The Muawiyah bin Abi Sufyan School once educated the children of Raqqa’s al-Tawasoeya neighborhood. It was a large institution, containing three buildings around a spacious courtyard and serving over a thousand students at a time.
When ISIS took over the city in 2014, however, it transformed the school into its Hisba Diwan headquarters, including an overcrowded prison for those who had violated the Hisba’s behavioral rules.
This virtual tour shows the entire prison and provides details on its layout and the purpose of its various parts and rooms. To create the tour, the ISIS Prisons Museum (IPM) team relied on 3D photography of the entire basement as well as testimonies by former detainees who provided detailed descriptions of detention conditions and information about the uses of the prison’s rooms.
The prison included communal cells, solitary confinement cells, and rooms for storing confiscated items. It also included an investigations room where prisoners were interrogated and, when sentenced, flogged. To better understand the purpose of each room and what happened there, architects and the IPM’s field inspection unit studied the changes made to the building by ISIS, such as the installation of a solitary confinement cell block.
The team used videos and photographs to document the changes made to the premises at various points in time, starting in 2017 just days after ISIS had abandoned the school. It also recorded two testimonies (not published) of people who lived near the school building when it was an ISIS prison. Furthermore, the IPM team analyzed many Hisba documents, including audio recordings, interrogation minutes, and other files. This helped them build a clearer picture of the procedural system within the prison.
And the team’s architects conducted an architectural study of the building. The courtyard was bombed in 2015, and nearby buildings in 2017.
ISIS finally abandoned the premises in September 2017. Afterwards, the building’s basement was demined and the entire premises refurbished. Since then the school has reopened and now serves around 1300 students.