Syria: The Jail Gates Thrown Open | Stefan Tarnowski

As Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) pushed south from Idlib Province, the rebels’ first precedence was to liberate prisons. From Aleppo to Hama to Homs, movies emerged of fighters breaking down doorways and slicing by way of locks. Detainees streamed out. They ran, typically barefoot, to freedom. “What’s happening?” one prisoner asks a bystander. “The regime has fallen!” He squeals in pleasure and quickens his tempo. In one other video males break down the doorways of a jail cell filled with feminine inmates. “You’re free!” they shout. “But where do we go?” Liberation got here rapidly and unexpectedly.

These in exile—since 2011 half of Syria’s inhabitants has been displaced, 1 / 4 overseas—pored over movies of prisons being opened and lists of inmates’ names circulating on-line. Consideration quickly turned to Saydnaya Army Jail. Positioned thirty kilometers north of Damascus and formed like three blades of a propeller, it was the motor of the Assad regime’s repression. For the reason that 2011 rebellion, detainees from a community of just about 100 intelligence branches and secret police detention facilities—together with twenty in Damascus alone—had been introduced there for central processing. Based on Amnesty Worldwide, between 5,000 and 13,000 Syrians had been killed in Saydnaya between 2011 and 2015; the quantity killed within the subsequent years stays unknown. Syrian buddies residing within the nation and in exile instructed me they feared the regime, in its remaining hours, would execute 1000’s of political prisoners held there. One nameless opposition media activist group, Younger Damascene Lens, launched a press release expressing this anxiousness: “We hope to God that today the birds of Saydnaya will finally fly free from this vile prison.”

Early on the morning of Sunday, December 8, the rebels declared Damascus “liberated.” Syrians from as far afield as Maarat Numan within the northwest and Deir Ezzor within the northeast started streaming towards Saydnaya, hoping to search out family members who had been detained years and typically many years in the past, or a minimum of to be taught what had occurred to them. That night, the rebels circulated a video with the phrases “from inside Saydnaya Prison” typed excessive. It confirmed the panopticon’s eye: a management room with a wall of video screens and tons of of surveillance feeds, every wanting right into a cell or hall filled with prisoners going about their each day routine, unaware that the regime had been toppled. The rebels then uploaded movies exhibiting themselves systematically releasing prisoners from varied blocks. Crowds rifled by way of the ledgers and deserted paperwork for clues.

Rumors unfold extensively on satellite tv for pc information channels and social media. A narrative went round that 1000’s of prisoners had been held in three secret flooring beneath Saydnaya. By Monday enormous crowds had been scouring the power for an entrance main underground. That day the Syrian Civil Defence (SCD) had been referred to as in from Idlib Province to excavate. (Also referred to as the White Helmets, the SCD is a primary responder group based in 2014 in response to the Assad regime’s aerial bombardment of opposition-controlled areas.) Movies circulated of them pickaxing at stable concrete partitions and flooring—to no avail. Quickly they gave up the search. However folks saved digging and rumors—about prisoners being concreted into rooms with out openings, the existence of different secret prisons—continued to unfold. 

I spoke to Mohammad Ali Atassi, a Syrian filmmaker and journalist who, within the late Nineteen Nineties and 2000s, collected testimonies of political prisoners for the Lebanese weekly Mulhaq al-Nahar. He was elated on the fall of the regime, however disturbed by the reminiscences that resurfaced because the prisons had been liberated. “Once they find those three underground floors—if they find the underground floors—it will only drive a search for another three underground floors, and then another, and then another,” he stated. “If they stop looking, the glimmer of hope of finding their relatives alive will die.” To his eyes the footage popping out of Saydnaya—of rooms the place mass hangings happened, the place a concrete press crushed dwell our bodies right into a tissue of flesh, the place corpses had been burned or dissolved in acid—wasn’t stunning. “It was expected, but few were listening, and sometimes they were unwilling to believe us.” 

Ex-detainees—and regime defectors—residing in exile have, over a few years, shared ample testimonies about their remedy to journalists, lecturers, courts, and human rights organizations. In October 2022 the Affiliation of Detainees and the Lacking in Saydnaya Jail (ADMSP) revealed a report, primarily based on prolonged interviews with defected officers, which mapped its administrative construction and its evolving practices of mistreatment, torture, and killing. The authors admitted that “collecting quantitative data would not be feasible.” Nobody knew what number of detainees remained within the jail.

