Inside Assad’s intelligence-gathering communityrevealed at 09:34 Greenwich Mean Time
Feras Kilani
BBC Arabic particular correspondent, in Damascus
Beneath
the streets of Damascus I’ve gained entry to one of many key websites of the
former Syrian regime’s sprawling community of intelligence companies which for
many years tried to brutally crush opposition actions.
In
the basement of the state safety headquarters, within the Kafr Sousa district of
the town, is row after row of tiny cells – every simply two metres by one metre and
protected by thick metal doorways.
Inside, darkish stains mark the filthy partitions. Detainees might be held in these cells for
months whereas being interrogated and tortured.
They
are just under street-level, on a busy highway the place every single day hundreds of
extraordinary Syrians handed by, going about their each day lives only a few metres
from the place their compatriots had been being detained and tortured.
A
brief distance away is the General Intelligence Directorate, one other a part of
Syria’s former community of spy companies.
Here there are an enormous numbers of data – proof of how the Assad regime used to watch
its residents.
There
is row after row of paper recordsdata in cupboards and, in some rooms, piles of
notebooks stacked from flooring to ceiling.
Nearby
is a pc server room. The flooring and partitions are a pristine white and black information storage items hum quietly.
The
electrical energy has been reduce to a lot of Damascus however it appears that evidently this facility is
so necessary it has its personal energy provide.