INSIDE THE JAILS OF THE SYRIAN REGIME

Unfortunately, we cannot think of memories in the same way as a tumour that a doctor could remove, or an illness to be cured. Memories are like a cancer that spreads to all parts of the brain and cannot be stopped. The only solution is to face them with a little courage and tell your stories, maybe with a dose of morphine to ease the pain for a brief moment.

Inside the jails of the Syrian regime: The “party” where we are the gifts (1)

I still remember the day I arrived at this prison in the Syrian desert. There were around 40 of us crammed into the vehicle transporting us from Homs prison to the military prison in Palmyra. On the way, some of the men whispered about the reception that would be waiting for us when we arrived. We already knew it was going to be a party for the jailers and executioners, and we were the gifts.

Some prisoners gave advice on how to ease the pain that would overwhelm us during torture: “Don’t make eye contact with the jailer.” – “When you reach the absolute apex of pain, sing the anthem of the party, ‘The party in power in Syria,’ that will force the jailer to stop beating you until you finish the anthem.” – “Never take your hands away from your testicles when you’re inside the wheel, so you don’t lose your ability to have children.” The sound of laughter rose, the vehicle came to a sharp stop and the large iron door swung open. The jailer appeared, holding a whip made from electric cables and started beating and kicking the near-naked bodies of the prisoners. He shouted angrily: “Are you bastards laughing? It’ll be your last laugh!” He didn’t stop beating us until the officer in charge told him to stop. 

Before the vehicle moved on, the guards closed all the iron shutters, even the one on the door, turning day to night. Only a few minutes passed before we started to suffocate. Some men lost consciousness in a moment felt that like a mass execution. We started yelling and begging them to open the windows. The vehicle came to a stop again. The jailer climbed inside, walking over prisoners’ heads and bodies until he could beat the ones who had passed out. It was a terrifying scene. When a whip strikes the body for the first time, the flesh swells by 2cm; from the second lash, it is ripped away.

I tried, with my own hands, to protect a weaker young man with a slender build, and I received twice as many strikes, as the jailer thought I was defying orders from his commanding officer. It didn’t stop there; all the prisoners received their share of blows, and this was just the start of the welcome reception.

Tyre torture

When we reached the prison, we lined up under a semicircular arch and they ordered us to undress completely so that we could be searched. All I could think about was: why are the jailers wearing swords decorated with white writing that I can’t read?

Tyres were placed in the middle of the yard, and the executioners began sorting the prisoners into groups, five in each group, and putting them inside tyres (the prisoner puts his legs through the wheel, up to his thighs, bends his head and shoulders inside too, then turns the wheel on the ground, so that his head is between his knees and his feet are pointing up to the sky). Two former prisoners were working with the police to steady the prisoners’ feet with a cord attached to a stick around a metre long, known as “al-Qaris”. The Corridor (the name given to prisoners who help the police) would start to wrap the cord around the prisoner’s ankles until it almost broke the bone – it certainly pierced the flesh. The first scream always escaped when the cord was wound like this. Two jailers holding swords started to beat the prisoner’s feet – they would take one foot each and coordinate their strokes. When one whip struck the right foot, the other was high above the left, and so on. The weapons were nothing more than fat bits of tyre made into the shape of a sword. Written on each one was a word or phrase uttered by prisoners during torture: “Oh, mother” – “Oh father” – “Oh God” – “Oh Mohammed”. Each time the prisoner screamed something, their tormentor would replace the whip with the whip bearing the name or phrase they had called out.

None of the advice I’d heard in the vehicle helped to ease the pain. The more the anthem was sung, the more the beatings and torture intensified.

The jailer was planning to leave me until the end of the party, so that I could see and hear what was happening in full consciousness. The Corridor pulled me towards the tyre while the policemen laughed noisily, chanting “Time for dessert”. I thought about the love letters the policeman had ripped up before my eyes when he slapped me and mocked the story they told. I will never smell the jasmine perfume on those letters, but I can still remember the details of my love’s face as if she were in front of me – even if our last meeting was four long months ago. I tried to dream about my girlfriend to take myself out of the hell I was in. I didn’t even realise when the Corridor put me in the wheel; I was trying to stay in another world. My first scream reached the heavens when my feet were fastened to “al-Qaris”.

