BBCIt was a defining second of the autumn of the Syrian regime – rebels liberating inmates from the nation’s most infamous jail. Per week on, 4 males communicate to the BBC in regards to the elation of their launch, and the years of horror that preceded it.
Warning: This article accommodates descriptions of torture
The prisoners fell silent once they heard the shouting exterior their cell door.
A person’s voice referred to as: “Is there anybody in there?” But they have been too afraid to reply.
Over years, that they had learnt that the door opening meant beatings, rapes and different punishments. But on at the present time, it meant freedom.
At the shout of “Allahu Akbar”, the boys contained in the cell peered by way of a small opening within the centre of the heavy metallic door.
They noticed rebels within the jail’s hall as a substitute of guards.
“We mentioned ‘We are right here. Free us,'” one of many inmates, 30-year-old Qasem Sobhi Al-Qabalani, remembers.
As the door was shot open, Qasem says he “ran out with naked toes”.
Like different inmates, he saved operating and did not look again.
“When they got here to start out liberating us and shouting ‘all exit, all exit’, I ran out of the jail however I used to be so terrified to look behind me as a result of I assumed they’d put me again,” says 31-year-old Adnan Ahmed Ghnem.
They didn’t but know that Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad had fled the nation and that his authorities had fallen. But the information quickly reached them.
“It was the very best day of my life. An unexplainable feeling. Like somebody who had simply escaped loss of life,” Adnan remembers.
Qasem and Adnan are amongst 4 prisoners the BBC has spoken to who have been launched this week from Saydnaya jail – a facility for political prisoners nicknamed the “human slaughterhouse”.
All gave comparable accounts of years of mistreatment and torture by the hands of guards, executions of fellow inmates, corruption by jail officers, and compelled confessions.
We have been additionally proven contained in the jail by a former inmate who had the same account, and heard from households of lacking folks held at Saydnaya who’re desperately in search of solutions.
We have seen our bodies discovered by insurgent fighters within the mortuary of a army hospital, believed to be Saydnaya detainees, that medics say bear indicators of torture.
Rights group Amnesty International, whose 2017 report on the jail accuses authorities of homicide and torture there, has referred to as for “justice and reparations for crimes underneath worldwide legislation in Syria”, together with its therapy of political prisoners.
Saydnaya jail, a sprawling complicated situated atop a hill of barren land and surrounded by barbed wire, was established within the early Eighties and for many years has been used to carry opponents of the Assad household regime.
It has been described because the nation’s principal political jail because the 2011 rebellion, when the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and The Missing in Saydnaya Prison says it successfully grew to become a “loss of life camp”.
The prisoners we spoke to say they have been despatched to Saydnaya due to actual or perceived hyperlinks with the insurgent Free Syrian Army, their opposition to Assad, or just because they lived in an space recognized to oppose him.
Some had been accused of kidnapping and killing regime troopers and convicted of terrorism.
All mentioned that they had given confessions underneath “stress” and “torture”.
They got prolonged sentences or sentenced to loss of life. One man mentioned he had been detained on the jail for 4 years however had not but been to court docket.
The males have been held within the jail’s principal Red Building, for opponents of the regime.
Qasem says he was arrested whereas passing by way of a highway block in 2016, accused of terrorism with the Free Syrian Army, and despatched for brief stints at a number of detention services earlier than being transferred to Saydnaya.
“After that door, you’re a useless individual,” he says softly in an interview at his household dwelling in a city south of Damascus, as kinfolk collect round sipping espresso and nodding in grim captivation.
“This is the place the torture started.”
He remembers being stripped bare and instructed to pose for {a photograph} earlier than being overwhelmed for wanting on the digital camera.
He says he was then put onto a series with different inmates and led, with their faces staring on the floor, to a tiny solitary confinement cell the place he and 5 different males have been crammed in and given uniforms to put on however disadvantaged of meals and water for a number of days.
They have been then taken to the jail’s principal cells, the place the rooms haven’t any beds, a single lightbulb and a small bathroom space within the nook.
When we visited the jail this week, we noticed blankets, garments and meals strewn on the flooring of cells.
Our information, a former inmate from 2019-2022, walked us by way of the corridors looking for his cell.
Two of his fingers and a thumb have been chopped off on the jail, he says.
Finding scratch marks on a cell wall that he believes he made, he knelt down and commenced to cry.
About 20 males would sleep in every room, however the inmates inform us it was tough to get to know one another – they might communicate solely in hushed voices and knew that guards have been all the time watching and listening.
“Everything was banned. You’re simply allowed to eat and drink and sleep and die,” says Qasem.
Punishments at Saydnaya have been frequent and brutal.
All of the folks we spoke to described being overwhelmed with completely different implements – metallic staffs, cables, electrical sticks.
“They would enter the room and begin to beat us throughout our our bodies. I might keep nonetheless, watching and ready for my flip,” Adnan, who was arrested in 2019 on accusations of kidnapping and killing a regime soldier, remembers.
“Every evening, we’d thank God that we have been nonetheless alive. Every morning, we’d pray to God, please take our souls so we are able to die in peace.”
Adnan and two of the opposite newly launched inmates mentioned they have been typically pressured to take a seat with their knees in direction of their foreheads and a car tyre positioned over their our bodies with a stick wedged inside so that they could not transfer, earlier than beatings have been administered.
