Faraj Bayrakdar: A Permanent Guest of the Intelligence services
“In authoritarian and backward countries, imprisonment feels like booking a one-way ticket, as return tickets are often out of stock if they were ever printed at all.”
My Detentions
The standard definitions and terms used in political science, economics, and law do not apply to the Syrian reality under Assad family rule.
I was detained four times. The first was in 1978. I was arrested by the Air Force Intelligence in 1978 because I’d helped to publish an unlicensed literary magazine focused on poetry and short stories. Another possible reason was that in the referendum to support Hafez al-Assad’s presidency, I’d chosen “No” instead of “Yes”.
The second detention was by the General Intelligence, and it happened the day after my release from the Air Force Intelligence, where I had spent several months. I was arrested in an apartment in Yarmouk Camp which was frequented by intellectuals and leftist political activists.
The third detention was by the Military Intelligence in 1987, after I’d spent four years in hiding. I was arrested because of my membership in the Communist Labor Party in Syria. This time, my detention lasted nearly fourteen years.
These three detentions occurred in Damascus. The fourth, however, was carried out by the police at the Immigration and Passports Directorate in Homs, and they were acting on behalf of the Political Security Branch in Aleppo. This happened because they had forgotten to cancel an arrest warrant issued 15 years earlier.
In other words, all of Assad’s four intelligence agencies—Air Force, General, Military, and Political Security—had the opportunity to detain me. I will focus here on the longest of these detentions, which was under Military Intelligence.
At the Military Intelligence
“On the sixth day, the interrogation became blind and the torture frenzied. When my body could no longer withstand the abuse, they transferred me to the intensive care unit at Harasta Military Hospital.”
During my years in hiding, I narrowly escaped several security ambushes. This was likely one reason for the celebratory response of the security forces to my eventual arrest.
On the morning of March 31, 1987, Branch 235 (the “Palestine Branch”) of Military Intelligence cordoned off a neighborhood in the Palestine Camp and arrested me. The streets and rooftops were covered with armed personnel, as if they expected me to put up resistance, though I was armed only with willpower, hope, and dignity.
When the vehicles transporting me reached the entrance of the Palestine Branch, the agents celebrated my capture by blaring their horns and firing bursts of bullets into the air.
They took my watch, belt, shoelaces, cigarettes, lighter, and a small amount of money before leading me into a room. There they began slapping, kicking and punching, as they interrogated me about the party’s leadership’s meeting place, the time of its next appointment, the location of the party’s printing press, the names of the press’s main correspondents, the regional leaders, and the upcoming meeting of the Central Committee.
Their questions revealed that they already possessed significant information on these topics, and were more precise than during my first two arrests.
I adamantly refused to answer any questions unless the branch director was present. They brought someone who claimed to be the director, but although my eyes were blindfolded, the pretense in his voice made me sense he wasn’t the actual director. I persisted until the real branch director arrived. Based on prior information, I knew it was Brigadier General Muthar Fares. It later became clear that the officer who had impersonated the branch head was Abdulmohsen Hilal, one of the worst officers in the branch and someone I had known personally since our days as students at the same high school in Homs.
When Brigadier General Muthar Fares finally arrived, it seemed he was carrying both the sword of intimidation and the gold of persuasion. He stared at me as if evaluating me, then began nodding his head—or perhaps collecting his thoughts—before speaking:
“You know the law stipulates the death sentence for any Ba’athist proven to have dual party membership.”
“And what does that have to do with me?”
“You’re a Ba’athist first, and a member of the Communist Labor Party second.”
“It’s true that I joined the Ba’ath Party when I was a high school student, but I resigned in 1975 while in Budapest.”
“But we didn’t accept your resignation. Your name is still recorded in our files as a comrade.”
“Even if it wasn’t recorded then, nobody is stopping you from recording it now.”
“In any case,” Fares said, “that’s not our focus now. We want you to be our comrade and to assume the position you deserve. How about becoming the editor-in-chief of al-Thawra newspaper?”
“Before discussing anything,” I said, “I must say first that the only reason I refused to speak until you arrived was to spare you and myself the trouble of addressing matters I know nothing about. It would be pointless to raise this matters or to torture me for them. Surely you know that I resigned from the party leadership three months ago. Before that, I was indeed a member of the Political Bureau, so if you want to ask me about party matters, ask about the period before the last three months.”
“And how are we supposed to know about your resignation?”
“You detained some of the leadership before me. Surely you’ve extracted all the information about the last Central Committee meeting from them, including about the disputes that led to my resignation.”
