Vermont student reunites with parents at Logan Airport
Pathik “Tik’’ Root was reunited with his father, Tom, at Logan Airport in Boston yesterday. (Kayana Szymczak for The Boston Globe)
By David Abel | Globe Staff | April 3, 2011
The parents of the 21-year-old Middlebury
College junior from Ripton, Vt., who went to Syria to study Arabic, had no idea
whether their son was alive. They spent the past two weeks making call after
call to congressmen, senators, ambassadors — anyone who could help find their
son and bring him home.
Yesterday, a week after Syrian officials
acknowledged that Root had been taken into custody and after long negotiations
to establish he wasn’t a CIA agent or some other covert operative, Root caught
a flight from Damascus to London and then another to Logan International
Airport. There, he emerged from customs about 7:15 p.m. with a beaming smile
and fell into the arms of his parents.
“I’m just shocked,’’ he said. “Thirty-six
hours ago, I was in prison. I’m just trying to comprehend all of this. I’m just
really, really glad to be back.’’
His parents fought tears as they tried to size
up their son, who was much thinner than when they last saw him, with long,
disheveled hair and heavy eyes. They tried to grasp the horror of the ordeal he
said he had been through, locked in a prison cell in Damascus, with no way to
communicate with anyone.
“I’m overwhelmed,’’ said Tom Root, his father.
“Before this, I had very little information. It’s 10 times worse to know what
he went through. I just wish I could have taken his place. I can’t imagine how
he got through it.’’
Andi Lloyd, his stepmother, added: “We’re just
elated right now. I’m just very happy to have my son and my life back.’’
In an interview at the airport last night,
Pathik Root explained how he was wandering around the Old City after Friday
prayers ended on March 18 as hundreds of people began flooding out of mosques.
He had just bought some chicken shwarma when he caught sight of some flags and
heard chanting.
Then he made the fateful mistake of taking out
his BlackBerry to take some pictures.
Seconds afterward, several plainclothes
members of the secret police grabbed him, he said. One tried to drag him by his
hair. He explained that he was an American, and the men threw him in the back
of a Chevy Suburban.
When he showed his passport, it made things
worse. The worldly young man, who studied politics and economics and has long
been fascinated by the Middle East, had previously visited Saudi Arabia, Yemen,
and Egypt, all of which had stamped his passport.
“I was saying, ‘I’m an American. What’s going
on?’ ’’ he said.
They told him there was no problem, but then
shoved his head down in the back seat. Five secret police officers crowded into
the vehicle and drove him to a prison in Damascus. He never learned its name.
“I had no idea what was going on,’’ he said.
“I was just glad they hadn’t beaten me. There were clubs in the back of the
Suburban.’’
They brought him into an office at the prison,
where he was blindfolded. He was later interrogated at least four times, he
said.
“They threatened violence if I didn’t admit to
being a CIA agent or a journalist,’’ he said. “They said it would only take 10
minutes for me to start talking after they used violence.’’
Root said he told them the same thing,
repeatedly.
“I said I was a student at the University of
Damascus, studying Arabic,’’ he said. “I was glad I was wearing a Middlebury
College sweatshirt.’’
When he asked why he had been arrested, they
told him, “It was because of the picture, and that I was a CIA agent.’’
For his first week in custody, he was kept in
a dank, tiny cell with one other man, a Syrian. They strip-searched him and
took his shoelaces and the string from his hooded sweatshirt. He said the cell
was about 3 feet by 7 feet and windowless. The only time he was allowed out, he
said, was to go to the bathroom three times a day.
“They didn’t like it if you took very long,’’
he said.
Root said they slid his meals through a peep
hole in the cell door. He ate only bread and potatoes for the 15 days he was in
custody, and didn’t discover there was water until he asked for it on his third
day. He said he was never allowed to shower.
But the worst part, he said, was hearing the
screams. He said he was sure the prison was using electricity and clubs to
torture the other prisoners. He said he met a man who was beaten for putting an
X over a picture of President Bashar al-Assad’s face.
“I was not beaten, but I would say at least 75
percent of those in the prison were,’’ he said.
He said he slept on blankets on the floor of
his cell and fought boredom by sleeping as much as possible, which wasn’t easy.
“I would write stuff on the walls,’’ he said.
Root didn’t know he would be released until
the moment on Friday when he saw an official from the American embassy in
Syria, and even then he wasn’t sure.
“Every day, they told me I would be released,
and it wouldn’t happen,’’ he said. “I was pretty numb most of the time.’’
He worried that his arrest would become a
political issue and that he could be confined for years, as happened with the
young American hikers who were arrested several years ago in Iran.
“I was not convinced I was going to get back
until I was here on the ground,’’ he said.
When asked what he takes away from the
experience, he said: “People need to know that these kinds of governments exist
in the world, the ones that torture their citizens,’’ he said.
Asked if he would ever return to the Middle
East, he said he would one day.
“This experience, as bad as it was, has in no
way dampened my interest in these countries, in their cultures and their
people. There’s a big difference between the government and the people.’’
Root has no immediate plans, he said. “I’m
just going to go home and sleep as much as possible.’’
He and his family said they couldn’t thank
enough those who helped free him. Chief among them, they said, was Senator
Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who early Friday morning was the first American
official to learn that Root was to be freed.
Leahy had received a call while still in bed
from the Syrian ambassador in Washington, Imad Moustapha.
“I was happy to be awoken with such good
news,’’ Leahy said in a telephone interview.
He said Moustapha, as well as US Ambassador
Robert Ford in Syria, had been very helpful in securing Root’s release.
Leahy said Root, who had been adopted from
India, seemed suspicious to the Syrians, because he had been studying in Yemen
last summer and then was an exchange student in Alexandria, Egypt, until the
protests in January made it unsafe to stay. He had moved to Syria 10 days
before his arrest.
“They weren’t sure who he was, and why he was
there,’’ Leahy said. “But I explained that it was just a case of being at the
wrong place at the wrong time.’’
He said US officials relied on the goodwill of
the Syrians. “We couldn’t make a whole lot of demands, because that wouldn’t
get us anywhere,’’ he said.
He said Syrian officials kept him posted about
Root’s condition, but wouldn’t say where he was being held. The Americans, he
said, offered nothing in return for freeing Root.
“There was absolutely no quid pro quo,’’ Leahy
said.
Leahy said Root’s release was finally secured
after Ford held a meeting with a senior
official in the Syrian government on Thursday.
He also praised Root’s parents, both of whom
teach biology at Middlebury College, saying their devotion to their son “has
deeply touched every Vermonter who has stood with them.’’
Root’s freedom also brought a huge sigh of
relief to officials at Middlebury, where friends set up a Facebook page and
have been waiting anxiously for him to return.
“Needless to say, everyone here at Middlebury
is both relieved and delighted that Tik has been freed,’’ said Ron Liebowitz,
the college’s president, in an e-mail. “We now wish to give Tik and his family
the support and space they need following this intense ordeal.’’
David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @davabel.