“Be brave”

I passed out twice during those minutes. I don’t know how I woke up, but the pain was impossible to describe. There’s absolutely nothing like it, or at least that’s what I thought. Each time the whip came down on my feet, I felt like my head was going to explode, I tried to escape the pain by taking refuge in my imagination. I think I spent a few seconds like that. The seconds I was in a coma. Their party came to an end when my feet were cracked open and a pool of blood had formed underneath me. The Corridor took me over to the tap. I was barely conscious. More accurately, I was somewhere between life and death. They poured cold water over me. It was the worst pain, like a high-voltage electric current running through my body. I swear I could hear my heart beating in my head. I woke up in a large cell with pain in my feet, which were covered with a damp cloth. A tough young man was sitting near my head, smiling. Sarcastically, he mocked me: “Stand up, be brave, only real men go to prison.” Then he looked up at the hole in the cell’s ceiling and laughed, saying: “Please, let us out.”

 

Inside the jails of the Syrian regime. Humiliation and beatings designed to crush the will (2)

Despite the horror of the photos shared of 11,000 prisoners killed under torture in the prisons of the Assad regime (photos César https://www.google.com/), with all my own scars, injuries, and signs of torture, I wasn’t as affected as everyone else. For me, and many others like me, dying under torture means you haven’t lived through the worst. Only those who have experienced moments of torture in damp, rotting basements will understand what I mean.

The pubic shave ordeal

When a whip strikes the naked body, the pain it inflicts is often easier to bear than an act you consider shameful. I remember the first time I reached the sixth courtyard. There is a place there where prisoners have their pubic area shaved. We were used to undressing before we arrived at the prison in the Palmyra desert, but we were not in the habit of volunteering to let the jailer have his fun by torturing us with obscenities whenever a prisoner had a small penis, or striking the intimate area with an electrical cord when he had a large penis.

We walked into the courtyard completely naked, forming a queue to be shaved. The weather was very cold, it was still morning when the jailer started to whip our bodies because we’d used our hands to cover our intimate areas. His words and curses were harsher than the pain of a whip tearing through tender flesh. Despite the pain, many of us continued to cover our most sensitive parts, refusing to submit to the jailers’ orders. The dilemma lasted moments: cover our genitals – a natural instinct, in keeping with our customs and traditions – or escape the whip on our buttocks, thighs and back. You find that customs, traditions and even religion fade away as you watch a line of men have their pubic area shaved.

After a while, no one bothered to cover their intimate area, and asking the barber to shave the area as much as possible became the norm. Prisoners who were rich (meaning that they had packets of foreign cigarettes) even paid bribes for it. That’s exactly what I often did. But this time I didn’t have any cigarettes, I’d stopped smoking. I was weak and I needed help to walk, my feet were still swollen and cut. But my injuries didn’t stop me from receiving plenty of blows to the back, buttocks and testicles. The biggest challenge was not to cry out, because that would only make the jailer hit your harder.

When my turn came to be shaved, the barber hadn’t changed the blade. I asked him to change it, and he looked at me in surprise and bit his bottom lip as a sign for me to shut up. I didn’t catch his hint, and I looked at one of the guards and spoke to him about it. He burst out laughing and called over the other guards to tell them the story. This was the worst moment of my life. The jailer told the barber to finish the shave in ten seconds, or he would be beaten and locked in the isolation cell. You can imagine how it felt when the barber set to work without even using water on the hairs, and with a blade that had been used to shave dozens of prisoners before me. What I remember from that moment are the screams of the other prisoners when they saw what was happening to me, and my own screams, which I think could be heard all the way to the monuments in Palmyra, several kilometres away from the prison. The injuries that barber left on my intimate parts caused me pain for months afterwards.

Lice and beatings

However, I was luckier than some prisoners, who became infected with lice. And I witnessed what happened to one prisoner who suffered from this. At lunchtime, he was brought out into the third courtyard, the largest in the prison. There, he was laid out on his stomach, completely naked, and forced to raise his bottom so that two other detainees could search for lice between his buttocks. While this was happening, the jailer forced the prisoners in the courtyard to hit the man, and the guards whipped his buttocks for their entertainment.

One friend who went through this ordeal told me that all the blows and slaps are nothing compared to the psychological damage inflicted by this treatment. He told me that he had lost his self-confidence and had nightmares about his virility. I can understand why, and I know that all these punishments were nothing more than a systematic policy to deprive the prisoners of their will. To reduce them to numbers in the records of the dark history of life under the Assad family regime. 

 

Inside the jails of the Syrian regime: the incurable cancer of memories (3)

Unfortunately, we cannot think of memories in the same way as a tumour that a doctor could remove, or an illness to be cured. Memories are like a cancer that spreads to all parts of the brain and cannot be stopped. The only solution is to face them with a little courage and tell your stories, maybe with a dose of morphine to ease the pain for a brief moment.