The branch head’s expectations of my cooperation—likely built on the fact that I had personally requested his presence—were dashed. He ordered his officers to strip my skin and shatter my molars while keeping my front teeth intact. I wasn’t sure how serious he was until they actually began breaking my molars.
I thought they might be planning to torture me until I completely broke down and agreed to their demands, after which they could air an interview with me on state television in which I would praise the tyrant and condemn my party and my own history. In such a scenario, shattered molars wouldn’t matter as long as my front teeth appeared intact for the audience.
Ultimately, they subjected me to nearly all their standard torture methods, which I can summarize as follows: the “tire”, suspension from the limbs (shabeh), forced splits (faskh), electric shocks, and the “German chair”.
Interrogation and Torture
During the first three days, they kept me in one of the interrogation rooms. These rooms were near the administrative and investigation offices, and it was easy to move from there to outside the security branch if necessary. I was taken outside twice. The first time was to identify a house I had previously lived in, located in the Hajar al-Aswad area adjacent to the Yarmouk Camp. However, my memory failed me, and I couldn’t recall the exact location of the house. The second time was to identify the house in Homs where the Central Committee had held its last meeting. I had been involved in renting it along with my comrade Abbas Mahmoud Abbas, and we had vacated it a few days after the meeting. This excursion gave me a few hours of fresh air on the road between Damascus and Homs.
Afterwards, they took me down to the basement where the cells were located, and the interrogations became a daily, sometimes twice-daily, routine.
The cells in the Palestine Branch were designed for individuals no taller than 180 centimeters – they were about 90 centimeters wide and two meters high. The ceiling had a small opening with a glaring light bulb that couldn’t be turned off. Inside, there was a piece of sturdy fabric to insulate against dampness, two or three old, tattered blankets stained with the blood and pus of previous occupants, a one-liter plastic bottle for drinking from, and another for urinating in.
On the sixth day, the interrogation became blind and the torture frenzied. When my body could no longer withstand the abuse, they transferred me to the intensive care unit at Harasta Military Hospital.
Over the months, the torture sessions became less frequent, often triggered only when new detainees’ testimonies contradicted my earlier statements. They also began forcing me to witness the torture of my comrades as a form of sadistic gratification and to weaken my morale, as they no longer found my torture to be productive.
Initially, they were intensely focused on discovering who the party’s Secretary General was, and on whether or not the party had a military wing. Had they read our party’s documents—its bylaws, political program, and theoretical framework, which they had possessed for years—they could have saved themselves and me the trouble of asking so many pointless questions. But it seemed they had an excess of interrogators, torturers, and time, so they left no aspect of my political or even personal life untouched.
Once their investigation into these critical party matters was exhausted, they moved on to less significant topics, such as my relationships with writers like Mamdouh Adwan, Jameel Hatmal, Shawqi Baghdadi, Abdulqader al-Hosni, and Abdulrahman Munif. They fixated on Ghassan Halsa, and I feared they might confront me with evidence proving I had stayed at his house during difficult times.
The Curse of Time
“As for me, poetry was the most beautiful bird of freedom, the one thing that could fully draw my bow.”
Time is a strange dimension in prison. While its vastness seems more expansive than in the outside world, it is viscous and slippery, heavy and quivering, dirty and idle. Its spaciousness often feels hollow and desolate.
From a deeper perspective, prison is more a state of time than a physical place. Thus, its psychological and spiritual toll is far greater than that of its walls, chains, and locks. Losing money, a bet, or a job is far less devastating than losing time—a span of life filled with countless possibilities and potential.
In authoritarian and backward countries, imprisonment feels like booking a one-way ticket, as return tickets are often out of stock—if they were ever printed at all.
I’ve spoken repeatedly about my relationship with time inside prison, yet I’ve never fully grasped its rhythm or essence. There’s something I can only describe as the curse of time—time that is deceitful and lying in wait, or time as a trap, or a net with hooks and barbs.
The perception of time’s length or brevity depends on the magnitude of events or accomplishments within it. In prison, time seems both protracted and meaningless, devoid of purpose. One of the deeper meanings of imprisonment is its attempt to strip the prisoner of their sense of meaning—of even the concept of meaning itself.
This is, of course, unless the prisoner recognizes this and fights back by creating their own meaning through writing, reading, music, singing, drawing, or even sculpting using the simplest of tools, like a needle, nail, or nail clipper.
As for me, poetry was the most beautiful bird of freedom, the one thing that could fully draw my bow. When I was sent to Tadmor Prison—cut off from the outside world and provided with only the barest essentials of survival—writing poetry was nearly impossible. With paper and pens forbidden, I resorted to composing poems directly in my memory, much as our ancient ancestors did. As my collection of poems grew, I began to fear that time or memory might fail me, so some of my comrades who loved poetry helped by memorizing the verses. This became a second copy alongside my own recollection.