On December 10 the Al Araby information channel interviewed Fadel Abdulghany, the top of the Syrian Community for Human Rights (SNHR). He estimated that the regime had killed 85 % of detainees. “Where are the bodies?” he requested. “For fourteen years, we haven’t been able to answer that question. Most indications—and I use the word indication, not evidence—point to mass incineration. Indications—including smells reportedly emanating from certain areas—suggest that there are mass graves as well as ovens. That is the fate of the bodies.” However folks continued to dig by way of the concrete at Saydnaya.

Syrians right now are utilizing the phrase “liberation” in two associated however distinct methods. The primary and most blatant is the liberation of cities and territories from Assad’s management. Opposition teams, activists, and intellectuals have all greeted the regime’s fall with unbridled pleasure—but additionally some trepidation on the ideologies and practices of the liberators. Since 2017 Abu Muhammad al-Julani, the chief of HTS, has managed Idlib province with a combination of technocratic talent and violence. He has a report of arresting, detaining, and typically torturing dissidents—although nothing on the size or brutality of the Assads. In Might 2024, after HTS’s safety forces killed a detainee, protests broke out in Idlib.

The second liberation is the tip of “the Syrian Gulag.” This has been unambiguously celebrated. Assad’s prisons had been a number of the worst on this planet: websites of isolation, humiliation, torture, hunger, and sadistic killing on an industrial scale. Jaber Baker and Uğur Ümit Üngör, of their guide Syrian Gulag, interpolate from statistics drawn from varied Syrian human rights organizations to estimate that, since 2011, a minimum of 300,000 Syrian nationals entered detention facilities. This previous August the SNHR estimated that round 135,000 prisoners had been nonetheless lacking, detained with out cost or forcibly disappeared. The speed of detention—1,200 folks per 100,000—is twenty occasions larger than that of america, which has the very best official gross and per capita jail inhabitants for any unbiased democracy.¹

Prisons have been central to Syrian public consciousness for greater than half a century. A few of the most infamous complexes, akin to Tadmor (Palmyra) Jail, had been constructed by the colonial French Mandate authorities. In 1949 Husni al-Zaim, Syria’s first navy dictator, locked up opponents within the Mezzeh Army Jail, positioned in an upmarket Damascus suburb. The Syrian jail community in all its infamy, nonetheless, was assembled over two generations of Assad rule. 

When Hafez al-Assad got here to energy in a coup in 1970, he imprisoned his former colleagues from the ruling Baath Get together. He’s stated to have remarked, in line with the Palestinian historian Hanna Batatu, that individuals have “primarily economic demands”: a home, a automobile, a plot of land. He claimed to try to fulfill these wants, “in one way or another.” Solely “one or two hundred individuals at most…make politics their profession” and would oppose him it doesn’t matter what, he stated: “It is for them that Mezzeh prison was originally intended.”²

Between 1979 and 1982 the Muslim Brotherhood mounted an rebellion towards the Syrian state. The regime’s response was brutal, concentrating on not solely members of the Brotherhood but additionally such “professionals” as leftists, communists, journalists, and filmmakers. In 1982 Hafez’s praetorian guard, commanded by his brother Refaat, positioned Hama underneath siege after which, over a interval of twenty-seven days, massacred between ten and forty thousand folks. (Nobody is aware of the precise quantity.) It stays the deadliest act an Arab regime has perpetrated towards its personal inhabitants.

Jail literature turned an vital Syrian literary style.³ Maybe its masterpiece is Mustafa Khalifa’s Al-Qawqa (The Shell). The guide opens in 1982, when a younger Christian communist, on his return residence from movie faculty in France, is arrested at Damascus airport. Absurdly accused of being an Islamist, he serves the higher a part of his thirteen-year-sentence within the “Desert Prison,” a cipher for Tadmor. The primary passage addresses the problem of bearing witness to the system’s internal workings:

Nearly all of this diary was written within the desert jail. However the phrase “written” within the earlier sentence isn’t exact. For in that jail, there are nether pens nor paper for writing. In that big jail, which numbers seven courtyards—not counting courtyard quantity zero—there are thirty-seven group cells, moreover all of the unnumbered extra not too long ago constructed cells, all of the rooms, all of the “French-style” cells (cellules) of courtyard quantity 5; that jail, which at a sure level held greater than ten thousand prisoners inside its partitions, and which contained the very best proportion of college graduates within the nation; not a single prisoner—and a few had been in additional than twenty years—ever noticed both pen or paper. Psychological writing is a course of developed by the Islamists. There was one who had memorized greater than ten thousand names: the names of prisoners who had entered the desert jail, their household identify, their city or village, their date of detention, their sentence, their destiny…⁴

