogmarched in cuffs through four different high security lockups. Each prison grimmer than the last. I was inside charged with terrorism, alongside two of my friends. We’d been filming a documentary with young Kurdish rebels as they launched an armed uprising against the despotism of the Turkish state. We’d been in the trenches dodging bullets and interviewing armed teenagers for about 10 days before the Turkish police caught up with us. Real journalism is a crime over there, so naturally, with no evidence whatsoever, they decided we were terrorists.
After nine days in and out of the gulags, we were on the home stretch. I was in deportation jail, with three days left before I’d be sent back home to England. The Turks wanted to sentence us to more than 30 years, but international pressure had persuaded them to deport us first. The final stop before being sent home, was Adana Deportation Jail. This was a prison on the outskirts of the city.
Inside, it’s main flow only. General pop. Shoulder to shoulder with all the other prisoners 24/7. We were locked up with over a dozen foreign volunteer ISIS fighters. They’d been arrested on the Syrian - Turkish border as they crossed over to receive medical treatment in Turkey, or for some R&R in Gaziantep before returning to the war. These guys were being processed for deportation back to their respective countries. Most of them were from Chechnya. Some had infected bullet wounds in their flesh from recent battles in Syria. Disgusting, the lot of them.
There were several young African men amongst the international collection of foreign ISIS volunteers. One night, a young Somali jihadi—around 18 years of age—had enough and slashed his wrists with one of the many jagged prison shanks. He’d tried to kill himself, but one of the non-ISIS Afghan lads from my cell, Ali, had managed to save him by wrapping torn bed linen around the wounds. Ali hated the jihadis as much as I did, but he would help anybody. He had a heart of pure gold.
Ali spent a few hours running in and out of our room as he put together makeshift medical care. Echoes of commotion and lights on-and-off in the corridors. Some shouting now and then. The lock on the wing door getting rattled to alert the guards. They never came. I rolled over on the harsh plastic of the prison mattress and went back to sleep.
In the morning, at breakfast, I ended up sat next to the young Somali lad who’d slashed his wrists. He still hadn’t been seen to by the guards. The strips of Ali’s bed sheet were bound so thick around his wrists that both his hands looked numb. His face looked numb too. It was as if all the life had drained out of him. He was almost invisible in that sense—just sat there, gone. It was like his soul had left his body. He was weak.
He smiled faintly whilst looking down at the table. He was embarrassed and alone. If you’re ISIS, you’re only allowed to kill yourself with explosives strapped to your belly. Strictly suicide bombings only. The young lad had been instantly ostracised by his “brothers” after cutting himself.
I pulled out a cigarette and offered it to him. He looked up, startled. The jihadis weren’t meant to smoke. Not allowed. Haram. Or whatever.
He looked at the cig, then back at me. I nodded. He shook his head. I left it there. He took the Camel Blue and nodded back. I passed him the lighter. We sat there smoking in silence. I think it was the best cigarette either of us have had in our lives. For a few minutes we were just two people—not jihadi, not kaffir, not enemies, not prisoners. In that moment neither of us wished the other dead.
2015