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Videos showing gaunt, confused prisoners stumbling out of their cells, some seemingly unaware of who or where they were, marked the end to a form of carceral governance that had cast a shadow over Syrians’ lives for decades.

The focus on liberating prisoners from Syria’s network of jails was a key priority for opposition forces in their lightning blitz that overthrew the Assad regime, a family dynasty in power for 54 years.

Amid the jubilation, there was also horror, as photos emerged of the corpses of those killed, presumably by prison guards before fleeing the rebel offensive.

With the relief of families who found their loved ones, there was also disappointment, as those who had been waiting for years to find out whether their relatives were being held in one of Syria’s notorious mass detention facilities could find no sign of them in the thousands freed.

Bodies burned and psyches scarred

Tadmur and Saydnaya are both places synonymous with the horrors inflicted on those detained in Syria’s prison network.

The French-built prison in Tadmur in the vast Syrian desert east of Damascus lives on in the minds of many Syrians despite no longer being in use.

Most famous for a in which an estimated 500 to 1,000 detainees were killed in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt on then-president Hafez al-Assad by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, inmates were reportedly not allowed to raise their eyes from the ground or look at each other.

It took years before many former detainees could make eye contact with anyone after they were released.

The prison was closed in 2001 but reopened in 2011 and used to interrogate or detain activists and others after popular protests broke out across the country. It was later captured and destroyed by the Islamic State (IS) in 2015.

Two years after the 2011 uprising began, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that civilian activists were held in at least .

According to the human rights organisation, some 28,000 photos taken between May 2011 and August 2013 by a Syrian military police defector known as “C˛ą±đ˛ő˛ą°ů”, and subsequently smuggled out of the country, showed “evidence of widespread torture, starvation, beatings, and disease in Syrian government detention facilities”.

HRW noted in a : “Most of the 6,786 victims shown in the Caesar photographs were detained by just five intelligence agency branches in Damascus, and their bodies were sent to at least two military hospitals in Damascus.”

The US State Department said in 2017 that it believed about 50 detainees were being hanged daily at the Saydnaya prison and that the bodies were then burned in a crematorium.

This was done “to cover up the extent of the mass murders taking place,” US diplomat for the Middle East, Stuart Jones, at the time.

A 2017 Amnesty International report referred to it as a “human slaughterhouse”, adding that, within it, “the Syrian authorities have quietly and methodically organised the killing of thousands of people in their custody”.

The organisation’s research, it added, “shows that the murder, torture, enforced disappearance and extermination carried out at Saydnaya since 2011 have been perpetrated as part of an attack against the civilian population that has been widespread, as well as systematic, and carried out in furtherance of state policy”.

Last week, a UN-mandated team investigating crimes in Syria released a documenting systematic torture and abuse in over 100 Syrian regime detention facilities.

Forced disappearance to 'control and intimidate'

A entitled Forcibly Disappeared in Syrian Detention Centers by the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) stressed that “forced disappearance is a major strategy of the Syrian state to control and intimidate society”.

It said, “arrest and monetary extortion of the population constitute a great source of funding of the state, and its repressive apparatus specifically”.

The ADMSP report added that of the hundreds of family members of the forcibly disappeared who took part in the study, some 44% said that “money was paid towards the promise of obtaining information about their [the individual forcibly disappeared] situation or permission to visit”.

This assertion was corroborated by numerous testimonies heard by this journalist since reporting from Syria’s Idlib province in 2012. Families would recount having sold possessions and at times even land to get information on where loved ones were and whether they were even alive.

However, the families also had to be careful and were at risk of being arrested or “disappeared” as well.

“The Syrian regime has deliberately used women as a means of pressure on opponents and revolutionaries in Syria over the decades of its rule,” Mona Abboud, a Turkey-based female researcher who was arrested twice by the Syrian regime and spent several months in the Branch 215 prison after being arrested by military intelligence, told °®Âţµş.

“Most women were arrested because the men of the family were rebels against the Assad regime,” she said. The regime “put them on trial in a military court. It executed a number of women in what is called the Military Field Court before it was abolished in September 2023. Entire families were victims of the Assad regime because villages and regions came out in their revolution against him”.

Abboud said that she has been documenting and writing the stories of women detainees since 2013, but that “now, with the opening of prisons and security branches, many things are being discovered and there seems to have been a terrifying number of women killed in Syrian detention centres”.

In a on the social media platform X, Synaps Network research director Alex Simon shared an edited transcript from a conversation with a researcher who spent decades in Damascus, in which the latter stated: “An intelligence agency could have large numbers of facilities which are not recorded, and which not everyone within the agency’s administration will even know about”.

Simon quoted the researcher as saying: “Historically, the regime would not just arrest individuals: It would arrest their entire families. The regime regards dissent as a contagious disease”.

Moreover, due to “overwhelming density in prisons,” he added, “the security apparatus stopped caring about details. In many cases, there’s no data, no lists. People could die under torture and the security apparatus itself would not know who they were”.

After taking over Damascus, the Military Operations Department led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) issued in finding secret prisons, pledging protection and “a generous reward” for relevant information.

Syrian survivors of Assad's jails

Many of those taking part in the offensive that started on 27 November and ended with the taking of Damascus on 8 December had themselves been in detention at some point. The leader of HTS, which spearheaded the offensive, had himself spent years of his life in prison in Iraq.

The father of HTS leader Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, had also spent time in Syrian prisons for student activism and had earned his degree in Baghdad - reportedly after escaping prison in Syria - prior to publishing books on regional economic developments from exile in Saudi Arabia, where the current HTS leader was reportedly born.

When reporting from the town of Maarat al-Numan and rural areas near it in the Idlib province in 2013, this journalist interviewed a local commander of one of the larger armed opposition groups at that time who said he had never met his father as the latter had died in prison.

The young commander said that he was fighting for a state based on “justice” and in honour of his father and those like him. The man was killed in fighting the following year, leaving toddler twins behind.

Both activists from upper and middle-class families and members of the working classes have over the years shared stories of imprisonment and the forced disappearance of those close to them: young women who were raped in prison, university students imprisoned for social media posts, and doctors who treated protestors.

Some now oscillate between processing both accumulated and fresh grief and a sense of euphoria.

Accountability and the future

A significant test for the new government will be to ensure a level of justice acceptable to the population while avoiding recourse to the previous regime’s heavy reliance on the fear of detention and forced disappearances in order to silence and coerce.

While HTS has announced a general amnesty for Syrian soldiers, conscripts, and reservists, HTS chief Sharaa has vowed not to pardon anyone involved in torturing detainees in the previous regime.

One of the first statements made by the spokesperson for the Syrian Department of Political Affairs, notably, was that the country henceforth would have “no place for notorious prisons”.

Shelly Kittleson is a journalist specialising in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Her work has been published in several international, US, and Italian media outlets.

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