Syria Unearths Years of Atrocities
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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.
And death certificates next to them.
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.
From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. After the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the opening up of Syria, tens of thousands of people were released from prisons across the country. Many had been locked away for years. Today, my colleague Christina Goldbaum takes us inside one of those prisons and tells us the story of a man who made it out. It's Tuesday, December 17th.
Christina, what was it like when you first got to Syria?
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.
Wow, they used to stop on Syria? Yeah.
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.
People inside were in an absolute frenzy. There were these crowds of people cramming into different cells.
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?
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