Families flock to Syria’s prisons looking for released inmates

As the Assad regime relinquishes control of Syria, hundreds of people have been flooding to its prisons hoping to find their loved ones.

So what? Most Syrians know – or know of – someone jailed by their deposed dictator. A complex security apparatus that arrested, imprisoned, tortured and executed anyone suspected of disloyalty was key to maintaining regime control. It’s estimated that there may have been up to 150,000 people in Assad’s prisons at any given time.

• People were often grabbed in the street by plainclothes police, and their families never informed as to their whereabouts.
• A semi-official extortion racket evolved as a result, with families sometimes selling their homes in attempts to buy information about their loved ones.
• Multiple overlapping security services operated their own prisons in most major cities. One of the most notorious, Sednaya in Damascus, held up to 20,000 people including women and children.

Syria’s security and prison industrial complex became a central fact of life under Assad – an instrument of terror but also a major employer, especially for members of Assad’s own Alawite sect. It was set up after the Second World War with help from escaped Nazis:

• The Nazi. Alois Brunner, a senior SS officer and Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand man, sought refuge from Nazi-hunters in Syria in the 1950s. Living under an alias, he was employed as an adviser to the regime, helping to set up its security services and prisons. He later fell out of favour and ended his days in a prison basement.
• The Stasi. In the 1960s and 1970s Syrian intelligence operatives were regular visitors to East Berlin. Stasi files show they received equipment and instruction in interrogation techniques; Stasi employees noted the extreme brutality of their apprentices.

By the 1980s Amnesty International had documented the systematic use by Syrian security forces of 35 torture techniques. Prisoners were often kept in cells so overcrowded they had to take it in turns to sit down, and were forced to rape or murder one another or be killed themselves.

Unimaginable suffering. As prisoners emerge from their cells, the medieval barbarity of these institutions is coming into focus. Some freed inmates are so traumatised and damaged by torture that they are unable to say who they are or where they come from.

The prisoners. Those who suffered incarceration include

• Adnan Qassar, imprisoned for 21 years after beating President Assad’s brother, Bassel, in an equestrian event.
• Raghid al-Tatari, imprisoned for 43 years after refusing orders to bomb the city of Hama in the early 1980s.
• Ali Hassan al-Ali, who vanished from a checkpoint when he was 18. He emerged days ago from Sedanya prison aged 57.
• Dr Rania al-Abbasi, a chess champion arrested in 2013 in Damascus with her six children, all teenagers or younger. They are still missing.

Mass murder. According to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, at least 17,723 people were killed in government custody from the start of the uprising in March 2011 to December 2015 – an average of 300 deaths each month. There are no figures for subsequent years but there is no reason to believe the killings stopped.

In 2021 a government grave digger testified in a court in Germany, describing nightly deliveries by refrigerated meat trucks of hundreds of bodies, including women, children and the elderly. He said he helped bury them in mass pits on the outskirts of Damascus. These have yet to be dug up.

The employees. If there were tens of thousands of prisoners, then there were thousands of workers involved in maintaining the prisons. So far the Syrian rebels, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), have arrested some senior prison staff and vowed to pursue those responsible for torture. But most have been allowed to flee in exchange for opening the prison gates.

What’s more... The Assad regime kept Soviet-style records, meaning almost every death will have been documented (even if in some cases the cause of death will be listed as the heart stopping). So far HTS has prevented government buildings being looted – a vital step towards preservation of documents, which will be essential if those responsible for Assad’s reign of terror are ever to be held to account.