{"id":596,"date":"2012-08-24T23:05:48","date_gmt":"2012-08-25T03:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matthewvandyke.com\/blog\/?p=596"},"modified":"2012-08-25T17:25:18","modified_gmt":"2012-08-25T21:25:18","slug":"abu-salim-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.matthewvandyke.com\/blog\/abu-salim-prison\/","title":{"rendered":"Escape from Abu Salim Prison"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1 align=\"center\">Escape from Abu Salim Prison<\/h1>\n<p>One year ago today I escaped from Abu Salim prison in Libya.\u00a0 I had spent half a year <a title=\"Gaddafi\u2019s Prisoner \u2013 Reflections on My Time as a POW in the Libyan Civil War\" href=\"http:\/\/www.matthewvandyke.com\/blog\/gaddafi-prisoner-pow-libyan-civil-war\/\" target=\"_blank\">being psychologically tortured in solitary confinement<\/a>, pacing in my cell, staring at the walls and fearing that this would be all I\u00a0would know\u00a0for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" title=\"matthew vandyke in maktab al-nasser prison\" src=\"http:\/\/www.matthewvandyke.com\/images\/matthew-vandyke-prisoner-of-war-libya.jpg\" alt=\"matthew vandyke in maktab al-nasser prison, tripoli, libya\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" \/><\/p>\n<p>On the 165th day of this unimaginable hell, prisoners came to my cell and broke off the lock.\u00a0 I escaped Abu Salim with other prisoners of war and we ran for our lives.<\/p>\n<p>That night I was watching the <a title=\"U.S. journalist escapes tripoli prison\" href=\"http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/video\/#\/video\/world\/2011\/08\/25\/tsr.dougherty.captive.american.cnn?iref=allsearch\" target=\"_blank\">story of my escape on CNN<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The world thought I was dead for most of the time I was in Abu Salim prison \u2013 I was missing in action.\u00a0 Despite the widespread belief that I was buried in the desert, Human Rights Watch (HRW) advocated for my release and the international press covered the story.\u00a0 Only in the last\u00a0two weeks\u00a0before my escape did the Gaddafi regime even admit that I was alive and\u00a0in custody, but they still would not let anyone see me or check on my condition.<\/p>\n<p>HRW went to Abu Salim a few weeks before the prison break and was told I wasn\u2019t there.\u00a0 I was there, and I was being held in solitary confinement under deplorable conditions.\u00a0 The Gaddafi regime did not care what the US government, NGOs, or the international press had to say.\u00a0 I would still be in that cell, if not executed, if we hadn\u2019t won the war.<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Why I Fought in the Libyan Civil War\" href=\"http:\/\/www.matthewvandyke.com\/blog\/why-fought-libyan-civil-war\/\" target=\"_blank\">I had come to help the Libyan rebels<\/a>, and then the Libyan rebels came to help me.\u00a0 My fellow rebel prisoners broke me out of the cell and we escaped together.\u00a0 There was no outside intervention to save me from the horrors of Abu Salim.<\/p>\n<p>A few days after my escape, I was at the Corinthia Hotel as a guest of the rebel government and I came under intense pressure, especially from HRW, to leave Libya.\u00a0 The international press started calling my mother telling her to convince me to leave as well.\u00a0 The press was confused about why I was still in Tripoli days after escaping from Abu Salim prison, as if I was waiting for something.<\/p>\n<p>I was waiting for something \u2013 for Nouri.\u00a0 Nouri Fonas was my friend of four years with whom I had been serving in the rebel forces before I was captured.\u00a0 Transportation was difficult and it took Nouri a few days to arrive from Benghazi.\u00a0 Soon after he arrived, we left Tripoli together.<\/p>\n<p>The press and HRW had no idea where I went.\u00a0 They assumed I had conceded to their demands and gone home.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, Nouri and I spent one night in Benghazi, paid a visit to the Ministry of Defence, and then headed\u00a0back to the front line.\u00a0 We joined the Ali Hassan al-Jaber brigade, were assigned a military jeep that we fitted with a DShK heavy machine gun, and returned to the war.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" title=\"freedom fighter Matthew VanDyke in Libya\" src=\"http:\/\/www.matthewvandyke.com\/images\/freedom-fighter-matthew-vandyke-libya-war.jpg\" alt=\"freedom fighter Matthew VanDyke in the libya war\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Just as when I first joined the revolution in March 2011, nobody was supposed to know about my return to the front lines.