The Security Prisons of the Assad Regime

 

 

The Background

Security prisons, and the terror they inspire in the Syrian population, have underpinned the Assad regime’s rule from the start.

The history of such prisons stretches back before Hafez al-Assad’s seizure of power in 1970, though his regime expanded and intensified the system. From 1946 on, Syria was racked by a series of military coups and counter-coups, interspersed with brief episodes of parliamentary democracy. Whenever a coup succeeded, the new rulers would round up the previous government and its supporters and detain them in prison.

The numbers of people held in security prisons increased during the United Arab Republic (UAR) of 1958 to 1961, and the conditions of detention worsened. The UAR brought the Syrian and Egyptian states together under the dictatorship of the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdul Nasser. Abd al-Hamid al-Sarraj, Nasser’s preferred Syrian secret policeman, is credited with introducing two particular torture methods to Syrian prisons during this period: the doulab, or tire, in which victims are stuffed, and then whipped; and the shabah, or ghost, by which victims are strung by their wrists from the ceiling for hours or days. Both methods are still applied in the Assad regime’s prisons today. ISIS inherited them from Assad, and also routinely applied such tortures in its own security prisons.

The UAR was widely seen as an economic as well as a political disaster, and was soon ended by a coup led by conservative army officers. When, in turn, a secret Military Committee of Baathist officers seized control in March 1963, it quickly set about rounding up and detaining those it considered a potential security threat. These included first the conservative officers who had seceded from Abdul Nasser’s UAR, then supporters of Abdul Nasser, then anyone who dissented from the ruling party’s line. As the Baathists had banned all media and all forms of civil organization beyond Baath Party control, this category covered many members of civil society.

The Assad Regime

In November 1970, defense minister Hafez al-Assad launched an internal coup within the Baathist regime that he called the Correctionist Movement. He assumed the presidency, and sent the previous president, Salah Jadid, to Mezzeh Prison. This notorious security prison is located underground in urban west Damascus. Jadid remained there until his death 23 years later.

Hafez al-Assad now built a coup-proof system of overlapping security agencies, each with their own prisons, and each being spied on by the others. The ultimate authority over these agencies lay with Assad himself. The officials beneath Assad always feared being implicated by the reports of their competitors, and never knew which of their subordinates were spying on them. This system did indeed coup-proof the Assad dictatorship, which has continued until today, 54 years later. On the occasions when it has been challenged, the challenge has come not from the army, but from the Syrian people.

The system of security prisons designed by Hafez al-Assad did secure regime stability, but it completely destabilized Syrian society. Intellectuals and ordinary citizens were terrorized into silence. The regime’s disciplinary power over society seemed not only severe but arbitrary. Unlucky citizens were often detained then eventually released by one security branch, only to be immediately arrested by another.

The horror of sudden detention, and of extreme abuses in detention, reach into almost every corner of Syrian society. The numbers of people taken “behind the sun”, as Syrians say, have been enormous, as comparisons with other countries show. The United States incarcerates 629 people per 100,000 of the population. This is generally considered to be the worst rate in the world. Russia incarcerates 445 per 100,000. In Syria, however, 1,200 per 100,000 are incarcerated. That’s a conservative estimate.^[1] It should be noted that most of those are imprisoned for political rather than criminal reasons.

statue of former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, surrounded by election posters of his son, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus – 23 May 2021 (AFP)

 

The Victims

Who then are the hundreds of thousands who have passed through, or still languish, in the Assad regime’s security prisons?

One major category is Islamists, particularly those of the Muslim Brotherhood. Syrians have been imprisoned not only for participation in Islamist-inspired violence, but for any form of Islamist activism, and for the mere expression of Islamist opinions, moderate as well as extremist.

Leftists too have been targeted for detention, and particularly members of the Syrian Communist Party – Political Bureau (SPG-PB). This party split from the larger Syrian Communist Party (SCP) in 1973, following the SCP’s decision in 1972 to give up its independence and join the Baathist-dominated National Progressive Front, which gave a façade of pluralism to the dictatorship. Riad al-Turk, the SPG-PB’s secretary general, became known as “Syria’s Mandela” for the long stretches he spent in prison.^[2] The longest was 18 years. Al-Turk and others associated with the SPG-PB moved away from authoritarian Communism to an accommodation with democracy. This only increased the regime’s displeasure.

