To the Editor:

Re “The Ex-Jihadi in Plain Sight,” by Rania Abouzeid (Sunday Review, March 11): I’m all for forgiving and forgetting when it comes to foot soldiers, but “Saleh,” the subject of this profile, was an aide to the highest Nusra Front commander, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, and a member of his internal security apparatus.

The Nusra Front, a jihadist organization in Syria, imprisoned me in the basement of its headquarters in Aleppo in the fall of 2012. I listened as Nusra fighters tortured members of the Syrian Parliament. In the boiler room at the end of the corridor, they hanged their fellow citizens by their wrists and shocked them, as they screamed, with cattle prods.

I have no idea how many people they killed in this facility. I know that 13 Syrian families, the relatives of my prison comrades, continue to search for news of their lost sons and husbands.

If Syria is ever to come back from this nightmare of a civil war, Europe must not continue to function as a retirement destination for Syrian war criminals. Journalists must stop writing about the war criminals as if they are characters whose struggles with the past are to be pondered, then sighed over, then held up as examples of moral complexity.