Padnos, an American journalist, tells about his abduction and near two-year incarceration at the hands of the Syrian Sunni jihadi organization Jabhat al-Nusra (Victory Front, JN) from October 2012 until August 2014. His kidnapping took place in the context of the Sunni Islamist insurgency against the Bashar al-Assad regime. His account details a casual brutality and sadism that began at the moment of his capture and, with a few periods of respite, continued throughout.
Padnos, like many other journalists and would-be journalists, made his way to the Turkish border town of Antakya in mid-2012, intending illegally to cross the border into Syria and report from the rebel side in the Syrian civil war. (Confession: your reviewer has done the same.) In an act of astonishing naïveté, Padnos entrusted himself to some Syrians he met in Antakya and crossed the border under their guidance. His dumb decision led to his capture by criminals who then sold him to the jihadis.
The “blindfold” of the title is a piece of cloth that Padnos’s captors supplied him to cover his eyes whenever he was not locked in his cell. His description of it captures a flavor of his experiences in captivity: “The blindfold was meant to detach me from everything I knew about the world, including my name, which, in those days, became Filth and sometimes Ass and other times Insect.”
For a while, Padnos was incarcerated together with another American journalist, Matthew Schrier. The two did not get along. Schrier achieved the distinction of being the only Western journalist to escape from jihadi captivity in the course of the Syrian civil war. (Padnos and Schrier dispute the details of this escape.)
Well written, Blindfold provides an acutely observed picture of JN’s jihadi mini-state that existed from 2017 to 2024: “A colony of brutes. They were to be feared no more—and no less—than other brutes.” He notes JN’s growing corruption, as funding from Qatar enabled the emergence of what he calls the jihad’s “middle managers.” Their caliphate, he writes, “was an elaborate real estate scam. Their MO was to blow things up, to stride around in the guise of lawgivers for as long as the illusion held, to summon, via the world’s social networks, all those dim or needy enough to submit to their law.”
Padnos’ portrait of Nusra’s astonishing brutality, ignorance, and corruption may seem to be of mainly historical interest, given that the JN mini-state came to an end in 2024. However, that JN subsequently renamed itself Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and since December 2024 rules Syria, makes information about it very relevant. Policymakers seeking to understand the current regime in Damascus would find great profit in consulting this fine account authored by probably the single most knowledgeable Westerner on the subject.