Kurds are another group who have suffered disproportionately in Syrian security prisons. The security branches detained not only activists of Kurdish political parties – the Yekiti Party was particularly hard hit – but also Kurdish cultural activists. Promoting Kurdish language and folklore was enough to prompt arrest and abuse.

Beyond those three categories, anyone who engages in any form of independent civic activism is at risk of detention. Tal al-Malouhi, for example, was arrested in December 2009 when she was 18 years old, and is still in prison today. Her crime was writing blog posts on social issues, including poems encouraging solidarity with the Palestinians.

Others are detained in order to pressure their relatives to turn themselves in, or because they have offered moral or material support to communities that have fallen out of favour with the regime. Many doctors have been detained for treating protestors wounded by regime fire.

Children are not spared. On March 12, 2013, dentist Rania Abbasi, her husband Abdul Rahman Yassin, and their six children – Dima, Intisar, Najah, Alaa, Ahmed, and Layan – were arrested. The children were 14, 13, 11, eight, six and two years old at the time. They have not been seen since, though there are rumours that Rania may have been held at Military Intelligence Branches 215 and 284.^[3]

Rania and Abdul Rahman were not members of any political party and had not participated in any political activities. They had, however, provided humanitarian assistance to people in communities besieged by the regime.

Rania Abbasi, her husband Abdul Rahman Yassin, and their children

 

The prominent dissident Michel Kilo described meeting a young child in prison. The child’s mother had been arrested to pressure her father, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, to turn himself in, and had then been raped in prison. Her child was born in prison nine months later. When Kilo met the boy he told him a story about a bird.

“What is a bird?” the boy asked.

Kilo explained that a bird is a beautiful flying animal that nests in trees.

“What is a tree?” the boy asked next.^[4]

The effects of security prisons on Syrian society are so profound that prison literature, or adab as-sijoon has become one of the country’s most recognizable literary genres. The poet Faraj Bairaqdar and the political thinker Yassin al-Haj Saleh have written prison memoirs, but the most well known example is perhaps Mustafa Khalifa’s autobiographical account “The Shell”. Khalifa was accused of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the fact that he had been born into a Christian family. He describes screaming under torture that he was not even a Muslim, but an atheist, and how the guards then increased the torture as punishment for his atheism. Many years later he learnt the real reason for his arrest was an off-the-cuff remark about the regime he’d made while studying in Paris. One of the regime’s ubiquitous informants had reported the comment.

Torture and Conditions of Detention

The torture methods applied in these prisons are extreme and widespread. In some cases they continue every day for many years. They include whipping with cables and hoses, beating with canes and metal rods, sleep deprivation, long periods in stress positions, and suspension from the ceiling or from a mechanical hoist. Prisoners are subjected to torments known by a specialized vocabulary. The “German chair” can fracture the spine; the “magic carpet” is a wooden board which moves from the middle, folding the victim’s body; the “ladder” encloses the victim on both sides, and fractures his bones when the guards walk over it. Prisoners are sometimes burnt with boiling water, or with charcoal. Their fingers, ears, tongue and genitals are electrocuted. Their fingernails are extracted. They are cut with knives. Their penis is tied so they can’t urinate. Both men and women are raped.

Many do not survive the torture. Those who do, and who are eventually released, usually suffer long-term physical and mental health conditions.

The conditions of detention are often as traumatic and as likely to cause death as the torture. Prisoners are crammed into cells so tightly that they have to sleep on their sides, and in shifts. In many cases they are held in absolute darkness, and must stand or lie in their own excrement. The food provided is almost always insufficient, dirty, and of the lowest quality. Medical care is either poor or non-existent. Many prisoners die of infection or disease.

The purpose of such abuse is not to extract information from prisoners – otherwise, why would it continue for months and years after arrest, when any information a prisoner may have had would have become obsolete. Instead it is designed to demonstrate the regime’s absolute power, and to project terror onto the society beyond the prison, to paralyze society from action.

A gruesome collection of images of dead bodies taken by a photographer, who has been identified by the code name “Caesar,” displayed at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, March 10, 2015 (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)

 

The “Events” of the 1980s

Syria became known – in Riad al-Turk’s phrase – as a “kingdom of silence”. But of course, the regime found it impossible to stamp out all opposition. In fact, the intensity of its repression ensured that when opposition did arise, it tended towards violence. Starting in 1978, a dissident movement attempted to rally opposition to the regime. At first this included leftists and dissident nationalists as well as Islamists, but extensive arrest campaigns soon eliminated all except the Muslim Brotherhood. By the early 1980s, a low-level war was waged between regime forces and Islamic militants, particularly in Aleppo, Idlib and Hama. In 1982, the Fighting Vanguard, an extremist armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, took control of Hama city. The regime responded with such shocking violence that Syrian society was traumatized for decades afterwards.

