BBCIt was a defining second of the autumn of the Syrian regime – rebels releasing inmates from the nation’s most infamous jail. Per week on, 4 males communicate to the BBC concerning the elation of their launch, and the years of horror that preceded it.
Warning: This text accommodates descriptions of torture
The prisoners fell silent after they heard the shouting exterior their cell door.
A person’s voice known as: “Is there anybody in there?” However they had been too afraid to reply.
Over years, that they had learnt that the door opening meant beatings, rapes and different punishments. However on at the present time, it meant freedom.
On the shout of “Allahu Akbar”, the lads contained in the cell peered via a small opening within the centre of the heavy metallic door.
They noticed rebels within the jail’s hall as a substitute of guards.
“We mentioned ‘We’re right here. Free us,'” one of many inmates, 30-year-old Qasem Sobhi Al-Qabalani, remembers.
Because the door was shot open, Qasem says he “ran out with naked toes”.
Like different inmates, he saved working and did not look again.
“Once they got here to begin liberating us and shouting ‘all exit, all exit’, I ran out of the jail however I used to be so terrified to look behind me as a result of I assumed they’d put me again,” says 31-year-old Adnan Ahmed Ghnem.
They didn’t but know that Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad had fled the nation and that his authorities had fallen. However the information quickly reached them.
“It was the very best day of my life. An unexplainable feeling. Like somebody who had simply escaped loss of life,” Adnan remembers.
Qasem and Adnan are amongst 4 prisoners the BBC has spoken to who had been launched this week from Saydnaya jail – a facility for political prisoners nicknamed the “human slaughterhouse”.
All gave related accounts of years of mistreatment and torture by the hands of guards, executions of fellow inmates, corruption by jail officers, and compelled confessions.
We had been additionally proven contained in the jail by a former inmate who had an identical account, and heard from households of lacking individuals held at Saydnaya who’re desperately on the lookout for solutions.
We’ve seen our bodies discovered by insurgent fighters within the mortuary of a army hospital, believed to be Saydnaya detainees, that medics say bear indicators of torture.
Rights group Amnesty Worldwide, whose 2017 report on the jail accuses authorities of homicide and torture there, has known as for “justice and reparations for crimes beneath worldwide legislation in Syria”, together with its therapy of political prisoners.
Saydnaya jail, a sprawling advanced situated atop a hill of barren land and surrounded by barbed wire, was established within the early Nineteen Eighties and for many years has been used to carry opponents of the Assad household regime.
It has been described because the nation’s principal political jail because the 2011 rebellion, when the Turkey-based Affiliation of Detainees and The Lacking in Saydnaya Jail says it successfully grew to become a “loss of life camp”.
The prisoners we spoke to say they had been despatched to Saydnaya due to actual or perceived hyperlinks with the insurgent Free Syrian Military, their opposition to Assad, or just because they lived in an space identified to oppose him.
Some had been accused of kidnapping and killing regime troopers and convicted of terrorism.
All mentioned that they had given confessions beneath “stress” and “torture”.
They got prolonged sentences or sentenced to loss of life. One man mentioned he had been detained on the jail for 4 years however had not but been to court docket.
The lads had been held within the jail’s principal Pink Constructing, for opponents of the regime.
Qasem says he was arrested whereas passing via a highway block in 2016, accused of terrorism with the Free Syrian Military, and despatched for brief stints at a number of detention amenities earlier than being transferred to Saydnaya.
“After that door, you’re a lifeless individual,” he says softly in an interview at his household house in a city south of Damascus, as family members collect round sipping espresso and nodding in grim captivation.
“That is the place the torture started.”
He remembers being stripped bare and instructed to pose for {a photograph} earlier than being overwhelmed for wanting on the digicam.
He says he was then put onto a series with different inmates and led, with their faces staring on the floor, to a tiny solitary confinement cell the place he and 5 different males had been crammed in and given uniforms to put on however disadvantaged of meals and water for a number of days.
They had been then taken to the jail’s principal cells, the place the rooms don’t have any beds, a single lightbulb and a small bathroom space within the nook.
Once we visited the jail this week, we noticed blankets, garments and meals strewn on the flooring of cells.
Our information, a former inmate from 2019-2022, walked us via the corridors looking for his cell.
Two of his fingers and a thumb had been chopped off on the jail, he says.
Discovering scratch marks on a cell wall that he believes he made, he knelt down and started to cry.
About 20 males would sleep in every room, however the inmates inform us it was tough to get to know one another – they may communicate solely in hushed voices and knew that guards had been at all times watching and listening.
“All the things was banned. You are simply allowed to eat and drink and sleep and die,” says Qasem.
Punishments at Saydnaya had been frequent and brutal.
All the individuals we spoke to described being overwhelmed with totally different implements – metallic staffs, cables, electrical sticks.
“They might enter the room and begin to beat us throughout our our bodies. I might keep nonetheless, watching and ready for my flip,” Adnan, who was arrested in 2019 on accusations of kidnapping and killing a regime soldier, remembers.
“Each evening, we might thank God that we had been nonetheless alive. Each morning, we might pray to God, please take our souls so we are able to die in peace.”
Adnan and two of the opposite newly launched inmates mentioned they had been typically pressured to sit down with their knees in the direction of their foreheads and a car tyre positioned over their our bodies with a stick wedged inside so that they could not transfer, earlier than beatings had been administered.