\u00a0 My participation in Libya\u2019s revolution was supposed to be a secret, a personal matter, but being captured and imprisoned in Abu Salim erased my anonymity.\u00a0 I tried once again to stay below the radar when returning to the front lines after prison until a photographer spotted me as I passed through a checkpoint in the jeep.\u00a0 The secret was out.<\/p>\n<p>It was for the best, it turned out.\u00a0 Occasionally, I was able to take the press with me in the jeep to the front lines so they could report on the war while I fought in it, giving them a safe escort in an otherwise uncertain conflict zone.\u00a0 And thanks to our commander giving Nouri and I a lot of freedom to move as we wanted and fight where we wanted, we had a rare grasp of what was happening on the various front lines in Sirte.\u00a0 We fought at many different\u00a0areas on the front lines alongside various other brigades, <a title=\"Libya at a standstill until Sirte falls\" href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/news\/world\/story\/2011-10-06\/sirte-libya-rebels\/50680750\/1\" target=\"_blank\">making us a reliable source of information for the media<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless, I was criticized after the war by men incapable of understanding why someone who endured nearly six months of hell in the notorious Abu Salim prison would return to combat after escaping.\u00a0 To this day some of these individuals, from the comfort of their homes in Europe and the United States, have tried to disparage me for keeping the commitment I made to Libya the day I first put on a uniform in March 2011.<\/p>\n<p>Their criticism speaks volumes about their character, not mine.\u00a0 I told the rebels when I joined them in March 2011 that I would not leave Libya until the country was free.\u00a0 I honor my word; that is how I was raised.\u00a0 I would also not leave Libya before the men I was captured with were accounted for \u2013 they could have been in prison in Sirte or another Gaddafi-held city.\u00a0 Why would I ever abandon them?\u00a0 Furthermore, how could I leave Libya when there were <em>any<\/em> prisoners of war still being held by the regime?<\/p>\n<p>These wars of liberation aren\u2019t a game and there aren\u2019t any timeouts.\u00a0 The war in Libya, and the war now raging in Syria, are all-or-nothing pursuits.\u00a0 As Omar Mukhtar said, \u201cWe will not surrender. We win or we die.\u201d\u00a0 As I write this, there are thousands of prisoners waiting in their cells in Syria, just as I was waiting in a Libyan prison last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>No amount of reporting, NGO press releases, or rhetoric will get them out &#8211; Bashar al-Assad doesn&#8217;t care what anyone says, just like Gaddafi didn&#8217;t care what\u00a0any\u00a0of them\u00a0said about me.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t the time for observation.\u00a0 This isn&#8217;t the time for politely discussing the situation at the <a title=\"The Failure of the United Nations in Syria\" href=\"http:\/\/www.matthewvandyke.com\/blog\/united-nations-syria-failure\/\" target=\"_blank\">UN<\/a>, or standing at podiums issuing idle threats about what might happen if lines that we keep moving are somehow crossed.\u00a0 We are way past going through the motions of diplomacy.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Those thousands of Syrian prisoners &#8211; men, women, and children- are waiting for us.\u00a0 Each day they stare at the walls and wonder if it will be their last.\u00a0 I know the feeling, and I&#8217;ll do whatever I can to help them escape from <em>their<\/em> Abu Salim.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;m starting with <a title=\"Syrian revolution film\" href=\"http:\/\/www.indiegogo.com\/syrian-revolution-film\" target=\"_blank\">this film<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Escape from Abu Salim Prison One year ago today I escaped from Abu Salim prison in Libya.\u00a0 I had spent half a year being psychologically tortured in solitary confinement, pacing in my cell, staring at the walls and fearing that &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.matthewvandyke.com\/blog\/abu-salim-prison\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[52,3,7,9,11,14,15],"tags":[81],"class_list":["post-596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-arab-spring","category-libya","category-pow","category-prisoner-of-war","category-syria","category-war","tag-abu-salim"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.6 - 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