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In the fall of 2012, Theo Padnos, who grew up in Woodstock, Vermont, was working as a freelance journalist in Turkey. He made a fateful decision to trust two men who promised to arrange safe passage for him into Syria, where he hoped to report on the civil war that began a year earlier. It was a catastrophically bad decision.
His supposed helpers turned out to be working with Jabhat al-Nusra, the main affiliate of al-Qaida in Syria. Upon entering Syria, he was beaten and kidnapped. He spent the next two years in secret prisons being tortured by his captors. One of the ways he consoled himself was to write an allegorical novel set in Vermont. During his captivity, other journalists captured in Syria — including James Foley and Steven Sotloff — were executed. Others, like Austin Tice, disappeared. Padnos was lucky: In August 2014, he was released after the government of Qatar paid millions in ransom.
Padnos first wrote about his ordeal in 2014 in an article in The New York Times Magazine, and he is the subject of a documentary, Theo Who Lived. He has a new book about his ordeal, Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture, and Enlightenment. The New York Times says it “lays bare the human condition at its extremes. There is depravity and resilience, rage and revelation, and, ultimately, a triumph of the human spirit.”
Padnos sees parallels between the mindset of his al-Qaida captors and the pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January. “What if they set up their own little government, what would it be like to live inside it?” Padnos asks of the insurrectionists. He warns that the U.S. “started down the road … to have a similar outcome as Syria is having now.”
