Last December, the former al Qaeda leader, Ahmed al-Shara, made history as he led a loose coalition of rebels into downtown Damascus. The Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad , promptly fled in a helicopter. In January, al-Shara appointed himself the country’s new president. Lately, he’s been having earnest sit downs with David Patraeus in New York, addressing the U.N. General Assembly, and rocking a $50,000 Patek Philippe watch.

Before all this, I was his prisoner. In October of 2012, I slipped into Syria in order to carry out some freelance reporting. I was arrested almost right away. After about a week of being shuttled around in the trunk of a car, my captors brought me to the Aleppo eye hospital, which al-Shara was using as a prison. His men installed me in Cell One, formerly

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