Killing for pleasure

One cold morning, we were sitting in the sixth courtyard of the prison in Palmyra (read previous reports), close to the walls of a cell. We were stretched out in the sunlight, like swallows on a wire. That was the only hour we were allowed to rest outside the cell. The prisoners from one of the “al-Wazzawiz” cells walked past us (al-Wazzawiz is the name given to handsome young prisoners. These boys were used as servants to fulfil the needs of policemen and torturers). They were naked and walking towards the baths in long line. Among these slender bodies, I saw “Mohammad”, the skinny young man I’d tried to protect in the prison transport the day we arrived in this damp and rotting jail. Mohammad looked at me with sunken eyes and a broad smile played across his chapped lips. His face was very thin. His body looked like a walking skeleton. Mohammad tried to run in short, wobbly strides, to catch up with the line, but he was so weak that he could barely walk. He was stumbling around like a drunk. Two of his fellow prisoners tried to help him, but the guard’s whip drove them away and Mohammad was left to face the guard and his insults. The whip ate away what was left of his back and buttocks. Mohammad’s screams silenced after the jailer kicked him in the stomach and the testicles. Blood covered his body stretched out on the ground. The jailer didn’t even react. He simply shouted “Corridor,” and two large prisoners came and took Mohammad away, towards the baths. It was only a minute or two before the Corridor were back, dragging Mohammad through the prison courtyard and into the police courtyard, where the only medical point in the prison was located. That was when Mohammad disappeared forever.

I couldn’t believe, at the time, that Mohammad had been killed, though everyone around me was whispering prayers for the dead. What seemed even less believable was that the jailer who had beaten Mohammad came back into the third courtyard, where we were sitting, with an apple in his hand. He ate it greedily, chuckling loudly to himself. How can someone kill an innocent person and remain indifferent? How can a jailer be human?

The jailer told the prisoners to come and get the apple. And when they came, he slapped and kicked them. He tried to torture us just by looking at apples. Fruit is forbidden for prisoners – many fruits and vegetables and even traditional Syrian dishes were forbidden in prison.

When breakfast is a prisoner’s dream

My friend Yassine told me that he could no longer remember what apples – or any other fruits – tasted like, and that it didn’t bother him at all, all he cared about was “Fatteh Halawa” (breakfast). He told me that he’d spent five years in this cold prison. Five years never feeling full. And every night, as he settled himself under a military wool blanket, fraying like his heart, his chapped lips would curl into a smile. He was dreaming with his eyes wide open. Him in his garden at home, sitting on his old wooden chair, a stick in his raised hand. A teapot is placed on a wooden stove. His mother’s hands cut bread into pieces on a low wooden table. The silhouetted woman holding a dish of sweets is his wife. But he’s forgotten the details of her face; they only lived together for 19 days after they were married. Before he was brought to this empty place, where loud cries reverberate around the desert.

He told me that every night he dreamed about “Fatteh Halawa”. And thanks to the image of his mother’s face, he imagined the food being delicious. I can still remember the way his hands would move after he closed his eyes and savoured the taste, as if he was eating right there. How can breakfast be someone’s dream? 

“Fatteh Halawa” is the meal prepared daily at the military prison in Palmyra. Half a glass of something that looks like cold tea, a teaspoon of Syrian sweets. It could be described as animal feed, but with a sweet flavour. Some bread and three bitter olives. The bread is cut into small pieces, a spoonful of sweetener is added, then the tea is poured over the top. These components are mixed together until they take their final form, which bears a resemblance to “old man’s vomit”. The olives are left over in the name of “dessert”. Five or six people prepare this meal and then eat it. When your turn comes, you take a mouthful. Many prisoners would prefer 20 lashes of the whip on their feet and body to an extra mouthful of this meal. You could swap one mouthful for a torture session that might last ten minutes.

Ten minutes

Ten minutes is how long I spent listening to my friend’s story. Ten minutes was long enough to forget about Mohammad, killed before my eyes. And I didn’t move. Ten minutes in the third courtyard of that prison set the course for the rest of my life. Ten minutes was all it took for my mind to become infected with the incurable cancer of memories. 

 

Inside the jails of the Syrian regime. Torture to change human nature (4)

The cell I was imprisoned in comprised three interior rooms, with high walls and a circular window in the ceiling of each room granting clear views of each prisoner’s movements to the night guards. The surface area of a cell was around 16m2, the total surface area around 50m2. There were 190 of us sharing cell number 12, located in the second courtyard. The first room was the busiest, because it was the only one with a toilet. There was always a queue of prisoners waiting their turn.

