The Photos They Thought They Deleted

I was fifteen, maybe sixteen. It was 2013 or 2014, and we were still in Aleppo.

A week before my family left Syria, we drove back to our home to collect what was left of our belongings. The house sat beyond the part of the city we considered relatively safe, in the strip between territory held by the opposition and territory held by the government. It was a warzone.

My father drove. I sat in the back seat with my phone.

Through the car window, I watched buildings reduced to rubble. Entire neighbourhoods devastated by the fighting. I started taking photographs. I wanted a record of what I was seeing, of what was happening to my city.

All of a sudden.

The government militia from the checkpoint were arming their machines, and people were waving at us to stop. They stopped our car. One of them pointed his weapon at the car and approached my window.

He knocked hard on my window and pointed at my phone.

My father opened the driver’s window to ask what was happening.

Without answering, the militiaman put his arm through the window and grabbed my phone.

He told me: “Get out NOW.”

He was shouting and pushing my father back to the car. My father tried to reason with him, to understand what was happening. Instead, he received insults and was told to forget about me.

I was a kid who was being accused of treason.

They accused me of taking photos to feed the opposition the locations that they had hit.

I tried to explain that I was taking the photos as memories. But these people were animals, and there was no way to reason with them.

And those accused of treason were killed at gunpoint.

His supervisor showed up, silenced his dog, and dragged me inside.

The room was dim. There was a single light.

The supervisor was going through my phone, through every photo that I had taken.

His expression of disappointment meant that I would never see the light of day, that I would never see my parents.

Then he uttered a choice for me.

“You either delete these photos or we delete you.”

I understood what that meant. There was nothing to negotiate.

In front of his eyes, I deleted every single photo until my gallery was clean.

He was reluctantly satisfied. He brought me outside and let me go to rejoin my family.

A week later, we fled Syria with a secret that I dearly protected until we made it safely to Lebanon.

My phone was an old Samsung running Android. What the supervisor didn’t know was that I had that phone jailbroken. He didn’t know that I had spent years experimenting with computers, software, and Android devices. Rooting that phone gave me access to parts of the operating system an ordinary user never sees.

I knew that deleted items are still stored in the cache. Nothing is ever fully deleted.

I restored every single photo he thought I had deleted.

His assumption was my weapon.

His ignorance was my exploit.

He had the weapons, the authority, and complete control in that room.

Yet a kid still outsmarted him.

I got what I wanted.