Christina Goldbaum
speaker
92 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 1 Apr
Christina Goldbaum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Headlines · Trump Won’t Rule Out a Recession, and a Crackdown on Campus Protests · 10 Mar 2025
podcast
Most people on the coast do not support the armed uprising by these Assad loyalists. But many people there are from the same sect as Assad. And so they're worried that they could be caught up in this violence, even targeted by government forces as they try to squash that armed rebellion.
And people are very worried that this could spiral into another civil war after this three-month period of relative calm. So right now has become this critical test for the country's new leaders about whether they are able to manage the situation, reestablish control, or if this becomes a broader conflict.
I'm in Damascus, capital of Syria right now. And I'm walking through a prison that's underneath one of the intelligence branches in the capital. There are these three solitary confinement rooms, and etched onto the walls are messages from prisoners who were held here. One of the messages says, I love you, Mom. There are others that are praying to God. And there's also an etching of a mosque.
What's inside that folder? And earlier, as we were going through the building, we found a folder with pictures of what looked like prisoners who had been tortured and killed.
You know, when we first arrived in Syria, just a day after the rebels took the country, there was a lot of celebration, a lot of people out on the streets, finally feeling this taste of freedom and
As the week has gone on and we've come to more and more of these prisons and torture facilities, it's just clear how, just how much of a reckoning the country is going to have to go through now to confront and reconcile with all of the horrors that happened over the past couple decades.
So my colleagues and I drove into Syria towards the capital, Damascus, 24 hours after the rebels had seized the country. And the highway was filled with these very surreal scenes.
There were checkpoints where usually you would spend hours being interrogated by police officers and security forces that had been completely abandoned. We saw posters of Bashar al-Assad that used to be ubiquitous, that had been torn down and either ripped apart or burned. And we also began to see, the closer we got to the Capitol, signs of the rebels who had entered the city.
They were driving these cars that had been painted in this kind of beige mud, almost like a makeshift camouflage from their rapid offensive towards the Capitol. And then we saw people from Damascus who were out on the streets. They were putting their fingers in a V in the air, signifying victory. And they were cheering on the rebels as they drove past them.
To celebrate this incredible moment in the country's history. But for a lot of people here, that moment is also about finally getting answers. The Assad government had set up this vast network of detention facilities and prisons and torture chambers that swallowed up tens of thousands of people across the country. And for years, this was a complete black box.
People would disappear into the system and their families would have no idea what happened to them, where they went, or whether or not they were still alive. But now, with the fall of that government, suddenly people hoped for answers.
And as we were driving through the city, we saw a huge convoy of cars going to the epicenter of that system, a prison called Sednaya, which is one of the most notorious in all of Syria. And my colleague, Huayt Asad, and I joined them as they went on that journey.
As we were driving towards the prison, you can see leading to the prison, there's this massive convoy of cars, all people who are trying to get there. We got caught in this traffic because there were thousands of people on Monday morning trying to get there.
We ended up getting out of our car with a lot of other people and just walking down the road for about an hour until we reached the outskirts of the prison. We then walked with people up this kind of footpath that led up the hillside and to the prison gates.
My brother-in-law, he's been in prison 2012. They were screaming the names of their relatives who had been lost into this prison. Some of them had printout photos of their sons or brothers or husbands. And were shoving them in people's faces, asking, have you seen this person? Have you seen this person?
There were feces across the floor and messages scrawled into the walls, some of which were begging for death rather than staying there. And a lot of prisoners had escaped on Sunday morning after the government fell, but there were still thousands of others that families suspected of being in Sednaya who were still unaccounted for.
And so these families were going around the prison looking for any kind of scraps of information, any clues as to where their relatives were.
You know, one of the first rooms that we walked into looked like maybe it had been an electrical room in the prison. And we came across one guy there who had a shovel in hand
And he was knocking against the wall and the floor, trying to hear an echo that maybe would signal there was something hollow underneath, maybe a room beneath the floor.
He started also kind of pulling apart the wires, saying, you know, where does this go? You know, again, thinking that maybe it led to something underneath the prison, some cells that were there.
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