Inside an ISIS Prison
The Mother Jones Podcast
Mother Jones
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2019
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Beneath a crumbling soccer stadium in Raqqa, in northeast Syria, is a maze of narrow corridors and underground cells where ISIS once held its prisoners. In this installment of our “Behind the Lines” podcast series, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer tours these abandoned tunnels with a former prisoner who recounts the atrocities that happened beneath the stands where he’d watched soccer matches as a boy. Pro-ISIS graffiti still covers the walls of the cramped rooms were prisoners were kept in darkness, released only to be interrogated, tortured, and fed ISIS propaganda. While some prisoners made false confessions and were beheaded, others tried to save their lives by accepting their captors’ religious message; some escaped by joining ISIS. In this episode, Bauer provides an inside look at the place where ISIS held its captives and created new recruits.
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| 0:00.0 | This episode contains content that some listeners might find disturbing. |
| 0:04.0 | Last week on Behind the Lines, a Mother Jones podcast series. |
| 0:09.0 | I've never seen a body of zooms in my life. |
| 0:11.0 | It was horrifying. |
| 0:13.0 | America is more involved in Syria than anyone understands. |
| 0:17.0 | If something like Rocca had happened in Vietnam War for example it might have been one of the most sensational parts of that war. |
| 0:24.8 | Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer went deep inside Syria to see it firsthand |
| 0:30.4 | to wrestle with America's role in one of the 21st century's greatest tragedies. I'm Jimmy Lippe King in New York, and this is behind the lines from the Mother Jones |
| 0:50.0 | podcast. |
| 0:51.7 | American Special Forces, Jihadists anarchists, and ISIS wives have all made |
| 0:56.6 | their way to the battlefront. So Shane followed them. What he learned there and |
| 1:01.3 | what he brought back is the basis of this podcast series and a big immersive |
| 1:06.6 | reported feature with stunning videos at mother Jones.com right now. |
| 1:31.5 | Today dot com right now. Today episode two. Inside an ISIS prison. Deep inside the territory formerly controlled by ISIS, inside its former capital, |
| 1:37.8 | a stronghold from which they hope to build and rule a global caliphate, |
| 1:42.3 | is a crumbling soccer stadium. |
| 1:45.0 | And beneath that at the heart of this brutal regime is a maze of narrow |
| 1:55.7 | corridors and underground cells, perhaps the epitome of ISIS's barbaric |
| 2:01.4 | torture tactics. |
| 2:03.0 | In this installment of Behind the Lines, |
| 2:05.6 | Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer |
| 2:07.9 | tours these abandoned tunnels with a former prisoner. |
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