Syria: The Prison Gates Thrown Open

As Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) pushed south from Idlib Province, the rebels’ first priority was to liberate prisons. From Aleppo to Hama to Homs, videos emerged of fighters breaking down doors and cutting through locks. Detainees streamed out. They ran, sometimes barefoot, to freedom. “What’s happening?” one prisoner asks a bystander. “The regime has fallen!” He squeals in joy and quickens his pace. In another video men break down the doors of a prison cell full of female inmates. “You’re free!” they shout. “But where do we go?” Liberation came quickly and unexpectedly.

Those in exile—since 2011 half of Syria’s population has been displaced, a quarter abroad—pored over videos of prisons being opened and lists of inmates’ names circulating online. Attention soon turned to Saydnaya Military Prison. Located thirty kilometers north of Damascus and shaped like three blades of a propeller, it was the motor of the Assad regime’s repression. Since the 2011 uprising, detainees from a network of almost a hundred intelligence branches and secret police detention centers—including twenty in Damascus alone—were brought there for central processing. According to Amnesty International, between 5,000 and 13,000 Syrians were killed in Saydnaya between 2011 and 2015; the number killed in the subsequent years remains unknown. Syrian friends living in the country and in exile told me they feared the regime, in its final hours, would execute thousands of political prisoners held there. One anonymous opposition media activist group, Young Damascene Lens, released a statement expressing this anxiety: “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 in the northwest and Deir Ezzor in the northeast began streaming toward Saydnaya, hoping to find loved ones who had been detained years and sometimes decades ago, or at least to learn what had happened to them. That evening, the rebels circulated a video with the words “from inside Saydnaya Prison” typed over the top. It showed the panopticon’s eye: a control room with a wall of video screens and hundreds of surveillance feeds, each looking into a cell or corridor stuffed with prisoners going about their daily routine, unaware that the regime had been toppled. The rebels then uploaded videos showing themselves systematically freeing prisoners from various blocks. Crowds rifled through the ledgers and abandoned documents for clues.

Rumors spread widely on satellite news channels and social media. A story went around that thousands of prisoners were held in three secret floors beneath Saydnaya. By Monday huge crowds were scouring the facility for an entrance leading underground. That day the Syrian Civil Defence (SCD) were called in from Idlib Province to excavate. (Also known as the White Helmets, the SCD is a first responder group founded in 2014 in response to the Assad regime’s aerial bombardment of opposition-controlled areas.) Videos circulated of them pickaxing at solid concrete walls and floors—to no avail. Soon they gave up the search. But people kept digging and rumors—about prisoners being concreted into rooms without openings, the existence of other secret prisons—continued to spread. 

I spoke to Mohammad Ali Atassi, a Syrian filmmaker and journalist who, in the late 1990s and 2000s, collected testimonies of political prisoners for the Lebanese weekly Mulhaq al-Nahar. He was elated at the fall of the regime, but disturbed by the memories that resurfaced as the prisons were 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 said. “If they stop looking, the glimmer of hope of finding their relatives alive will die.” To his eyes the footage coming out of Saydnaya—of rooms where mass hangings took place, where a concrete press crushed live bodies into a tissue of flesh, where corpses were burned or dissolved in acid—wasn’t shocking. “It was expected, but few were listening, and sometimes they were unwilling to believe us.” 

Ex-detainees—and regime defectors—living in exile have, over many years, shared ample testimonies about their treatment to journalists, academics, courts, and human rights organizations. In October 2022 the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP) published a report, based on lengthy interviews with defected officers, which mapped its administrative structure and its evolving practices of mistreatment, torture, and killing. The authors admitted that “collecting quantitative data would not be feasible.” No one knew how many detainees remained in the prison.

On December 10 the Al Araby news channel interviewed Fadel Abdulghany, the head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR). He estimated that the regime had killed 85 percent of detainees. “Where are the bodies?” he asked. “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.” But people continued to dig through the concrete at Saydnaya.

Syrians today are using the word “liberation” in two related but distinct ways. The first and most obvious is the liberation of cities and territories from Assad’s control. Opposition groups, activists, and intellectuals have all greeted the regime’s fall with unbridled joy—but also some trepidation at the ideologies and practices of the liberators. Since 2017 Abu Muhammad al-Julani, the leader of HTS, has controlled Idlib province with a mixture of technocratic skill and violence. He has a record of arresting, detaining, and sometimes torturing dissidents—though nothing on the scale or brutality of the Assads. In May 2024, after HTS’s security forces killed a detainee, protests broke out in Idlib.