It was tough to get any details about political prisoners. Funerals had been held and wives remarried just for detainees to reemerge many years later.⁵ Comparable scenes have performed out in latest days, as Lebanese nationals—detained between 1976, when the Assad regime started intervening in Lebanon’s civil struggle, and 2005, when a preferred rebellion pushed out the Syrian military—resurfaced dazed and decrepit. In Hama, the rebels freed a Lebanese man who had disappeared thirty-nine years in the past at a Syrian checkpoint. He had misplaced his reminiscence, however his brother instantly acknowledged him from a video posted on-line. Based on the Lebanese authorities, 9 nationals have thus far returned from Assad’s prisons. That is although, as not too long ago as 2015, politicians allied with the Assad regime, together with the previous president (and warlord) Michel Aoun, gave assurances that no Lebanese residents had been detained in Syria. For its half, the Committee of the Households of the Kidnapped and Lacking in Lebanon (CFKDL) has compiled 282 names, primarily based on registration by relations, of individuals thought to have disappeared into Syria’s detention facilities. 

A listing is circulating with the names of eighty Lebanese nationals liberated in latest weeks from Syrian jails. Households are sharing photos of disappeared family members with their cell phone numbers on social media, asking for anybody who may need data to contact them. At a December 7 press convention in Beirut, nonetheless, the founding father of the CFKDL, Wadad Halawani, cautioned towards sharing unsubstantiated paperwork of this type. “Hope flowed again into their veins and into their pores,” she stated of the victims’ households. “They suddenly forgot their deep wounds, their years of oppression, of knocking on doors, of demanding answers, and of waiting.” Talking with me over the cellphone, Wadad Halawani described the state of affairs in Syria: “You can’t rely on anything, and three quarters of what’s happening is being left undocumented. There’s a state of hysteria. The issue will take a long time to be resolved.” I requested if she trusted the brand new authorities to take cost of the state of affairs: “There is no authority in place yet, there’s chaos, and all the butchers have fled.”

When Bashar al-Assad inherited the presidency from his father in 2000, the transition occasioned a short thaw throughout which political prisoners had been freed. For round a 12 months mental salons flourished in Damascus. Activists referred to as for democratic reform and an amnesty for prisoners of conscience.⁶ However the “Damascus Spring” got here to an abrupt finish when Riad al-Turk—a pacesetter of the Syrian Communist Get together (Political Bureau), recognized overseas because the “Syrian Mandela”—gave an interview on Al Jazeera wherein he declared that the “dictator was dead.” Al-Turk had not too long ago emerged from eighteen years of detention, which he spent in solitary confinement in an underground cell. He was arrested as soon as once more, placed on sham trial earlier than a navy courtroom, and sentenced to 2 additional years in jail.⁷

The brand new regime’s reforms had been restricted to financial liberalization, a course of that students have referred to as “authoritarian upgrading.” ATMs, boutique motels, and music festivals popped up in Damascus. Bashar’s glamorous British-born spouse, Asma, appeared in Vogue, and President Sarkozy invited the couple to the Élysée Palace. However coercive establishments—the jail system, the military, the navy police, paramilitary youth golf equipment, 4 competing safety providers referred to as the mukhabarat—remained in place. 

In 2011, after Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak had been toppled, there have been sporadic demonstrations in Damascus. At first the protesters referred to as for reforms, together with an finish to the state of emergency that had been in place since 1963 and the discharge of political prisoners. In March the safety providers confronted down unarmed protesters with dwell ammunition. That was when the motion adopted the revolutionary slogans of the Arab Spring, akin to “The people demand the fall of the regime.” Bashar’s response revealed him to be much more brutal than his father. 

Folks had been rounded up and arrested en masse. Tons of of movies shot inside detention facilities—together with Mezzeh and Tadmur—had been intentionally leaked on social media, prone to intimidate the restive inhabitants.⁸ They revealed glimpses of the types of torture Syrians had lengthy heard or examine however had by no means seen: shabah (“the ghost”), the German Chair, the wheel. Opponents of the regime additionally recirculated the footage to underscore its brutality.

