DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Handcuffed and squatting on the floor, Abdullah Zahra saw smoke rising from his cellmate’s flesh as his torturers gave him electric shocks.
Then it was Zahra’s turn. They hanged the 20-year-old university student from his wrists until his toes barely touched the floor and electrocuted and beat him for two hours. They made his father watch and taunted him about his son’s torment.
That was 2012, and the entire security apparatus of Syria’s then-President Bashar Assad was deployed to crush the protests that had arisen against his rule.
With Assad’s fall a month ago, the machinery of death that he ran is starting to come out into the open.
It was systematic and well-organized, growing to more than 100 detention facilities where torture, brutality, sexual violence and mass executions were rampant, according to activists, rights group and former prisoners. Security agents spared no one, not even Assad’s own soldiers. Young men and women were detained for simply living in districts where protests were held.
As tens of thousands disappeared over more than a decade, a blanket of fear kept the Syrian population silent. People rarely told anyone that a loved one had vanished for fear they too could be reported to security agencies.
Now, everyone is talking. The insurgents who swept Assad out of power opened detention facilities, releasing prisoners and allowing the public to bear witness. Crowds swarmed, searching for answers, bodies of their loved ones, and ways to heal.
The Associated Press visited seven of these facilities in Damascus and spoke to nine former detainees, some released on Dec. 8, the day Assad was ousted. Some details of the accounts by those who spoke to the AP could not be independently confirmed, but they matched past reports by former detainees to human rights groups.
Days after Assad’s fall, Zahra — now 33 — came to visit Branch 215, a detention facility run by military intelligence in Damascus where he was held for two months. In an underground dungeon, he stepped into the windowless, 4-by-4-meter cell where he says he was held with 100 other inmates.
Each man was allowed a floor tile to squat on, Zahra said. When ventilators weren’t running — either intentionally or because of a power failure — some suffocated. Men went mad; torture wounds festered. When a cellmate died, they stowed his body next to the cell’s toilet until jailers came to collect corpses, Zahra said.
“Death was the least bad thing,” he said. “We reached a place where death was easier than staying here for one minute.”
Assad’s system of repression grew as civil war raged
Zahra was arrested along with his father after security agents killed one of his brothers, a well-known anti-Assad graffiti artist. After they were released, Zahra fled to opposition-held areas. Within a few months, security agents returned and dragged off 13 of his male relatives, including a younger brother and, again, his father.
They were brought to Branch 215. All were tortured and killed. Zahra later recognized their bodies among photos leaked by a defector that showed the corpses of thousands killed while in detention. Their bodies were never recovered, and how and when they died is unknown.
Rights groups estimate at least 150,000 people went missing after anti-government protests began in 2011, most vanishing into Assad’s prison network. Many of them were killed, either in mass executions or from torture and prison conditions. The exact number remains unknown.
