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 chopping by 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 Navy 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 virtually 100 intelligence branches and secret police detention facilities—together with twenty in Damascus alone—had been introduced there for central processing. In keeping with 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 hundreds 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 a long time in the past, or no less than 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 a whole lot of surveillance feeds, every trying right into a cell or hall full of prisoners going about their every day routine, unaware that the regime had been toppled. The rebels then uploaded movies displaying themselves systematically releasing prisoners from numerous blocks. Crowds rifled by 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 hundreds 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 individuals 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 came about, the place a concrete press crushed reside our bodies right into a tissue of flesh, the place corpses had been burned or dissolved in acid—wasn’t surprising. “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, based mostly 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 pinnacle of the Syrian Community for Human Rights (SNHR). He estimated that the regime had killed 85 p.c 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 individuals continued to dig by the concrete at Saydnaya.
Syrians immediately 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 in addition 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 ability and violence. He has a report of arresting, detaining, and typically torturing dissidents—although nothing on the dimensions or brutality of the Assads. In Could 2024, after HTS’s safety forces killed a detainee, protests broke out in Idlib.
The second liberation is the top of “the Syrian Gulag.” This has been unambiguously celebrated. Assad’s prisons had been among the worst on the planet: websites of isolation, humiliation, torture, hunger, and sadistic killing on an industrial scale. Jaber Baker and Uğur Ümit Üngör, of their e-book Syrian Gulag, interpolate from statistics drawn from numerous Syrian human rights organizations to estimate that, since 2011, no less than 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 individuals per 100,000—is twenty instances increased than that of the USA, which has the 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. Among the most infamous complexes, comparable to Tadmor (Palmyra) Jail, had been constructed by the colonial French Mandate authorities. In 1949 Husni al-Zaim, Syria’s first army dictator, locked up opponents within the Mezzeh Navy Jail, positioned in an upmarket Damascus suburb. The Syrian jail community in all its infamy, nevertheless, 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 Occasion. He’s stated to have remarked, in keeping with the Palestinian historian Hanna Batatu, that folks have “primarily economic demands”: a home, a automotive, 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 in addition such “professionals” as leftists, communists, journalists, and filmmakers. In 1982 Hafez’s praetorian guard, commanded by his brother Refaat, positioned Hama below siege after which, over a interval of twenty-seven days, massacred between ten and forty thousand individuals. (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 necessary Syrian literary style.3 Maybe its masterpiece is Mustafa Khalifa’s Al-Qawqa (The Shell). The e-book 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 inside workings:
Nearly all of this diary was written within the desert jail. However the phrase “written” within the earlier sentence will not be exact. For in that jail, there are nether pens nor paper for writing. In that giant jail, which numbers seven courtyards—not counting courtyard quantity zero—there are thirty-seven group cells, in addition to all of the unnumbered extra lately 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 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 title, 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 a long time later.5 Comparable scenes have performed out in current days, as Lebanese nationals—detained between 1976, when the Assad regime started intervening in Lebanon’s civil conflict, and 2005, when a well-liked 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. In keeping with the Lebanese authorities, 9 nationals have to date returned from Assad’s prisons. That is even supposing, as lately 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, based mostly 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 current weeks from Syrian jails. Households are sharing footage of disappeared family members with their cell phone numbers on social media, asking for anybody who may need info to contact them. At a December 7 press convention in Beirut, nevertheless, the founding father of the CFKDL, Wadad Halawani, cautioned towards sharing unsubstantiated paperwork of this sort. “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 scenario 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 scenario: “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 quick thaw throughout which political prisoners had been freed. For round a yr 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 Occasion (Political Bureau), identified overseas because the “Syrian Mandela”—gave an interview on Al Jazeera through which he declared that the “dictator was dead.” Al-Turk had lately 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 army court docket, 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 accommodations, 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 army police, paramilitary youth golf equipment, 4 competing safety companies 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 companies confronted down unarmed protesters with reside ammunition. That was when the motion adopted the revolutionary slogans of the Arab Spring, comparable 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. A whole lot 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 fireplace on protesters.9 There was a spiral of defections; defectors fashioned native models to guard civilians. The regime targeted 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 a lot of the north, south, and the realm 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 one among President Barack Obama’s much-vaunted “red lines.” It appeared sure that Assad can be deposed. However US army intervention didn’t materialize—that story is well-known—and Hezbollah after which the Russian air power turned the tide in his favor.
