The secret police's grip on Syria under Assad
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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson and in the early hours of Saturday the 14th of December, these are our main stories. More secrets of the Assad regime have been emerging as Syrians across the country continue to celebrate the end of half a century of authoritarian rule. Francois Bayrou has admitted he has a mountainous task ahead as he becomes the fourth prime minister to take office in France this year. The management consulting firm McKinsey has agreed a settlement of hundreds of millions of dollars with the US authorities over its role in the opioid crisis. Also in this podcast.
These are large drones that are the size of bicycles, small cars. When you get close to those drones, they notice those drones kind of turn off their lights and evade police helicopters.
The mystery of the huge drone spotted in parts of the US but dismissed by the White House. We begin in Syria, where secrets of the Assad regime have been emerging since its overthrow last weekend. For more than half a century, the linchpin of the regime's stranglehold in the country was the General Intelligence Directorate, better known throughout the Arab world as the Muqabarat. the secret police. It's impossible to overstate its grip on Syrian society. It spied on the Syrian people and others, got Syrians to spy on each other and imprisoned, tortured and often killed anyone who fell foul of the authorities. BBC Arabic's Feras Kalani visited the secretive heart of the Assad state's security apparatus. He told me what he found.
It's the most important institution of the Assad regime, both father and the son. And the headquarters I visited is the most important one in Damascus to intervene in anything, whether it's internal or overseas.
I mean, just a few days ago, what you've done would be impossible. But you have now been inside the headquarters. What did you see?
I don't like to personalize it, but I am one of the wanted by this service, the Mukhabarat in Syria, because of my experience. role at the BBC or the way I cover the news in Syria. So literally, I was thinking about this to find my file there. And then I found millions of documents about everything, about the situation in the country, in each corner in the country, what was going on even a few days, just a few days before the militants reached Damascus, the capital. Lots of files about the neighboring country, mainly like Lebanon, Jordan, spying and everything. Every single politician in Lebanon, for example, put away what they were doing here in Syria. They have files about every single person in the country.
So it's an office building with files on everyone. Is it also the kind of place where suspects were taken and mistreated?
Not in the Mukhabarat one. It's what we used to call the security square. So there is a nearby, another building where they were arresting the people and interrogating them for sometimes four weeks, sometimes four months. It means that they use all the possible ways to torture them in a crazy way, in an unbelievable way. and then put them in cells just two metres by one, without any light, without anything, and lots of them died in these cells because of the torture and the hunger. They were starved to death in these cells.
As you say, you've been inside, you've seen just how recently these files were being updated, and yet the people who were doing that updating, the regime's officers, they've just melted away.
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Speakers
21 identified
Alex Ritson 8 min
Neda Torfik 3 min
Dr Jane Gregory 2 min
Anbarasan Ethirajan 2 min
Feras Kalani 2 min
Anthony Lloyd 2 min
Andrew Benson 2 min
Hugh Schofield 1 min
Miranda 1 min
Barbara Platt-Usher 1 min
John Morgan 1 min
Narrator 1 min
Ryan (Chumba Casino Narrator) 1 min
Julian Marshall 1 min
Michelle Fleury 1 min
Unnamed Woman 1 min
Unnamed Man 1 min
Abdullah Fayyad 1 min
Unnamed Voice
Antony Blinken
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