Some troopers refused to fireside on protesters.⁹ There was a spiral of defections; defectors shaped native items to guard civilians. The regime centered on controlling main cities and coastal areas: it both “withdrew” from giant swathes of territory, or they had been “liberated.” By 2013 it had misplaced management of many of the north, south, and the world alongside the Lebanese border. In August 2013 the rebels, having taken management of the cities within the greenbelt surrounding Damascus referred to as the “Ghouta,” had been encroaching on the capital, when the regime attacked them with chemical weapons, crossing certainly one of President Barack Obama’s much-vaunted “red lines.” It appeared sure that Assad could be deposed. However US navy intervention didn’t materialize—that story is well-known—and Hezbollah after which the Russian air drive turned the tide in his favor. 

All through these years, the regime escalated imprisonment. Based on ADMSP, the inhabitants of Saidnaya had swollen to 4 thousand by 2012. For family members of the detained, the system’s inside workings remained opaque, a black field. Our bodies went in and bits of paper got here out. Jail guards and intelligence officers charged 1000’s of {dollars} for details about detainees or demise certificates. They often lied to determined households. Visits had been practically not possible: households had been charged $30,000 to see their family members, and solely fifteen to twenty had been allowed in per week. 

Internally, nonetheless, high-ranking regime officers, conscious of the system’s propensity for corruption, demanded dependable proof that their orders had been being carried out. When rebels liberated areas in 2012–2013, the nonprofit Fee for Worldwide Justice and Accountability (CIJA) gathered troves of paperwork from detention facilities and intelligence bureaus, revealing excessive centralization. Assad and his feared lieutenants within the Damascus “Crisis Management Cell”—together with his brother Maher al-Assad, in addition to Assef Shawkat, Ali Mamlouk, and Jamil Hassan—accredited lists of individuals to be arrested at checkpoints. Between demise certificates and images of corpses, the economies of realizing and killing mixed to provide each bureaucratic proof and murk. 

The state additionally saved photographic information of murdered detainees. Probably the most notorious of those archives are the “Caesar Files”—named after “Caesar,” a navy photographer who defected in 2013. Up till 2011 he took photos of the corpses of troopers and safety service members for his or her demise certificates. However as soon as the crackdown started, he was tasked with documenting the corpses of detainees. Based on the French investigative journalist Garance Le Caisne, who interviewed him in individual, Caesar was shocked by the sudden change in work.¹⁰ There have been so many our bodies he might barely sustain; they bore marks of hunger, torture, and mutilation. 

Caesar, who feared he was complicit in mass state killing, needed to defect instantly. However his pal Sami persuaded him to proceed the morbid work for 2 years, with the purpose of smuggling out the proof. In all he downloaded 26,948 photographs of 6,627 detainees who had been imprisoned in twenty-four detention facilities throughout Damascus. It’s an archive of horror exhibiting each possible type of cruelty. The demise certificates issued all listing both coronary heart assault or respiratory failure.

With the assistance of Sami—who, after years of residing underneath a pseudonym in northern Europe, final week revealed his true id to be Osama Othman—and the Syrian opposition in exile, Caesar handed the pictures to human rights legal professionals in Turkey. Ultimately they had been exhibited internationally, together with on the UN headquarters in Geneva, the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and quite a few universities. They’ve been verified by forensic investigators and utilized in authorized processes, together with the 2021–2022 Koblenz trial towards Anwar Raslan for homicide, torture, sexual violence, and different crimes towards humanity dedicated on his watch on the Al-Khatib secret jail.¹¹

What’s—was—the operate of the Assad regime’s violence? The place does the jail advanced match throughout the Assad state? One solution to deal with this query is thru a consideration of perception. Some commentators have described “Assad’s Syria” as a “totalitarian” state akin to Stalin’s Soviet Union. As theorized by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, such a state combines propaganda and coercion—doctoring pictures, rewriting historical past books, and smothering dissent—to provide a actuality of its personal, untethered from what truly occurred. By monopolizing each the technique of violence and the circulation of knowledge, it produces obedient and credulous topics. 

However the Assad regime by no means got here near producing the sorts of brainwashed populations that the literature on totalitarianism describes. (Nor, for that matter, did the Soviet Union.) It didn’t even search “total” management over actuality—not likely. Conducting fieldwork within the late Nineteen Nineties, the political scientist Lisa Wedeen famous one hanging side of the regime: it pressured folks to say issues publicly that had been patently unbelievable.¹² For instance, an official slogan was that Hafez al-Assad would rule “for eternity.” (In latest days Syrians have chanted the rebuttal: “Eternity has ended.”) State propaganda claimed—and would typically drive Syrians to repeat—that the dour dictator, a former airforce pilot, was a knight in shining armor, or the nation’s premier pharmacist. Why expend scarce sources on propagating apparent falsehoods? The regime’s intention, Wedeen argued, was to make Syrians act “as if” these slogans had been true—to make them repeat falsehoods as a approach of acknowledging and enacting the regime’s energy. The cult “cluttered” public life, organizing what might and couldn’t be stated.