The second liberation is the end of “the Syrian Gulag.” This has been unambiguously celebrated. Assad’s prisons were some of the worst in the world: sites of isolation, humiliation, torture, starvation, and sadistic killing on an industrial scale. Jaber Baker and Uğur Ümit Üngör, in their book Syrian Gulag, interpolate from statistics drawn from various Syrian human rights organizations to estimate that, since 2011, at least 300,000 Syrian nationals entered detention centers. This past August the SNHR estimated that around 135,000 prisoners were still missing, detained without charge or forcibly disappeared. The rate of detention—1,200 people per 100,000—is twenty times higher than that of the United States, which has the highest official gross and per capita prison population for any independent democracy.¹

Prisons have been central to Syrian public consciousness for more than half a century. Some of the most notorious complexes, such as Tadmor (Palmyra) Prison, were constructed by the colonial French Mandate authorities. In 1949 Husni al-Zaim, Syria’s first military dictator, locked up opponents in the Mezzeh Military Prison, located in an upmarket Damascus suburb. The Syrian prison network in all its infamy, however, was assembled over two generations of Assad rule. 

When Hafez al-Assad came to power in a coup in 1970, he imprisoned his former colleagues from the ruling Baath Party. He is said to have remarked, according to the Palestinian historian Hanna Batatu, that people have “primarily economic demands”: a house, a car, a plot of land. He claimed to attempt to satisfy those needs, “in one way or another.” Only “one or two hundred individuals at most…make politics their profession” and would oppose him no matter what, he said: “It is for them that Mezzeh prison was originally intended.”²

Between 1979 and 1982 the Muslim Brotherhood mounted an uprising against the Syrian state. The regime’s response was brutal, targeting not only members of the Brotherhood but also such “professionals” as leftists, communists, journalists, and filmmakers. In 1982 Hafez’s praetorian guard, commanded by his brother Refaat, placed Hama under siege and then, over a period of twenty-seven days, massacred between ten and forty thousand people. (No one knows the exact number.) It remains the deadliest act an Arab regime has perpetrated against its own population.

Prison literature became an important Syrian literary genre.³ Perhaps its masterpiece is Mustafa Khalifa’s Al-Qawqa (The Shell). The book opens in 1982, when a young Christian communist, on his return home from film school in France, is arrested at Damascus airport. Absurdly accused of being an Islamist, he serves the better part of his thirteen-year-sentence in the “Desert Prison,” a cipher for Tadmor. The first passage addresses the challenge of bearing witness to the system’s inner workings:

The majority of this diary was written in the desert prison. But the word “written” in the previous sentence is not precise. For in that prison, there are neither pens nor paper for writing. In that enormous prison, which numbers seven courtyards—not counting courtyard number zero—there are thirty-seven group cells, besides all the unnumbered more recently built cells, all the rooms, all the “French-style” cells (cellules) of courtyard number five; that prison, which at a certain point held more than ten thousand prisoners within its walls, and which contained the highest proportion of university graduates in the country; not a single prisoner—and some had been in more than twenty years—ever saw either pen or paper. Mental writing is a process developed by the Islamists. There was one who had memorized more than ten thousand names: the names of prisoners who had entered the desert prison, their family name, their town or village, their date of detention, their sentence, their fate…⁴

It was difficult to get any information about political prisoners. Funerals were held and wives remarried only for detainees to reemerge decades later.⁵ Similar scenes have played out in recent days, as Lebanese nationals—detained between 1976, when the Assad regime began intervening in Lebanon’s civil war, and 2005, when a popular uprising pushed out the Syrian army—resurfaced dazed and decrepit. In Hama, the rebels freed a Lebanese man who had disappeared thirty-nine years ago at a Syrian checkpoint. He had lost his memory, but his brother immediately recognized him from a video posted online. According to the Lebanese authorities, nine nationals have so far returned from Assad’s prisons. This is despite the fact that, as recently as 2015, politicians allied with the Assad regime, including the former president (and warlord) Michel Aoun, gave assurances that no Lebanese citizens were detained in Syria. For its part, the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Missing in Lebanon (CFKDL) has compiled 282 names, based on registration by family members, of people thought to have disappeared into Syria’s detention centers. 

A list is circulating with the names of eighty Lebanese nationals liberated in recent weeks from Syrian jails. Families are sharing pictures of disappeared loved ones with their mobile phone numbers on social media, asking for anyone who might have information to contact them. At a December 7 press conference in Beirut, however, the founder of the CFKDL, Wadad Halawani, cautioned against sharing unsubstantiated documents of this kind. “Hope flowed again into their veins and into their pores,” she said of the victims’ families. “They suddenly forgot their deep wounds, their years of oppression, of knocking on doors, of demanding answers, and of waiting.” Speaking with me over the phone, Wadad Halawani described the situation 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 asked if she trusted the new authorities to take charge of the situation: “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 brief thaw during which political prisoners were freed. For around a year intellectual salons flourished in Damascus. Activists called for democratic reform and an amnesty for prisoners of conscience.⁶ But the “Damascus Spring” came to an abrupt end when Riad al-Turk—a leader of the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau), known abroad as the “Syrian Mandela”—gave an interview on Al Jazeera in which he declared that the “dictator was dead.” Al-Turk had recently emerged from eighteen years of detention, which he spent in solitary confinement in an underground cell. He was arrested once again, put on sham trial before a military court, and sentenced to two further years in jail.⁷

