UNFree Media: Syria

Dining with Al Qaeda, an extract from foreign correspondent Hugh Pope's book 

I urged my gaze back down to the book of Arabic grammar that lay open on my lap. However hard I pressed my lips together, the curling script kept dancing away from me. My eyes went back up to the flimsy door of my hotel room, rattling in its frame. The knocking was growing insistent. I prayed that Jean-Pierre Thieck, the exuberant Frenchman who had persuaded me to visit Syria, would soon return.

Over lunch on a far-away houseboat moored to a grassy bank near the River Thames south of Oxford, Jean-Pierre's wild stories of Eastern adventures had put me under his spell. Now we lodged on the upper floor of a brothel in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. He had left on an obscure mission and, as the evening lengthened, he had not returned. From time to time, bursts of machine-gun fire echoed over the rooftops. I was only dimly aware of the cause of the fighting. What I did know was that the man banging on the door was a tall, virulent Iraqi truck driver from the next-door room. He was clearly more than ever determined to break in, first through the door, and then my own efforts to defend my virtue.

"Mr Q! Mr. Q!!" the Iraqi roared, beating the plywood panels once again. "Open the door!"