Such discourse lived on underneath Bashar. A wry instance of it may be discovered within the late filmmaker Omar Amiralay’s documentary A Flood within the Baath Nation (2003). In its remaining scene a low-ranking regime official, a type of headmaster at a poor rural major faculty close to the Euphrates Dam, paces backwards and forwards underneath the ever-present portraits of Bashar and Hafez al-Assad, extolling the virtues of Syria’s leaders. “This is the IT room, it has been specially built, the equipment has been delivered to us.” The room is empty—as empty as his langue de bois—aside from 4 small cardboard bins. “Computers, screens, a printer…” The headmaster gestures at every field in flip. “This material is a gift from comrade Bashar al-Assad who aims to develop and modernize the country, and bring us into the information age.”

The Assad regime’s strategy to propaganda can partly be defined by its peculiar relationship to the state. In political concept the military symbolizes the monopoly of official violence; it needs to be on the apex of coercion. However Michel Seurat—one of many few social scientists to do analysis in Syria through the Nineteen Eighties—described the nation as having “two armies…one the prisoner of the other.”¹³ Trusted elite items commanded untrusted conscripts at gunpoint. A method of deciphering the spectacular collapse of the regime this month was that it was brought on by the latter’s defection en masse.

To theorize the Syrian state, Seurat drew on Ibn Khaldoun’s idea of asabiyya: a time period which means each a gaggle and “group feeling” however which I recommend we translate on this case as “regime.” Ibn Khaldoun famous in The Muqaddimah that an asabiyya arises within the hinterland to occupy a social physique however with out penetrating it, with out anticipating these it guidelines over to internalize its ethical and political code.¹⁴ Seurat up to date these concepts to argue innovatively that the asabiyya might additionally occupy and dominate a state. In recent times, Syrian protesters and intellectuals have described the Assad regime as an occupying moderately than governing drive. Its exterior domination had come with out inside compliance—a brutal in addition to brittle type of energy.

That is the place the prisons are available, and notably the economies of realizing and killing. After the 2011 rebellion, when the regime might now not depend on exterior compliance, it turned to terror. The proliferation of bureaucratic proof—one CIJA director claimed that there’s “stronger evidence than…for any past conflicts, any past tribunals, any past international justice efforts”—means that the regime was deeply anxious about its personal energy. It couldn’t confidently order foot troopers and jail guards to kill however moderately had to verify—in photographic element, 4 pictures per corpse—that they had been correctly doing so. In Saydnaya, proximity to the president moderately than official rank decided authority: the lower-ranking “security officer,” who was appointed straight by the president or members of the disaster cell, might bypass the higher-ranking jail director. Such contortions existed all through the labyrinthine safety apparatuses.

It’s the name for the “fall of the regime” (isqāt al-nizam)—not the state—that has echoed by way of Syria for the previous fourteen years. If their actions are something to go by, the rebels are keenly conscious of this distinction. They’ve disbanded the 4 safety providers, dissolved ministries whose sole operate was to distribute sinecures (the Monetary Occasions reported on a “department of flags”), and granted common amnesty to conscripts, however to not officers or the shabiha, the regime’s paramilitary thugs, who participated in mass killing and torture. 

“Dynasties,” Ibn Khaldoun wrote, “have a natural lifespan like people.” They final roughly forty years. The primary era possesses the “tawahhush” (brutality) required to keep up energy. The second acquires a style for “taraf” (luxurious) and softens. The third loses the toughness of desert life and is destined to get replaced by one other asabiyya. Is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, then, merely the following asabiyya to return from the hinterland and occupy town—and the state? Is that this revolution a flip of the wheel, or a leap ahead?

For now, because the prisons are liberated and displaced Syrians start to return residence, this query has understandably been kicked down the highway. HTS has shaped a transitional authorities which is able to stay in place till March 1. Al-Julani has introduced that Saydnaya Jail might be become a museum. It’s a promising signal, however no systematic makes an attempt appear to be underway to assemble and protect paperwork for a future tribunal the place perpetrators could be held to account, or to lastly inform households in regards to the fates of their family members.