In 'Blindfold,' Journalist Theo Padnos Recounts 2 Years Of Captivity, Torture In Syria

In 2012, freelance journalist Theo Padnos was in a Turkish border town searching for a way into Syria to cover the civil war.

He found men who volunteered to guide him through the country — and soon found out they were not who they claimed they were.

Once over the border into Syria, the al-Qaida affiliates kidnaped Padnos, tortured him, moved him from prison to prison for two years, and threatened him with execution — but Padnos survived.

He recalls the harrowing experience in his new book, “Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture, and Enlightenment.”

Alone without support from a news organization, Padnos was unprepared to set foot in a war zone when he tried entering Syria nearly a decade ago. The freelance reporter says he didn’t realize the so-called guides, who belonged to al-Qaida affiliate group Jabhat al-Nusra, had grim ulterior motives until they held a gun to his head.

He underscores the point of his blindness within the pages of his memoir. Being physically blindfolded and living within a “period of extended terror” under the mercy of jihadists served as a “paradox of seeing in an Islamic State,” he says.

“Every citizen there, all the young recruits in the jihad, every normal average everyday citizen who submits to that kind of government and of course, the prisoners, you deprive yourself of your senses, your sense of orientation in the world, your own identity,” he says. “You lose all of that.”

After being tortured by al-Qaida or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), citizens and prisoners alike are supposed to “awaken with a deeper and truer, more profound, more moral orientation in life.” However for Padnos, he “woke up” to understand the rebels he once thought were potential forces for good were anything but.

But Padnos’ enlightenment isn’t shared by many in the Islamic