The new regime’s reforms were limited to economic liberalization, a process that scholars have called “authoritarian upgrading.” ATMs, boutique hotels, and music festivals popped up in Damascus. Bashar’s glamorous British-born wife, Asma, appeared in Vogue, and President Sarkozy invited the couple to the Élysée Palace. But coercive institutions—the prison system, the army, the military police, paramilitary youth clubs, four competing security services known as the mukhabarat—remained in place. 

In 2011, after Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak were toppled, there were sporadic demonstrations in Damascus. At first the protesters called for reforms, including an end to the state of emergency that had been in place since 1963 and the release of political prisoners. In March the security services faced down unarmed protesters with live ammunition. That was when the movement adopted the revolutionary slogans of the Arab Spring, such as “The people demand the fall of the regime.” Bashar’s response revealed him to be even more brutal than his father. 

People were rounded up and arrested en masse. Hundreds of videos shot inside detention centers—including Mezzeh and Tadmur—were deliberately leaked on social media, likely to intimidate the restive population.⁸ They revealed glimpses of the forms of torture Syrians had long heard or read about but had never seen: shabah (the ghost), the German Chair, the wheel. Opponents of the regime also recirculated the footage to underscore its brutality.

Some soldiers refused to fire on protesters.⁹ There was a spiral of defections; defectors formed local units to protect civilians. The regime focused on controlling major cities and coastal areas: it either “withdrew” from large swathes of territory, or they were “liberated.” By 2013 it had lost control of most of the north, south, and the area along the Lebanese border. In August 2013 the rebels, having taken control of the towns in the greenbelt surrounding Damascus known as the “Ghouta,” were encroaching on the capital, when the regime attacked them with chemical weapons, crossing one of President Barack Obama’s much-vaunted “red lines.” It seemed certain that Assad would be deposed. But US military intervention didn’t materialize—that story is well known—and Hezbollah and then the Russian air force turned the tide in his favor. 

Throughout these years, the regime escalated imprisonment. According to ADMSP, the population of Saidnaya had swollen to four thousand by 2012. For relatives of the detained, the system’s internal workings remained opaque, a black box. Bodies went in and bits of paper came out. Prison guards and intelligence officers charged thousands of dollars for information about detainees or death certificates. They frequently lied to desperate families. Visits were nearly impossible: families were charged $30,000 to see their loved ones, and only fifteen to twenty were allowed in per week. 

Internally, however, high-ranking regime officers, aware of the system’s propensity for corruption, demanded reliable proof that their orders were being carried out. When rebels liberated areas in 2012–2013, the nonprofit Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) gathered troves of documents from detention centers and intelligence bureaus, revealing extreme centralization. Assad and his feared lieutenants in the Damascus “Crisis Management Cell”—including his brother Maher al-Assad, as well as Assef Shawkat, Ali Mamlouk, and Jamil Hassan—approved lists of people to be arrested at checkpoints. Between death certificates and photographs of corpses, the economies of knowing and killing combined to produce both bureaucratic proof and murk. 

The state also kept photographic records of murdered detainees. The most infamous of these archives are the “Caesar Files”—named after “Caesar,” a military photographer who defected in 2013. Up until 2011 he took pictures of the corpses of soldiers and security service members for their death certificates. But once the crackdown began, he was tasked with documenting the corpses of detainees. According to the French investigative journalist Garance Le Caisne, who interviewed him in person, Caesar was shocked by the sudden change in work.¹⁰ There were so many bodies he could barely keep up; they bore marks of starvation, torture, and mutilation. 

Caesar, who feared he was complicit in mass state killing, wanted to defect immediately. But his friend Sami persuaded him to continue the morbid work for two years, with the goal of smuggling out the evidence. In all he downloaded 26,948 images of 6,627 detainees who had been imprisoned in twenty-four detention centers across Damascus. It’s an archive of horror showing every imaginable kind of cruelty. The death certificates issued all list either heart attack or respiratory failure.