Forms of punishment have been various.
Qasem says he was held the other way up by two jail officers in a barrel of water till he thought he was going to “choke and die”.
“I noticed loss of life with my very own eyes,” he says. “They would do that if you happen to wakened within the evening, or we spoke in a loud voice, or if we had an issue with any of the opposite prisoners.”
Two of the prisoners launched this week and the previous inmate at Saydnaya described witnessing sexual assaults by guards, who they mentioned would anally rape inmates with sticks.
One man mentioned inmates would supply oral intercourse to the guards of their desperation for extra meals.
Three described guards leaping on their our bodies as a part of the abuse.
In a hospital in central Damascus, we have been launched to 43-year-old Imad Jamal, who grimaced in ache at every contact from his mom who was tending to him at his bedside.
Asked to explain his time in Sayndaya, he smiled and responded slowly in English: “No eat. No sleep. Hit. Cane. Fighting. Sick. Everything not regular. Nothing regular. Everything irregular.”
He says he was detained in 2021 underneath what he described as a “political arrest” due to the world he was from.
Speaking once more in Arabic, he says his again was damaged when he was made to take a seat on the bottom together with his knees towards his chest as a guard jumped from a ledge on prime of him as a punishment for stealing medicine from one other inmate to offer to a buddy.
But for Imad, the toughest factor about life within the jail was the chilly. “Even the wall was chilly,” he says. “I grew to become a respiratory corpse”.
There have been few issues to stay up for within the jail, however three of the inmates mentioned something constructive was met afterwards with punishment.
“Every time we had a bathe, each time we had a customer, each time we went out into the solar, each time we left the cell door we’d be punished,” says 30-year-old Rakan Mohammed Al Saed, who says he was detained in 2020 on allegations of killing and kidnapping from his former days within the insurgent Free Syrian Army however had by no means confronted trial.
He bares his damaged tooth, saying they have been knocked out when he was hit within the mouth by a guard with a stick.
All of the boys we spoke to mentioned they believed folks of their cells had been executed.
Guards would are available and name names of people that can be led away and by no means seen once more.
“People would not be executed in entrance of us. Every time they might name names at 12am, we knew that these folks have been going to be killed,” Adnan says.
Others gave comparable accounts, explaining there was no method of them understanding what occurred to those males.
Qasem’s father and different kinfolk say the household have been made to pay jail officers greater than $10,000 to cease him from being executed – at first to be transformed to life in jail after which to a 20-year sentence.
Qasem says his therapy by guards improved a bit after this.
But, his dad says, “they refused any quantity to let him free”.
Families despatched family members cash for meals within the jail however they are saying corrupt officers would hold a lot of it and provides the inmates solely restricted rations.
In a number of the cells, inmates would pool the entire meals collectively. But it wasn’t sufficient.
Adnan discovered the starvation even tougher than the beatings. “I might fall asleep and get up hungry,” he says.
“There was a punishment that we obtained one month the place sooner or later they might go us a slice of bread, the subsequent day half a slice, till it was a tiny crumb. Then it was nothing. We bought no bread.”
Qasem says sooner or later guards coated the face of his cell’s de-facto chief with yoghurt and made others lick it off.
The males mentioned the behaviour of guards was as a lot about inflicting humiliation as ache.
All described shedding vital quantities of weight within the jail due to malnourishment.
“My largest dream was to eat and be full,” Qasem says.
His household paid officers bribes for visitation rights. He would typically be introduced down on a wheelchair as a result of he was too weak to stroll, his father says.
Diseases have been rife and the inmates had no method of stopping them from spreading.
Two of the boys we spoke to who have been launched on Sunday say that they had contracted tuberculosis in Sayndaya – one mentioned medicine was often withheld as a type of punishment.
But Adnan says the “illnesses from concern” have been even worse than the bodily ones.
At a hospital in Damascus this week, an official mentioned temporary medical checks of the detainees that have been despatched there had discovered “primarily psychological issues”.
These accounts paint an image of a spot with no hope, solely ache.
The prisoners spent a lot of their time in silence with no entry to the skin world, so it’s no shock that they are saying they knew nothing of the insurgent Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) speedy advance in Syria till they have been damaged free that morning.
Qasem mentioned they might hear what gave the impression of a helicopter taking off from the hospital grounds earlier than the boys’s shouts within the corridors. But within the windowless cell they could not make sure.
Then the doorways opened, and the freed inmates started operating as quick as they might.
“We ran out of the jail. We ran from concern too,” Rakan says, his ideas on his younger youngsters and spouse.
At one level within the chaos, he says, “I used to be hit by a automotive. But I did not thoughts. I bought up and carried on operating.”
He says he won’t ever return to Saydnaya once more.
Adnan, too, says he could not look again on the jail, as he ran crying in direction of Damascus.
“I simply saved going. I can not describe it. I simply headed for Damascus. People have been taking us from the highway of their vehicles.”
He now fears every evening when he goes to sleep that he’ll wake within the jail, and discover it was all a dream.
Qasem ran to a city referred to as Tal Mneen. It was there {that a} girl who supplied the freed prisoners with meals, cash and clothes instructed them: “Assad has fallen”.
He was delivered to his hometown the place celebratory gunfire rang out and his tearful household embraced him.
“It’s like I’m born once more. I can not describe it to you,” he says.
Additional reporting by Nihad Al-Salem