In Tadmor, we staged an 11-day hunger strike, which led to slight improvements in our living conditions. They ceased the beatings, insults, and curses and allowed us to borrow books on literature and history from the prison library. We were also permitted to purchase a small mirror, an Arabic-English dictionary, and a kerosene stove, which allowed us to heat and re-cook our food with whatever onions and garlic we could find.
However, within a few months, the beatings and insults resumed. This prompted another hunger strike that lasted 16 days. It coincided with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which heightened tensions and provoked harsher reactions from the authorities. Despite this, a colonel was sent from Damascus to persuade us to end the strike. When we refused, five of us were placed in solitary confinement, accused of exploiting the Kuwait war. We decided to take a step back and suspend the strike temporarily.
During our first year in Tadmor, we noticed little difference between the torture inflicted upon us and that inflicted on members of the Muslim Brotherhood or the so-called “Iraqi Ba’ath”. But distinctions did gradually become apparent. For example, one of us was taken to the hospital in an emergency; this scenario was unthinkable for a Brotherhood or Iraqi Ba’ath detainee. After the hunger strike, the differences in treatment grew even more pronounced, and the looming threat of execution that haunted us during our first year diminished. The executions of Brotherhood and Iraqi Ba’ath detainees continued, however.
We never understood the criteria or reasons behind the prison administration’s decision to execute a detainee every few days during exercise or “breathing time” in the courtyards. The methods of execution were savage: striking a prisoner with a concrete block on the head, a metal rod or hammer on the spine, or jumping on their head and neck. These murders were not mere rumors; we saw them perpetrated with our own eyes when we were in New Group Cell 18 and Group Cell 24 in the Courtyard Four.
Tadmor Prison had six courtyards, each surrounded by several group cells. From the fourth courtyard, we observed through the door holes as detainees were taken out of their cells for breathing time, and we counted them. The number of prisoners in each cell ranged between 70 and 90. Later, my brother, who spent 11 years in Tadmor, told me that his cell housed up to 200 detainees. While this was a blessing in winter, as the breath of so many people warmed the ward, it turned into a version of hell in summer.
Music
“Music was, of course, prohibited in prison. Yet free spirits don’t surrender to the prison’s desolation.”
In Sednaya Prison, conditions were different—less severe, less controlled, and less surveilled. Family visits became possible, and opportunities expanded for reading, writing, theater, music, painting, sculpture, and language courses (English, French, and Russian). In fact, many of the most prominent Syrian translators today are former prisoners.
Music was, of course, prohibited in prison. Yet free spirits don’t surrender to the prison’s desolation. Among us were doctors, professionals, linguists, chemists, engineers, as well as visual artists and musicians. Some turned a cooking pot into the body of a lute, used scraps of wooden vegetable crates for the neck, and repurposed nylon threads from socks, twisting them into strings of varying thicknesses. Later, they experimented with making the lute’s body from bread mixed with paper, wood shavings, and jam for binding, and then dried it into shape. Eventually, as the administration began tolerating or ignoring the presence of vegetable crates, we started crafting wooden lutes, some of which were of an almost professional quality. We also built guitars and violins.
However, we paid a price for our enjoyment of music. Whenever a lute was discovered, the administration would smash it and send its owner to the third underground floor, where darkness, dampness, and rats ruled. My brother Ibrahim, for instance, spent a month there after he was caught playing music.
In late 1988 or early 1989, Asaad Shalash, a graduate of the Aleppo Conservatory, announced a course in lute playing. Most inmates signed up, but over time, some opted to focus only on theoretical lessons concerning maqams, musical scales, rhythms, and sheet music reading.
Samir Abdo (Abu al-Nada) was the ultimate authority on performance and singing. In another wing of the prison, Turki Maqdad—a blind musician who played the accordion and organ professionally, and a philosophy graduate—conducted theoretical music classes and solfeggio courses. Turki had an insightful grasp of culture, politics and society, as well as music.
In short, music became a cultural pursuit for many prisoners, even those who didn’t actively participate in the theoretical or practical sessions.
Music, truly, is an excellent tool for “retuning” the soul and spirit.
Food for Body and Soul
Daily life in Syrian prisons varied significantly depending on the capacities and the political affiliations of the detainees. For Communist Labor Party detainees such as myself, reading occupied a significant portion of our time and attention. We would allocate a portion of the money we received during visits to the purchase of books. In the early years at Sednaya, our private library contained around a thousand titles, most of which were acquired from sources pre-approved by the censors. They included publications of the Ministry of Culture, the Writers’ Union, and the Assad Library Book Fair. Occasionally, families managed to smuggle in banned books brought from Lebanon.