Hafez al-Assad, ‘a role model’

At exactly 8pm, from the prison rooftops, the guards would give the order for us to get ready for sleep. We had ten minutes and not one more. In ten minutes, all the prisoners must be in a sleeping position and ready to listen to the story of the day. One of the prisoners would tell us a story (a sort of psychological boost for the inmates, at least according to the police). It was usually about the heroism of President Hafez al-Assad, one of his sons or his entourage. The story of Hafez al-Assad’s diplomatic victory over the American Secretary of State was the police’s particular favourite. We were forced to listen to this one at least three times a week, it was all about Assad’s diplomatic skills, his courage and his strength of character. This was how we learned that President Assad was capable of going nine hours without urinating. Something Kissinger could not do. There you have it: Syria’s greatest diplomatic victory over American imperialism and global Zionism. It astonished the leaders of the West and East alike, according to the press and leaders of the Syrian regime at the time. This story was meant to inspire us. We, the prisoners, had to follow the example set by our President. What the prison director demanded of us, therefore, consisted of going the next 12 hours without urinating. If we failed, we would be betraying the values and principles of our ‘leader’ Hafez al-Assad.

The prison officials knew what they were doing, and that it was unrealistic. You only need to imagine 190 people sleeping in 50m2 to understand the madness of this order. So they suggested that the actions of the President should be our source of inspiration. Ignoring them was equivalent to treason punishable by law.

In position, sardine!

The magic solution to the sleeping problem, despite the overcrowding in prisons, was for prisoners to sleep packed together like sardines in a tin. There was one catch: each prisoner had to sleep on one side of his body for the whole night. It was impossible to roll over, stand up, or even move.

The cell manager, a former inmate, started by placing a prisoner on his right side in one corner of the room, with his head against the wall and his face turned towards the inside of the room. Then the second prisoner was placed on his right side, but with his head at the feet of the first prisoner and his feet in the man’s face. The third prisoner would be in the same position as the first, the fourth in the same position as the second, and so on and so forth, until the row reached the opposite wall. The second row was the same as the first, but in reverse order. And this went on until the last inmate in the cell was lying down (see illustration).

The prisoners sleeping closest to the wall were some of the richest, they paid a bribe to the jailers for this privilege. As for the cell manager, he had his own spot, which allowed him to sleep in the small space in front of the toilets. 

One toilet, 190 prisoners

We encountered the biggest problem of the day first thing in the morning: getting 190 people to relieve themselves in a single toilet. And quickly, since we had to be out of the cell by 9am on the dot for breakfast and our daily walk. We didn’t have enough time to use the toilet alone, so you had to urinate at the same time as two or three other people. 
Many prisoners, especially the new ones, couldn’t wait their turn and relieved themselves in their clothes. Then they had to wait until midday to shower in the washroom or, to be more precise, to pour cold water over their body for a duration of no more than one minute. These unsanitary conditions explain the spread of lice and skin diseases such as scabies and fungi that grew between the legs and sometimes all over people’s bodies. In the afternoon, we hurried into the washroom to wash or defecate, which left a stifling, foul stench in the cell. Many prisoners contracted tuberculosis, others suffered from chronic bronchitis or serious lung diseases. The number of deaths in prisons under the regime of Hafez al-Assad was considerable. And those who made it out alive were marked forever.

 

Inside the jails of the Syrian regime: the slow death chamber (5)

One cold and rainy day in the military prison in Palmyra, while I was in the courtyard waiting for my ration of food, the guards ordered us to look down so we wouldn’t see the most dangerous prisoners passing by on the way to the shower. They were in a cell with enhanced security, and no one was allowed to see them or mix with them without personal authorisation from the prison director. But I did look at the faces of these prisoners. I was looking for a familiar face – someone I used to know was among them. He was a man from my village, who I’d met in the military prison in Homs when I was on my way to Palmyra prison. This prisoner was ten years older than me and had spent the last ten years in different Syrian prisons.

First meeting with Abu Sharif

I first met Abu Sharif by chance, in the military prison in Homs (al-Baloona). When he realised I was his friend’s younger brother, he spent an hour with me in a filthy cell. He made sure I could sleep on my back that night – a miracle for new detainees like me. At the time, I didn’t understand why Abu Sharif had this kind of authority inside the prison, when he was an inmate himself. He told me that he would see me again in Palmyra prison when he got back from his military tribunal in Damas, and that he would explain everything. I later learned, from another prisoner, that Abu Sharif was considered one of the most dangerous prisoners because he had committed a number of serious offences during his first stay in Palmyra prison. He had taken a guard hostage, with the help of other inmates, in a bid to change the unjust prison system of the time. Although Abu Sharif did receive several gunshot wounds from a military weapon during this incident, he lived, while everyone else who had participated in the jailer’s kidnap was killed. The reason his life was spared remains a mystery.

