A political prisoner who served 43 years is just one of many horror stories emerging in Syria.
A political prisoner who served 43 years is just one of many horror stories emerging in Syria.
W hen Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled his country on Saturday, he left a grisly reminder of his legacy. Between 2011, when the Syrian civil war began, and this year, more than 136,000 people are believed to have been jailed or made to disappear, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. That includes 3,700 children and 8,500 women. Many who’ve just been released report indescribable killings and torture in hellish living conditions.
Some of the stories beggar belief. Ragheed al-Tatari was a Syrian air force pilot who refused to bomb the city of Hama during protests against the regime of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father. For that in 1981, he was thrown into prison for life. The military tribunal that sentenced him took just one minute to decide his fate.
He emerged from prison on Sunday after spending 43 years behind bars. He is now 70 years old and has finally met his only son, who hadn’t yet been born when he vanished into the al-Assad family gulag.
Incredibly, he held up well during confinement in several of Syria’s most infamous prisons. Fellow inmates reported that he became a talented artist and sculptor, creating intricate pieces from bread crumbs, sugar, citric acid, and olive pits. He also conducted chess tournaments, crafting the pieces from bread dough and drawing the board on a piece of cloth.
Other prisoners tell stories almost as heartbreaking. “I haven’t seen the sun until today,” author Bashar Barhoum told the Associated Press after being deposited in disbelief on the streets of Damascus. “Instead of being dead tomorrow, thank God, he gave me a new lease of life.”
Others weren’t so lucky.
The liberators of the infamous Sednaya military prison, known as “the human slaughterhouse,” report finding large iron presses used to break bones and execute prisoners. People were held in pitch-black dungeons as deep as 100 feet underground and locked behind heavy electronic doors.
Among the thousands of prisoners set free on Sunday, a tiny three-year-old toddler was seen hesitantly leaving his mother’s cell. A teenager who had spent his entire life inside the Sednaya prison was filmed saying the only word he knew — “Halap” (or Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city).
Amnesty International and other groups say that dozens of people were secretly executed every week in Sednaya and that the total ran into the tens of thousands over the years.
There was an evil method to Bashar al-Assad’s madness. His feared secret police and network of prisons not only isolated his opponents but divided average Syrians against each other.
“Anxiety about being thrown in one of Assad’s notorious prisons created wide mistrust among Syrians,” Lina Khatib, a fellow at the London think tank Chatham House, told the Washington Post: “Assad nurtured this culture of fear to maintain control and crush political opposition.”
One would devoutly like to believe Syria’s new revolutionary leaders, who claim they have toppled Assad in part to promote stability and human rights. But many of them have a checkered past and terrorist connections.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of a prize-winning biography of Joseph Stalin, says we are wise to be cautious: “This is the Middle East. Anyone who remembers the Arab Spring knows that things can always get worse. And anyone who studies history knows that predictions are for fools.”