All through these years, the regime escalated imprisonment. In keeping with ADMSP, the inhabitants of Saidnaya had swollen to 4 thousand by 2012. For family members of the detained, the system’s inner workings remained opaque, a black field. Our bodies went in and bits of paper got here out. Jail guards and intelligence officers charged hundreds of {dollars} for details about detainees or dying certificates. They ceaselessly lied to determined households. Visits had been almost 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, nevertheless, 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—authorized lists of individuals to be arrested at checkpoints. Between dying certificates and images of corpses, the economies of figuring out and killing mixed to supply 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 army photographer who defected in 2013. Up till 2011 he took footage of the corpses of troopers and safety service members for his or her dying certificates. However as soon as the crackdown started, he was tasked with documenting the corpses of detainees. In keeping with the French investigative journalist Garance Le Caisne, who interviewed him in particular person, Caesar was shocked by the sudden change in work.10 There have been so many our bodies he may barely sustain; they bore marks of hunger, torture, and mutilation.
Izettin Kasim/Anadolu/Getty Picture
A group excavating exterior Saydnaya Navy Jail, Damascus, Syria, December 9, 2024
Caesar, who feared he was complicit in mass state killing, wished to defect instantly. However his good friend Sami persuaded him to proceed the morbid work for 2 years, with the objective of smuggling out the proof. In all he downloaded 26,948 pictures of 6,627 detainees who had been imprisoned in twenty-four detention facilities throughout Damascus. It’s an archive of horror displaying each conceivable form of cruelty. The dying certificates issued all checklist both coronary heart assault or respiratory failure.
With the assistance of Sami—who, after years of residing below a pseudonym in northern Europe, final week revealed his true identification to be Osama Othman—and the Syrian opposition in exile, Caesar handed the pictures to human rights legal professionals in Turkey. Finally 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 complicated match throughout the Assad state? One solution to tackle 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 photographs, rewriting historical past books, and smothering dissent—to supply a actuality of its personal, untethered from what really occurred. By monopolizing each the technique of violence and the circulation of data, 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 placing side of the regime: it pressured individuals 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 current days Syrians have chanted the rebuttal: “Eternity has ended.”) State propaganda claimed—and would typically power 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 may and couldn’t be stated.
Such discourse lived on below 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 form of headmaster at a poor rural major faculty close to the Euphrates Dam, paces backwards and forwards below 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—other than 4 small cardboard packing containers. “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 method to propaganda can partly be defined by its peculiar relationship to the state. In political idea 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 throughout the Eighties—described the nation as having “two armies…one the prisoner of the other.”13 Trusted elite models commanded untrusted conscripts at gunpoint. A technique of deciphering the spectacular collapse of the regime this month was that it was attributable to 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 bunch and “group feeling” however which I counsel 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 may additionally occupy and dominate a state. In recent times, Syrian protesters and intellectuals have described the Assad regime as an occupying fairly than governing power. Its exterior domination had come with out inner compliance—a brutal in addition to brittle type of energy.
That is the place the prisons are available in, and significantly the economies of figuring out and killing. After the 2011 rebellion, when the regime may 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 fairly had to verify—in photographic element, 4 photographs per corpse—that they had been correctly doing so. In Saydnaya, proximity to the president fairly than official rank decided authority: the lower-ranking “security officer,” who was appointed straight by the president or members of the disaster cell, may 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 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 companies, dissolved ministries whose sole operate was to distribute sinecures (the Monetary Instances 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 come back from the hinterland and occupy town—and the state? Is that this revolution a flip of the wheel, or a leap ahead?
For now, as prisons are liberated and displaced Syrians start to return residence, this query has understandably been kicked down the highway. HTS has fashioned a transitional authorities which is able to stay in place till March 1. Al-Julani has introduced that Saydnaya Jail will likely be was a museum. It’s a promising signal, however no systematic makes an attempt appear to be underway to collect and protect paperwork for a future tribunal the place perpetrators can be held to account, or to lastly inform households concerning the fates of their family members.
