‘A number not a name’: In Syria, freed prisoners remember the horrors of the past syrian war news

Idlib, Syria – “My name was number 1100,” Hala said, still afraid of being identified by her real name.

Hala is one of thousands of people who have been freed from prisons under the regime of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, less than two weeks after the regime collapsed amid a rebel offensive.

She told Al Jazeera that she was taken from a checkpoint in Hama in 2019, accused of “terrorism” – a charge often leveled at anyone suspected of opposing the government. He was taken to Aleppo, from where he spent time in various prisons.

That is until Syrian opposition forces arrived at Aleppo’s Central Prison on November 29, freeing him and countless others.

“We couldn’t believe it was real and that we would see the light,” he said of the prison’s opening by rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in late November.

“The joy was immense; “We cheered and rejoiced, wishing we could hug and kiss them,” Hala said of her liberators. “The joy grew even more when I reached my family. It was as if I was born again.”

The Aleppo prison was one of several facilities opened up by HTS, whose rapid advance from Aleppo to Damascus stunned many around the world and ousted al-Assad.

Hala was one of more than 136,614 people who were held in Syria’s brutal prison network before the rebel advance, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

Syria’s prisons have been a key pillar of support for the al-Assad regime. The human rights group said photographs smuggled out of Syria in 2013 showed what Human Rights Watch described as “incontrovertible evidence of widespread torture, starvation, beatings, and disease in Syrian government detention facilities”, amounting to crimes against humanity. Is.

Hala recalled the arrest and torture of another girl, a 16-year-old girl who she says later died. The girl’s arrest came just two months after her wedding, Hala said, when she was captured by police along with a university student, an elderly woman and two doctors whom police accused of treating revolutionaries.

Memories ‘cannot be erased’

“It was like the day of my birth, like it was the first day of my life,” Safi al-Yasin, 49, said of his release from prison in Aleppo.

“The joy is indescribable,” he told Al Jazeera.

Al-Yasin described hearing the sounds of fighting after getting close to the prison before 29 November, before “calm was restored, and we heard the sound of chants”, he said of hearing the victorious rebels.

“There were about 5,000 prisoners there,” he recalled. “We started breaking windows and breaking down doors to get out. Even the officers and guards dressed in civilian clothes and took advantage of the prison exit and went out with us so as not to be caught by the rebels.

Al-Yasin was a blacksmith who built fishing boats in Baniyas, a coastal town in Syria’s northwest, before his detention.

Before his release, he says he had served almost half of his 31-year sentence for taking part in one of the nationwide demonstrations at the start of the Syrian revolution in 2011.

Over the next 14 years, he said, he suffered “severe physical and years of psychological torture” at various locations within Syria’s extensive prison system.

Moving between facilities, each with its own brutal type of interrogation, al-Yasin spent a year in the notorious prison in Sayednaya, a facility described by Amnesty International in 2017 as a “human slaughterhouse”, Sweida, and eventually Aleppo. Before being transferred to.

Al-Yasin said that his treatment at Syednaya was “indescribable and unspeakable”.

“The scenes I saw could not be erased from my memory even till I die,” he said, recalling the mental image of “an elderly man covered in blood, who later died”.

‘Close to death’

Maher – who did not even want to give his full name – was among those freed.

Arrested in 2017 for “financing terrorism”, he had spent the previous seven years detained without trial within the Syrian prison system. She thought the authorities had “forgotten” her as if “I wasn’t human because I was just a number”.

He described the horror of what he experienced and saw in prison.

He said, “Because of the severity of the torture and his cruel methods, every minute felt as if he was getting closer to death, which even an animal cannot endure.”

But perhaps his most shocking moment was when he encountered a relative in Damascus’s notorious Mezzeh prison.

“A bus came and brought the prisoners who were transferred to my cell,” Maher said. “There was also a prisoner among them who looked like my brother-in-law. At first I hesitated and thought to myself, ‘It can’t be Ayman, it can’t be him – weren’t his legs amputated?’

Maher described visiting the prisoner to confirm his worst suspicions, but later learned that the disabled man had “lost his mind”.

Finally, only through a tattoo did Maher realize that this was the same person he knew from life outside prison.

Mezeh was one of the facilities where Maher was held. After years of torture, he said he never expected to leave Aleppo prison.

But then, the unexpected happened.

He said, “As the sound of gunshots got closer to the jail, we all started shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great) and we could never believe that this dream had come true.” “After breaking the doors we walked out of the prison, hugged the revolutionaries, bowed gratefully to God and were kept safe until I reached the house of my sister, who lives in Idlib with her family.”