Syrians have been terrorized for decades by what happened behind the concrete walls of the Damascus security compound. Now the Assad dynasty has been overthrown, its dungeons and torture chambers are revealing their secrets.
Rebel fighters stand guard at the entrances to the Forbidden City in the capital’s Kafr Sousa district, where government offices as well as the headquarters of the feared security services were located.
Myriad different agencies that monitored the lives of ordinary Syrians operated their own underground prisons and interrogation chambers inside the Defense Ministry compound.
Syrians lived in fear that they would be called for interrogation, after which they might never return.
AFP found first responder Sleiman Kahwaji walking through the compound this week trying to locate the building where he was interrogated and then detained.
He said he was still in secondary school when he was arrested in 2014 on suspicion of “terrorism”, a frequent charge under the rule of now-ousted President Bashar al-Assad, who tolerated no dissent.
‘My dear mother’
“I spent 55 days underground,” he said. “There were 55 of us in that dungeon. Two died, one from diabetes.”
The graffiti left by prisoners on the walls is barely legible amid the darkness.
“My dear mother,” someone had probably written in his own blood.
The cells used for solitary confinement are so small that there is not even room to lie down.
Another former detainee, Theer Mustafa, who was arrested for alleged desertion, recalls that about 80 prisoners were crammed into a large cell, forcing the prisoners to take turns sleeping each other.
All the remaining prisoners were freed on Sunday after their captors fled, as rebels halted a lightning offensive on Damascus launched late last month.
A large mob entered the security area and vandalized the huge offices located on the upper floors of the complex.
Thousands of intelligence files lay unused, many of them scattered on the floor, detailing the activities of ordinary citizens subject to rigorous surveillance by security service agents.
A handwritten document lists more than 10,000 prisoners suspected of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Sunni Islamist group was anathema to the Assad clan, who are members of Syria’s Alawite minority, followers of a branch of Shia Islam.
Brotherhood membership had been punishable by death since 1980, two years before Assad’s father and predecessor Hafez ordered the army to crush his rebellion by attacking the central city of Hama, killing 10,000 to 40,000 people.
Along with each prisoner’s name and date of birth, the security services also noted details of their detention and interrogation, and whether and when they died.
Another declassified file details the detention of a British man of Syrian origin who was subjected to a lie detector test on charges of working for British intelligence.
paid informants
Another report from this January details the investigation into a bomb attack in the Mazzeh area of Damascus, in which an Iraqi was injured.
Nothing was considered trivial enough to escape the attention of the security services. It also contains files recording the activities of ordinary citizens as well as journalists and religious leaders.
Even government ministers were not untouched by this. In listing members of Assad’s government, a security service agent has carefully noted the confessions of each minister – Sunni or Alawite, Christian or Druze.
The security services operated vast networks of paid informants, who provided even the smallest information about people’s daily lives.
Families have been arriving at the gates of the Damascus security zone since Saturday seeking information about the fate of their missing loved ones.
Many come after visiting Sayednaya Prison for the first time, a massive detention complex on the outskirts of Damascus, where many of those who escaped interrogation at security headquarters were taken for long-term imprisonment.
“We heard there were secret dungeons there. I’m looking for my son, Obada Amini, who was arrested in 2013,” said Khouloud Amini, 53, her husband and daughter.
“He was in his fourth year at the Faculty of Engineering, I went to Syednaya but I didn’t find him.
“I was told that there are underground dungeons here. I hope that all Syrian prisoners will be released.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