Renewed encounter in Palmyra

In Palmyra, we saw each other across the third courtyard. Abu Sharif walked towards me, but one of the guards stopped him from coming over, while the other guard took me into the police courtyard where I would be punished for violating the prison rule that prohibits approaching or speaking to the dangerous prisoners. As the jailer was dragging me away, I yelled “Twelve” at the top of my voice, to answer Abu Sharif’s question about my cell number. 

Just two days later, Abu Sharif visited me in my cell. My feet were cut and swollen, and I had a huge black eye thanks to the beating I’d taken from the guards. That day, Abu Sharif told me the whole story. He told me about kidnapping the jailer, and about his three bullet wounds. And why he’d been given treatment on the orders of the Ministry of Defence, who wanted information about other operations planned by the prisoners. He explained how the prison authorities had taken the illegal decision to kill him slowly in the “death cell” (al-Monfareda), which is the most horrific story I ever heard in prison.

The invention of a Nazi officer

Al-Monfareda is a one metre cubed cell, with two iron shutters. The first, half way up the door, 25cm2, opens once a day for 20 minutes, for air. The other opening, at the bottom or the door, measures 15cm2. This opens twice a day for food to be passed through. In one corner of the floor in al-Monfareda, there is a small opening (with no additional features) that serves as a toilet. The walls and the door are padded to prevent the inmate from committing suicide by hitting their head. There are also no electricity wires or light bulbs. And no window. The length of stay in this cell is generally no longer than one month, enough time for the detainee to lose their mind or contract a fatal disease like cancer, tuberculosis, plague, malaria, and others.
It is said that this method of slow death was invented by the Nazi Alois Brunner, the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann, a notorious Nazi officer and one of the key organisers of the Holocaust. Brunner was granted asylum in Syria in 1961. After the coup d’état in September of that year, which dissolved the United Arab Republic (Syria and Egypt), he stayed there until his death in 2010.

Surviving thanks to a rat

“The first time that Marmar paid me a visit was the day after I’d gone into the death chamber,” Abu Sharif told me. “I was in a dangerous psychological state, I was looking for a quick way to commit suicide, after the failure of my first attempt when I bashed my head against the wall. Marmar, the rat, came in through the hole for the toilet, looking for something to eat. There were two bread rolls on the floor of the cell. That was like treasure to my friend Marmar. He broke off a piece of bread and ran back to wherever he came from, only to reappear a few hours later to get the rest of the bread. This time he stayed for a few minutes to wander around my feet. That happened a few times, and each time Marmar stayed a little longer, until I got used to it and I enjoyed his company. I started to talk to him and stroke him like a pet. I gave him my food, because I’d decided to die by going on hunger strike. I thought the rat could help me by taking away the food, because I had to prove to the guard that I was eating, otherwise they’d force feed me. After a few days, the disease began to seep into my body. The cough was the worst thing, at that point. I noticed that Marmar wasn’t taking as much bread anymore, which put my plan in danger if there was bread left on the floor. I tried to throw it down the toilet hole, but the guard found out my trick and forced me to eat. I started hiding bread in my trousers to give to my friend Marmar, who made al-Monfareda his permanent home. He put on weight, unlike me. I didn’t know why he was gaining weight, and it was a total surprise when Marmar gave birth in the corner of the cell. It never crossed my mind that the animal was female. I had conflicting feelings, but the overwhelming one was love. 

I really liked the little one and called it Kifah, because that’s a name that can be male or female. Marmar and Kifah were my little family in that dungeon. They gave me hope of surviving and confidence in myself, to believe that I can still give love, the love I need to give to my family and the love I want to find when I get out of prison. 

After six months of confinement, I refused to leave the cell. Every time they tried to make me leave, I hit out at the guards like I’d turned into a human monster that couldn’t be tamed. The prison director didn’t understand my behaviour, and he decided to keep me in al-Monfareda indefinitely.”

Bribes to get out… and come back every day

Abu Sharif did leave the death chamber, after his family paid a kilo of gold and a huge sum in bribes to visit him for five minutes. This five-minute visit with his mother changed his life over the following years. An agreement was reached with the prison director that Abu Sharif would leave al-Monfareda, with the right to go in there every day to see Marmar and Kifah, in exchange for a monthly sum of cash the family paid to the director…