Chess was another prominent interest, as were backgammon and card games.
At Sednaya, the sleep schedule was flexible, though general lighting was turned off at 10 PM. Those who wanted to read past this time used homemade “lamps” crafted from cardboard with openings the size of a Syrian coin—just enough to illuminate the page without disturbing their neighbors. Each prisoner had an individual mat, mattress, and several military blankets. Families were allowed to bring additional blankets and sheets during visits.
Small radios were permitted, and we could extend wires and antennas to strengthen reception and tune in to stations like the BBC and Monte Carlo. However, the administration occasionally confiscated the radios as punishment.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, the wards and corridors at Sednaya were generally open between the morning and evening inspections. Occasionally, they were closed as a form of punishment, for security reasons during the visits of high-ranking officials, or during prisoner transfers or larger releases. The prison also had courtyards for exercise, but most prisoners preferred the relative freedom of the corridors, where they could even engage in light individual sports.
This was starkly different from the so-called “breathing courtyards” in Tadmor Prison, where brutality, oppression, and killing were at their peak. In truth, those courtyards were not for breathing but for suffocating.
At Sednaya, we did not rely heavily on prison food, as monthly family visits provided much of what we needed. Vegetables and basic cooking supplies could also be purchased.
In Tadmor, the food that reached the wards was often stripped of meat, and large portions of eggs, olives, jam, and cheese were stolen by the administrators and soldiers. What remained was typically bulgur or rice served with watery broth containing a few pieces of beans or potatoes. The only thing the administration maintained strictly was the daily bread ration. Fights frequently broke out among detainees over food, especially when rations were as meager as one-sixth of an egg, two olives, or a single apple shared among nine people.
Waking Nightmares
Political prisons under the Assad regime fall into the realm of absurdity, horror, and the surreal. At Tadmor, prisoners were only permitted to leave their cells for the bathroom completely naked, covered only by military blankets, while being whipped. The lashes made them writhe and squirm under the blankets. They looked like disoriented, mythical bats. The bathroom water was either ice-cold or scalding—not due to technical issues but as a deliberate punishment. On the way back to the cells, soldiers would entertain themselves by tormenting the prisoners. On one occasion, a soldier used a long rope with a noose at the end, throwing it over the heads or necks of detainees to drag them to the ground as if reenacting scenes from Hollywood films of wild horse hunting in Texas.
We witnessed unimaginable cruelty at Tadmor, including forcing prisoners to swallow a dead rat whole, without chewing. On several occasions, we saw the “catapulting” method, where two soldiers would grab a prisoner by their hands and legs, swing them back and forth, and then hurl them into the air as far as they could.
Even at Sednaya, where conditions were less severe, the unbelievable sadism persisted. Some detainees had served 21 years despite being sentenced to only two by exceptional military courts. Others were imprisoned while underage and retained a childlike appearance even after years of detention. One prisoner received his first family visit 12 years after his arrest. When he entered the visiting room and scanned his visitors behind an iron mesh, he failed to recognize his family. A guard had to guide him to his relatives. After prolonged staring and effort, he recognized his father, now aged and frail. When the woman next to his father began to cry, he tried to comfort her, saying, “Mother, I’m fine. Why are you crying? Are you in pain? Are you sick?” Her sobs intensified as he spoke until she finally composed herself enough to tell him, “I am your sister. Your mother passed away after you disappeared.”
In Tadmor and in the intelligence branches, nightmares visited prisoners both in their sleep and when they were awake.
I was among those who survived Assad’s infernal prisons. My case received particular attention from international human rights organizations due to my status as a political prisoner and poet. An extensive global campaign for my release was initiated by my comrades in France, and it grew to include numerous literary and cultural organizations, such as PEN International and Reporters Without Borders, along with petitions signed by many prominent writers worldwide, especially in France. This pressure eventually compelled French President Jacques Chirac to demand my release from Hafez al-Assad. Assad delayed and procrastinated, and it wasn’t until his death that I was finally released on November 16, 2000, under the rule of his son, Bashar al-Assad, who inherited the throne.
The Writer
Faraj Bayrakdar is a writer, poet, and political activist, he was detained four times in the Assad regime’s prisons and was subjected to torture. He was detained in the Palestine Branch Prison, Tadmur Prison and Sednaya Prison. His last detention lasted for approximately 13 years, from 1987 to 2000.