With the help of Sami—who, after years of living under a pseudonym in northern Europe, last week revealed his true identity to be Osama Othman—and the Syrian opposition in exile, Caesar handed the images to human rights lawyers in Turkey. Eventually they were exhibited across the world, including at the UN headquarters in Geneva, the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and a number of universities. They have been verified by forensic investigators and used in legal processes, including the 2021–2022 Koblenz trial against Anwar Raslan for murder, torture, sexual violence, and other crimes against humanity committed on his watch at the Al-Khatib secret prison.¹¹

What is—was—the function of the Assad regime’s violence? Where does the prison complex fit within the Assad state? One way to address this question is through a consideration of belief. 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 photos, rewriting history books, and smothering dissent—to produce a reality of its own, untethered from what actually happened. By monopolizing both the means of violence and the circulation of information, it produces obedient and credulous subjects. 

But the Assad regime never came close to producing the kinds of brainwashed populations that the literature on totalitarianism describes. (Nor, for that matter, did the Soviet Union.) It did not even seek “total” control over reality—not really. Conducting fieldwork in the late 1990s, the political scientist Lisa Wedeen noted one striking aspect of the regime: it forced people to say things publicly that were patently unbelievable.¹² For example, an official slogan was that Hafez al-Assad would rule “for eternity.” (In recent days Syrians have chanted the rebuttal: “Eternity has ended.”) State propaganda claimed—and would sometimes force Syrians to repeat—that the dour dictator, a former airforce pilot, was a knight in shining armor, or the country’s premier pharmacist. Why expend scarce resources on propagating obvious falsehoods? The regime’s intention, Wedeen argued, was to make Syrians act “as if” those slogans were true—to make them repeat falsehoods as a way of acknowledging and enacting the regime’s power. The cult “cluttered” public life, organizing what could and couldn’t be said.

Such discourse lived on under Bashar. A wry example of it can be found in the late filmmaker Omar Amiralay’s documentary A Flood in the Baath Country (2003). In its final scene a low-ranking regime official, a kind of headmaster at a poor rural primary school near the Euphrates Dam, paces back and forth under the ubiquitous 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—apart from four small cardboard boxes. “Computers, screens, a printer…” The headmaster gestures at each box in turn. “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 approach to propaganda can partly be explained by its peculiar relationship to the state. In political theory the army symbolizes the monopoly of legitimate violence; it should be at the apex of coercion. But Michel Seurat—one of the few social scientists to do research in Syria during the 1980s—described the country as having “two armies…one the prisoner of the other.”¹³ Trusted elite units commanded untrusted conscripts at gunpoint. One way of interpreting the spectacular collapse of the regime this month was that it was caused by the latter’s defection en masse.

To theorize the Syrian state, Seurat drew on Ibn Khaldoun’s concept of asabiyya: a term meaning both a group and “group feeling” but which I suggest we translate in this case as “regime.” Ibn Khaldoun noted in The Muqaddimah that an asabiyya arises in the hinterland to occupy a social body but without penetrating it, without expecting those it rules over to internalize its moral and political code.¹⁴ Seurat updated these ideas to argue innovatively that the asabiyya could also occupy and dominate a state. In recent years, Syrian protesters and intellectuals have described the Assad regime as an occupying rather than governing force. Its external domination had come without internal compliance—a brutal as well as brittle form of power.

This is where the prisons come in, and particularly the economies of knowing and killing. After the 2011 uprising, when the regime could no longer rely on external compliance, it turned to terror. The proliferation of bureaucratic evidence—one CIJA director claimed that there is “stronger evidence than…for any past conflicts, any past tribunals, any past international justice efforts”—suggests that the regime was deeply anxious about its own power. It could not confidently order foot soldiers and prison guards to kill but rather had to make sure—in photographic detail, four photos per corpse—that they were properly doing so. In Saydnaya, proximity to the president rather than official rank determined authority: the lower-ranking “security officer,” who was appointed directly by the president or members of the crisis cell, could bypass the higher-ranking prison director. Such contortions existed throughout the labyrinthine security apparatuses.

It is the call for the “fall of the regime” (isqāt al-nizam)—not the state—that has echoed through Syria for the past fourteen years. If their actions are anything to go by, the rebels are keenly aware of this distinction. They have disbanded the four security services, dissolved ministries whose sole function was to distribute sinecures (the Financial Times reported on a “department of flags”), and granted general amnesty to conscripts, but not to 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 last roughly forty years. The first generation possesses the “tawahhush” (brutality) required to maintain power. The second acquires a taste for “taraf” (luxury) and softens. The third loses the toughness of desert life and is destined to be replaced by another asabiyya. Is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, then, merely the next asabiyya to come from the hinterland and occupy the city—and the state? Is this revolution a turn of the wheel, or a leap forward?

For now, as prisons are liberated and displaced Syrians begin to return home, this question has understandably been kicked down the road. HTS has formed a transitional government which will remain in place until March 1. Al-Julani has announced that Saydnaya Prison will be turned into a museum. It’s a promising sign, but no systematic attempts seem to be underway to gather and preserve documents for a future tribunal where perpetrators would be held to account, or to finally inform families about the fates of their loved ones.