This was not the first time the Syrian regime had directed large scale violence against the population in the streets as opposed to inside prison walls. It had sent the army to suppress urban uprisings in 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1973, and 1980. But the 1982 Hama massacre was on a totally new scale. The city was shelled by artillery and tanks, and bombed from the air. Once armed resistance had been quashed, troops commanded by President Hafez al-Assad’s brother Rifaat committed massacres against the city’s civilian population. Somewhere between ten and forty thousand residents were killed, and the historical center of the ancient city was largely destroyed. The expression “Hama rules” was coined afterwards to refer to the use of indiscriminate violence against an urban population considered unruly.

Inside the regime’s security prisons, meanwhile, blood had flowed just as freely. Following an assassination attempt on Hafez al-Assad in 1980, the regime adopted Law 49, which made membership of, or even association with, the Muslim Brotherhood punishable by death. On June 27, 1980, in revenge for the assassination attempt, some 1,000 prisoners were murdered at Tadmor (Palmyra) Prison in under an hour.^[5]

Tadmor Prison was one of the most notorious of security prisons. The poet Faraj Bairaqdar called it “the kingdom of death and madness”. In 2015, ISIS captured Tadmor (Palmyra) from the regime, both the town and the prison. Before the organization was driven out of Tadmor, it blew up the prison, destroying the forensic and documentary evidence that might have revealed details of the crimes committed there over the years.

 

Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian Revolution

In 2000, Hafez al-Assad died, and was succeeded as president by his son Bashar. Those around the new leader encouraged the impression that he was forward-looking and open to reforms. This prompted civil and human rights activists to publicly discuss their hopes for a more democratic Syria. In a movement that became known as the Damascus Spring, they organized discussion groups and issued public statements.

Within a few months, however, spring was succeeded by winter. Those who had dared to speak in public were arrested in the clampdown. Liberal businessmen, cultural figures, and human rights lawyers, as well as veteran leftist and Islamist political actors, found themselves in the regime’s prisons. This again quietened the political scene. Syria appeared to revert to a kingdom of silence.

The appearance of apparent social submission continued until February and March 2011, when mass protests erupted. They came in the context of the Arab Spring, as people took to the streets in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere. This time the political action was not restricted to Islamist or leftist activists. Ordinary men and women of all backgrounds protested, but particularly in working class suburbs and depressed countryside areas. The regime tried to nip the movement in the bud by shooting at protestors, but this only added fuel to the fire. Funerals became protests, which grew and grew until millions were on the streets.

The regime detained tens, then hundreds of thousands. The security prisons whose names had terrified Syrians for decades were filled to the brim, so the regime began detaining people in schools and sports stadiums. It focused in particular on the non-violent, non-sectarian civil revolutionaries, because it saw such people as the greatest threat to regime security. Unlike the Islamists of earlier episodes, non-violent democrats could potentially attract support from a critical mass of society, including minority groups.

Very many of these revolutionaries were tortured to death in prison. The mutilated corpse of Ghiath Matar, for instance, who had organized protestors in Daraya to offer water and roses to the soldiers sent to shoot at them, was delivered to his family four days after his arrest in September 2011.^[6]

In the years since, “Hama rules” have been applied to Homs, Deir ez-Zor, Aleppo, the Damascus suburbs, and many smaller towns and villages. The result was the killing of hundreds of thousands of Syrians and the expulsion of at least 13 million from their homes.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands have been killed in the regime’s prisons. In 2013, a regime defector known as “Caesar” smuggled 53,000 photographs out of Syria which showed 6,786 people killed by torture or starvation in detention. Human Rights Watch examined and confirmed the veracity of this evidence.^[7] The Human Rights Data Analysis Group also counted at least 17,723 people killed in regime custody between March 2011 and December 2015, an average of 300 deaths each month.^[8] In addition, Amnesty International estimates that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extrajudicially executed at Saydnaya Prison alone between September 2011 and December 2015. In this light, Assad regime prisons are perhaps better thought of as death camps.

