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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.
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