While news about the collapse of the regime Bashar al-Assad and the dictator’s escape spread over the weekend, many Syrians rushed to public squares to celebrate. In Damascuswomen wrapped in the green and black flag of the Syrian opposition chanted slogans in honor of Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, the Islamist leader who had planned the rebel offensive that overthrew Assad in less than two weeks. The fighters fired their weapons into the sky in celebration.
Thousands of others did not have time to celebrate. They headed directly to the prisons, opened by the rebels, in a desperate search for friends and family. Some had disappeared into Assad’s labyrinth of secret prisons and torture chambers more than a decade ago. Outside Damascus, traffic was paralyzed for miles on the highway. Saidnayaa city in the mountains north of the capital, which was the most notorious site of the regime’s abuses. Rebels with rifles acted as makeshift traffic guards.
Among all the symbols of Assad’s brutality, none were as potent as Saidnaya prison. Many of the tens of thousands of people who were taken for decades to what Syrians call al-Maslakh al-Basharia, the human slaughterhouse, never left. Human rights groups estimate that between 13,000 and 30,000 people have been killed in Saidnaya alone. since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011. And there are many other prisons too.
What people found when they arrived at Saidnaya was even worse than they had imagined. The regime had dug hidden cells into the ground beneath the prison, packing men by the dozens into the pitch-black chambers. Screams echoed in the night air around the prison, both of agony at the prisoners’ suffering and ecstasy at their release. The empty cells stank of urine contained in plastic bottles; Soaked blankets were piled in corners. In a hallway lay a prosthetic leg, whose owner was nowhere to be found. On the walls of an abandoned cell someone had written “take me now” in Arabic and a group of fighters discovered an iron press that they claimed was used to crush the remains of executed prisoners.
A day after the rebels took the prison, the search continued for the inmates still trapped inside. The rebels were calling for help from tunnels under the main prison building. The combatants tried to break the concrete with shovels and rifle butts, fearing that the prisoners might suffocate; A power outage had disabled the prison’s underground ventilation system. Among those searching for their missing relatives was Yemen al-Ayanan 18-year-old young man whose uncle had been detained for 12 years. The family had last heard from him in 2017. When they were allowed a rare visit to the prison, “he was just bones, like a skeleton,” Eyan said.
Groups of men used the light from their phones to search through old log books found inside the building. Others examined pieces of paper on the floor of the staff quarters. The freed prisoners continued to emerge from the building, gaunt and emaciated, their heads shaved. Some were so traumatized that they had forgotten their own names. The rebels gathered them at a nearby mosque to try to identify them.
Eyan, who comes from a nearby town, said the helicopters arrived at the prison on the afternoon of December 7, before the rebels arrived on the scene. He believes they took the guards and some prisoners the regime considered particularly important.
After they opened the prison, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, The Jolani-led rebel group that appears to be running Damascus for now, published a list of names of escaped prison staff. Aside from the Assad family, escaped prison guards are probably the most hated group in Syria right now. Syrians are elated by Assad’s departure. But they have only begun to understand the depth of his cruelty.
© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.
