In the fall of 2012, Theo Padnos was down and out in Antakya. An American freelance reporter in his early 40s, he was bunking at a grotty guesthouse in this town in southern Turkey on the border with Syria. Magazine editors were ignoring his emails. His funds had shrunk to a few hundred dollars. He felt lonely.
One evening, Padnos met a pair of young Syrians who, calling themselves citizen journalists, offered to spirit him into their country to report on the war unfolding there. Despite some troubling omens — another reporter, Austin Tice, had vanished weeks earlier — Padnos leapt at the offer. Less than 24 hours later he was sprinting across the border, into Syria, and headlong into a personal catastrophe.
What happens next is the subject of “Blindfold,” Padnos’s searching account of the almost two years he spent in the clutches of Jabhat al-Nusra, the main Qaeda affiliate in Syria. The Syrian guides turn out to be jihadi kidnappers.
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