“Evin” is a name that makes almost every Iranian shudder. It is the name of the notorious prison in Tehran, a seat of torture and murder. I have met survivors of Evin. The name of the equivalent prison outside Damascus is “Sednaya.” (The name is transliterated in different ways.) We have been reading a lot about it in recent days. The nickname of the prison is “The Human Slaughterhouse.”
The heading over a report from RFE/RL is “The Horrors of Syria’s ‘Human Slaughterhouse’ Spill into Public View.” The report begins,
Some shuffled out of the Syrian prison’s gray concrete corridors like zombies rising from a graveyard. Some sobbed as they reunited with long-unseen relatives.
A report from the Associated Press begins,
They came from all over Syria, tens of thousands. The first place they rushed to after the fall of their longtime tormentor, former president Bashar Assad, was here: Sednaya Prison . . .
• I sometimes think of a phrase from William F. Buckley Jr.: “the sheer stamina of evil.” He wrote it in an article about torture, and the persistence of torture, often by the same torturers, year after year, decade after decade.
• A headline from The Guardian: “ ‘He has come out an old man’: joy and grief as loved ones released from Assad prisons.”
The report begins,
Moammar Ali has been searching for his older brother for 39 years.
In 1986, Syrian soldiers arrested the university student Ali Hassan al-Ali, then 18, at a checkpoint in north Lebanon. Moammar has not heard from him since.
• A report from the BBC is headed “Victims of Syria chemical attacks speak freely for first time.” A man named Tawfiq Diam had a wife and four children. They were killed in a chemical attack in 2018. The husband and father survived, barely. I can’t help wondering whether he wanted to.
He told the BBC, “If I’d spoken out before, Bashar al-Assad’s forces would have cut off my tongue. They would have slit my throat. We were not allowed to talk about it.”
• Diana Magnay, of Sky News, visited the site of a mass grave with her crew. The grave contains the remains of victims of a massacre. She said,
When we arrived there, there were small children with shovels and buckets full of human bones, excitedly showing us where the bodies were mostly piled up in the road, and really just sort of scraping the ground and finding more body parts, and everywhere you looked there were more family members and people wanting to come up and tell you what they had not been able to say for more than a decade. One woman said, “If we had said anything, we would have been killed.”
• Leila Molana-Allen, a special correspondent for PBS, wrote,
I will never unsee what I saw today. The decaying, emaciated bodies of young men covered in the brutal scars of torture and starvation. Their faces drawn in a rictus of pain. Sobbing mothers searching through rows of destroyed boys for their babies.
That statement is here (and, warning: It is accompanied by photos).
• Here is a video of Dima Izzedin, a Syrian journalist who had been in exile and was now reporting from Damascus for the first time in 14 years. She is speaking in Arabic. But her face and tears also speak.
• Assad and his family fled to Moscow, as was perfectly natural. Putin’s allies are China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba — on and on. The worst of the worst.
• A report from the Financial Times says,
Bashar al-Assad’s central bank airlifted around $250mn in cash to Moscow in a two-year period when the then-Syrian dictator was indebted to the Kremlin for military support and his relatives were secretly buying assets in Russia.
The Financial Times has uncovered records showing that Assad’s regime, while desperately short of foreign currency, flew banknotes weighing nearly two tonnes in $100 bills and €500 notes into Moscow’s Vnukovo airport to be deposited at sanctioned Russian banks between 2018 and 2019.
• A week and a half ago, I wrote a post about Bashar Assad and his family — particularly the question of succession. I quoted from a book of mine, Children of Monsters.
Here is an article by Simon Sebag Montefiore, the great British historian, published in Air Mail: “Moscow Rolls Out the Red Carpet.” Montefiore begins,
The rise and fall of the House of Assad is the story of Syria and the Arab world over the past century. At its most fundamental it is about a family and power. At their height, the Assads resembled a royal family, courted by American and British leaders, praised for their wisdom, authenticity, anti-Western radicalism and glamour by Western academics, activists and progressives — and even Vogue magazine. But they ended more like a murderous Mafia clan, enriched by drug dealing, empowered by the mass killing of 40,000 people in a week, of 600,000 in a decade, butchery unequalled in the Middle East in modern times.
• Since 1970, two Assads have been in power: Hafez and Bashar. Their regime collapsed very quickly. Sometimes the collapse of a regime is expected, sometimes not.
I cherish a memory of Paul Nitze, not only a great diplomat and analyst, but also an honest man. Long ago, I had the chance to talk with him. I asked, “Did the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War, come as a surprise to you?” This was after the fact — he could have told me anything. “Yes,” he said (and then he elaborated).
Dictatorships may seem eternally entrenched — but they are not invulnerable. If I were Putin, I would be nervous. I bet he is.
• “Assad’s Enemies Are Not Our Friends,” reads a headline in The Bulwark. The article, by Bill Roggio and Will Selber, begins,
The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime is a moment for celebration. He is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the immiseration of millions more. Like his late Baathist co-partisan, Saddam Hussein, Assad used the state to torture, kill, and maim innocent civilians for decades. He will now join Edward Snowden in exile in Russia, where he will almost certainly try to be a player in Syria’s future.
American government officials should be eager to seize this opportunity, but wary about rehabilitating enemies for the sake of creating false allies. Over the last twenty years, American officials have fooled themselves that some terrorists could be made statesmen, only to watch them slaughter more innocents.
• When Assad fell, I thought back to 2007, and the destruction of Syria’s nuclear facility by Israel — a facility built with the help of North Koreans. George W. Bush made clear to Ehud Olmert that the United States would not take the action itself — but he had no objection to Israel’s doing so, which it did. Bush later commented that Olmert had “guts.”
This was an important action: the destruction of that nuclear facility.
Let me recommend Elliott Abrams’s memoir of 2013, Tested by Zion (reviewed by me here).
• While I am in the recommending business: “Khamenei Loses Everything,” by Eliot A. Cohen. The subheading of that article, in The Atlantic, is “The October 7 attack on Israel has now cost Iran its regional proxy forces.”
• Another article in The Atlantic: “The Syrian Regime Collapsed Gradually — and Then Suddenly.” The author is Anne Applebaum. As usual, she has important insights to share:
. . . cold, deliberate, well-planned cruelty has a logic to it: Brutality is meant to inspire hopelessness. Ludicrous lies and cynical propaganda campaigns are meant to create apathy and nihilism. Random arrests have driven millions of Syrians, Ukrainians, and Venezuelans abroad, creating large, destabilizing waves of refugees and leaving those who remain in despair. The despair, again, is part of the plan. These regimes want to rob people of any ability to plan for a different future, to convince people that their dictatorships are eternal. “Our leader forever” was the Assad dynasty’s slogan.
A “but” is coming:
But all such “eternal” regimes have one fatal flaw: Soldiers and police officers are members of the public too. They have relatives who suffer, cousins and friends who experience political repression and the effects of economic collapse. They, too, have doubts, and they, too, can become insecure. In Syria, we have just seen the result.
About coming months and years, who can say? Has it ever been different, in the long, great, horrific history of man?