Enormous numbers still endure the worst imaginable conditions in Assad’s gulag. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, at least 157,634 of those arrested by all parties to the Syrian conflict are still in detention. This number includes 10,221 women and 5,274 children. Syrian regime forces are responsible for detaining 86.7 percent of the total.^[9]

 

November and December 2024

On November 29, 2024, a coalition of rebel fighters ejected Assad regime forces from Aleppo. This event was unexpected and had dramatic consequences. Perhaps the most consequential for the families of those detained was that several Assad regime prisons were liberated. One moving video shows prisoners – including many women – running out of one of these installations.^[10] Other videos show freed prisoners being interviewed by citizen journalists.^[11]

On December 5, rebel forces took the city of Hama, the site of the 1982 massacre. The prisons in the city have been liberated. Reports say that 3,000 prisoners were released from Hama Central Prison.^[12] These numbers include many Lebanese, and some people who have been held since the 1980s. The facts are becoming clearer as the minutes pass.

Unfortunately, however, in many cases the regime has taken prisoners with it as it flees, and has removed documents which may shed light on their fate. The campaigning organization Families for Freedom has issued a statement to this effect.^[13]

The ISIS Prisons Museum is eager to enter the prisons in Aleppo, Hama,and whichever other cities are liberated from Assad rule, in order to document whatever evidence remains. These crime scenes need to be reconstructed and analyzed so that there may be accountability for the victims. Those detained in all of Syria’s prison systems deserve freedom, and restitution.

 

1. Uğur Ümit Üngör and Baker, Jaber, Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System (London: I.B. Tauris, 2023). ↑
2. Leila Al-Shami, ‘Riad Al-Turk’s Lifelong Struggle for a Free and Democratic Syria’, New Lines Magazine (blog), 10 January 2024, https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/riad-al-turks-lifelong-struggle-for-a-free-and-democratic-syria/. ↑
3. ‘Rania Al-Abbasi and Her Six Children | Tens Of Thousand’, accessed 4 December 2024, https://tensofthousands.amnesty.org/content/rania-al-abbasi-and-her-six-children.html. ↑
4. ‘“What Is a Bird” Explores Life in Assad’s Prisons – The Syrian Observer’, 9 January 2019, https://syrianobserver.com/foreign-actors/what-is-a-bird-explores-life-in-assads-prisons.html. ↑
5. Razan Saffour, ‘Remembering Syria’s Tadmur Prison Massacre, 44 Years On’, Al Jazeera, accessed 4 December 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/6/27/remembering-syrias-tadmur-prison-massacre-44-years-on.↑
6. Yassin-Kassab, Robin, ‘The Tragedy of Daraya’, Qunfuz (blog), 27 August 2016, https://qunfuz.com/2016/08/27/the-tragedy-of-daraya/. ↑
7. ‘Syria: Human Slaughterhouse: Mass Hangings and Extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria’, Amnesty International, 7 February 2017, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde24/5415/2017/en/. ↑
8. ‘Syria: Human Slaughterhouse: Mass Hangings and Extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria’, Amnesty International, 7 February 2017, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde24/5415/2017/en/. ↑
9. ‘SNHR’s 13th Annual Report on Enforced Disappearance in Syria on the International Day of the Disappeared: No End in Sight for the Crime of Enforced Disappearance in Syria | Syrian Network for Human Rights’, accessed 4 December 2024, https://snhr.org/blog/2024/08/30/snhrs-13th-annual-report-on-enforced-disappearance-in-syria-on-the-international-day-of-the-disappeared-no-end-in-sight-for-the-crime-of-enforced-disappearance-in-syria/. ↑
10. HussamHamoud, ‘Detainees, Including Women, Were Released from Assad Regime Prisons in #Aleppo after #DOA Rebels Took Control, Following Years of Unfair Treatment and Forced Disappearances. Https://T.Co/BmfAbrCv0V’, Tweet, Twitter, 29 November 2024, https://x.com/HussamHamoud/status/1862636195391365473. ↑
11. HadiAlabdallah, ‘صباحكم خير وفرحة صارت أكبر بتحرير المعتقلين من سجون الأسد❤️ لحظة خروج معتقلين من سجن حلب المركزي بعد تحريره https://t.co/No02WN56eZ’, Tweet, Twitter, 30 November 2024, https://x.com/HadiAlabdallah/status/1862738218296258766. ↑
12. https://x.com/prisonsmuseum/status/1864718312325648739 ↑
13. https://x.com/FamiliesSyria/status/1864006671351038212 ↑