Theo Padnos
speaker
157 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Theo Padnos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I put on some sports suit, like a track suit. And then we were in the southern part of Syria at that point, which is on the Israeli border. And I saw that out the truck window, the guys were pointing to the landscape ahead. They go, that's Israel up there. I'm like, maybe this will happen.
No, I mean, I had some idea. I was hoping, I was hoping, but I didn't trust them. But do you stop hoping at a certain point because they tell you so many tales? Yeah, yeah, that's right. You live for the moment. You go, I might make it through the next 20 minutes.
And you're happy when you make it through the next 20 minutes. You go, okay, I got another 20 minutes, but...
They drove me to the border, and there was a big al-Qaeda station there with a flag on top and Israelis, you know, it was within eyesight of the Israeli, like, surveillance places. Apparently, at this time, I didn't know this, but Jabhat al-Nusra and the Israeli government were in some kind of collaboration because...
At the time, the Israeli government was thinking, these guys oppose Assad and they oppose Hezbollah, and so we need to help them to topple Assad or to at least degrade Assad's capacity to make war and Hezbollah's capacity to make war. The Israelis were very tolerant of al-Qaeda's presence on their border like this, which they are no longer, but at the time they were.
Anyway, yeah, eventually they dropped me off at this UN post, like a no man's land kind of place. And they had made contact with the UN people beforehand. So the UN people came out and brought me into their truck and I was free.
All the way to the border, they were making a video, which is out there somewhere. I was saying to them what they wanted to hear. Wait, have you seen this video? Do you know that it's out there? I don't know. They have it. I've made a lot of videos with these guys that haven't come out. Do you want to see them? I would be very curious to see them. You would?
Including the capture and my trial they videotaped, and also this ride to the border where they're saying goodbye. And they were like, what do you want to say to Abu this one, Abu this one, Abu that one? I'm like, goodbye, I'm going to miss you. Goodbye, I'm going to miss you. I'm saying what they want to hear. Of course. I think that there's a part of them that wanted to go with me.
They're like, I could be free. I believe that there is a part of every last one of them that believes we have the capacity to shape our own future and earn money and go off and be all you can be. They don't have that. They have to do what they're told. And they're jealous of us for this freedom. But, of course, they have nowhere to go. They have no money. They have no future in the West.
Once you go over to the dark side like that, most of them know they're not coming back.
I'm fine. The crimes that they're committing are the crimes against the Syrian people, like all the minorities that they're never going to forgive, that they're killing now. And so one wants justice for those people, those families that have never found their loved ones.
The loved ones just vanished and now they're never going to be found because those people in charge who killed them are never going to admit.
I know what they really want. What they really want is a whole nation in harmony with Islam, and then the people that are not in harmony are doing what they're supposed to do according to the Quran, which is deep and total submission. To the law of God. So, for instance, you can't drink. That's why they're smashing up all the alcohol bottles. But the law of God is a little bit arbitrary.
You can violate it and not know it, and then they can kill you for that. One of the things that they killed people for is insulting God. And what is that?
No, because they know that that didn't work. They learned the lesson from ISIS.
Very rational. They were always the smarter group because ISIS got on TV. They made a bunch of videos and they said, this is who we are. And that was evidently a mistake. And it felt good for a little while. But I was there when they were doing this. And most of the rank and file were like jealous of all the media attention that ISIS was getting. But the commanders were like, that's stupid.
They're just going to get themselves in trouble this way. And that is indeed what happened.
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