Types of punishment had been various.
Qasem says he was held the wrong way up by two jail officers in a barrel of water till he thought he was going to “choke and die”.
“I noticed loss of life with my very own eyes,” he says. “They might do that when you awakened within the evening, or we spoke in a loud voice, or if we had an issue with any of the opposite prisoners.”
Two of the prisoners launched this week and the previous inmate at Saydnaya described witnessing sexual assaults by guards, who they mentioned would anally rape inmates with sticks.
One man mentioned inmates would provide oral intercourse to the guards of their desperation for extra meals.
Three described guards leaping on their our bodies as a part of the abuse.
In a hospital in central Damascus, we had been launched to 43-year-old Imad Jamal, who grimaced in ache at every contact from his mom who was tending to him at his bedside.
Requested to explain his time in Sayndaya, he smiled and responded slowly in English: “No eat. No sleep. Hit. Cane. Preventing. Sick. All the things not regular. Nothing regular. All the things irregular.”
He says he was detained in 2021 beneath what he described as a “political arrest” due to the world he was from.
Talking once more in Arabic, he says his again was damaged when he was made to sit down on the bottom along with his knees towards his chest as a guard jumped from a ledge on high of him as a punishment for stealing remedy from one other inmate to present to a pal.
However for Imad, the toughest factor about life within the jail was the chilly. “Even the wall was chilly,” he says. “I grew to become a respiratory corpse”.
There have been few issues to stay up for within the jail, however three of the inmates mentioned something constructive was met afterwards with punishment.
“Each time we had a bathe, each time we had a customer, each time we went out into the solar, each time we left the cell door we might be punished,” says 30-year-old Rakan Mohammed Al Saed, who says he was detained in 2020 on allegations of killing and kidnapping from his former days within the insurgent Free Syrian Military however had by no means confronted trial.
He bares his damaged enamel, saying they had been knocked out when he was hit within the mouth by a guard with a stick.
All the males we spoke to mentioned they believed individuals of their cells had been executed.
Guards would are available in and name names of people that can be led away and by no means seen once more.
“Folks would not be executed in entrance of us. Each time they’d name names at 12am, we knew that these individuals had been going to be killed,” Adnan says.
Others gave related accounts, explaining there was no method of them figuring out what occurred to those males.
Qasem’s father and different family members say the household had been made to pay jail officers greater than $10,000 to cease him from being executed – at first to be transformed to life in jail after which to a 20-year sentence.
Qasem says his therapy by guards improved a bit after this.
However, his dad says, “they refused any quantity to let him free”.
Households despatched family members cash for meals within the jail however they are saying corrupt officers would maintain a lot of it and provides the inmates solely restricted rations.
In a few of the cells, inmates would pool all the meals collectively. Nevertheless it wasn’t sufficient.
Adnan discovered the starvation even more durable than the beatings. “I might fall asleep and get up hungry,” he says.
“There was a punishment that we acquired one month the place someday they’d go us a slice of bread, the following day half a slice, till it was a tiny crumb. Then it was nothing. We obtained no bread.”
Qasem says someday guards coated the face of his cell’s de-facto chief with yoghurt and made others lick it off.
The lads mentioned the behaviour of guards was as a lot about inflicting humiliation as ache.
All described dropping vital quantities of weight within the jail due to malnourishment.
“My greatest dream was to eat and be full,” Qasem says.
His household paid officers bribes for visitation rights. He would typically be introduced down on a wheelchair as a result of he was too weak to stroll, his father says.
Illnesses had been rife and the inmates had no method of stopping them from spreading.
Two of the lads we spoke to who had been launched on Sunday say that they had contracted tuberculosis in Sayndaya – one mentioned remedy was regularly withheld as a type of punishment.
However Adnan says the “illnesses from concern” had been even worse than the bodily ones.
At a hospital in Damascus this week, an official mentioned transient medical checks of the detainees that had been despatched there had discovered “primarily psychological issues”.
These accounts paint an image of a spot with no hope, solely ache.
The prisoners spent a lot of their time in silence with no entry to the skin world, so it’s no shock that they are saying they knew nothing of the insurgent Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) fast advance in Syria till they had been damaged free that morning.
Qasem mentioned they may hear what seemed like a helicopter taking off from the hospital grounds earlier than the lads’s shouts within the corridors. However within the windowless cell they could not make sure.
Then the doorways opened, and the freed inmates started working as quick as they may.
“We ran out of the jail. We ran from concern too,” Rakan says, his ideas on his younger kids and spouse.
At one level within the chaos, he says, “I used to be hit by a automotive. However I did not thoughts. I obtained up and carried on working.”
He says he won’t ever return to Saydnaya once more.
Adnan, too, says he could not look again on the jail, as he ran crying in the direction of Damascus.
“I simply saved going. I am unable to describe it. I simply headed for Damascus. Folks had been taking us from the highway of their vehicles.”
He now fears every evening when he goes to sleep that he’ll wake within the jail, and discover it was all a dream.
Qasem ran to a city known as Tal Mneen. It was there {that a} lady who offered the freed prisoners with meals, cash and clothes instructed them: “Assad has fallen”.
He was delivered to his hometown the place celebratory gunfire rang out and his tearful household embraced him.
“It is like I’m born once more. I am unable to describe it to you,” he says.
Extra reporting by Nihad Al-Salem
