Tales from individuals free of Saydnaya torture jail

It was a defining second of the autumn of the Syrian regime – rebels liberating inmates from the nation’s most infamous jail. Every 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 comprises descriptions of torture

The prisoners fell silent once they heard the shouting outdoors their cell door.

A person’s voice referred to as inside: “Is there anybody in there?” However they have been too afraid to reply.

Over years, they’d learnt that the door opening meant beatings, rapes and different punishments. However on today, it meant freedom.

On the shout of “Allahu Akbar”, the lads contained in the cell peered by means of a small opening within the centre of the heavy metallic door.

There, they noticed rebels within the jail’s hall as an alternative 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 stored operating and did not look again.

“After 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”, mentioned 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 dying,” Adnan remembered.

Qasem and Adnan are amongst 4 prisoners the BBC has spoken to who have 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 have been additionally proven contained in the jail by a former inmate who had an analogous account, and heard from households of lacking individuals held at Saydnaya who’re desperately searching for solutions.

Now we have seen our bodies discovered by insurgent fighters within the mortuary of a navy 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 referred to as for “justice and reparations for crimes below worldwide regulation in Syria”, together with its remedy of political prisoners.

Saydnaya jail, a sprawling complicated positioned 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 major political jail for the reason that 2011 rebellion, when the Turkey-based Affiliation of Detainees and The Lacking in Saydnaya Jail says it effectively became a “death camp”.

The prisoners we spoke to say they have 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 they’d given confessions below “strain” and “torture”.

They got prolonged sentences or sentenced to dying. One man mentioned he had been detained on the jail for 4 years however had not but been to court docket.

The boys have been held within the jail’s major Crimson Constructing, for opponents of the regime.

Qasem says he was arrested whereas passing by means of a street block in 2016, accused of terrorism with the Free Syrian Military, and despatched for brief stints at a number of detention services earlier than being transferred to Saydnaya.

“After that door, you’re a lifeless particular person,” he says softly in an interview at his household dwelling in a city south of Damascus, as kinfolk 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 crushed for wanting on the digicam.

He says he was then put onto a sequence 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 got uniforms to put on however disadvantaged of meals and water for a number of days.

They have been then taken to the jail’s major cells, the place the rooms haven’t any beds, a single lightbulb and a small rest room 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 by means of the corridors looking for his cell.

Two of his fingers and a thumb have been chopped off on the jail, he says.

Discovering scratch marks on a cell wall that he believes he made, he knelt down and commenced 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 have been at all times watching and listening.

“Every thing was banned. You are simply allowed to eat and drink and sleep and die,” says Qasem.

Punishments at Saydnaya have been frequent and brutal.

All the individuals we spoke to described being crushed with completely different implements – metallic staffs, cables, electrical sticks.

“They’d 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 night time, we’d thank God that we have been nonetheless alive. Each morning, we’d pray to God, please take our souls so we will die in peace.”

Adnan and two of the opposite newly launched inmates mentioned they have been typically compelled to take a seat 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 have been administered.

Types of punishment have been diverse.

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 dying with my very own eyes,” he says. “They’d do that should you awoke within the night time, 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 supply 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 have 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. Combating. Sick. Every thing not regular. Nothing regular. Every thing irregular.”

He mentioned he was detained in 2021 below what he described as a “political arrest” due to the world he was from.

He mentioned his again had been damaged when he was made to take a seat on the bottom together with his knees in opposition to his chest as a guard jumped from a ledge on high of him as a punishment for stealing treatment from one other inmate to offer to a buddy.

However for Imad, the toughest factor about life within the jail was the chilly. “Even the wall was chilly,” he says. “I turned a respiratory corpse”.

There have been few issues to look ahead to 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 to court docket, each time we went out into the solar, each time we left the cell door we’d 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 bears his damaged enamel, saying they have 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 could 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 have been going to be killed,” Adnan says.

Others gave related accounts, explaining there was no method of them understanding what occurred to those males.

Qasem’s father and different kinfolk say the household have 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 remedy 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 number of the cells, inmates would pool all the meals collectively. However it wasn’t sufficient.

Adnan discovered the starvation even tougher than the beatings. “I might fall asleep and get up hungry,” he says.

“There was a punishment that we obtained one month the place at some point they’d go us a slice of bread, the subsequent day half a slice, till it was a tiny crumb. Then it was nothing. We obtained no bread.”

Qasem says at some point guards coated the face of his cell’s de-facto chief with yoghurt and made others lick it off.

The boys mentioned the behaviour of guards was as a lot about inflicting humiliation as ache.

All described shedding vital quantities of weight within the jail due to malnourishment.

“My largest 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 have been rife and the inmates had no method of stopping them from spreading.

Two of the lads we spoke to who have been launched on Sunday say they’d contracted tuberculosis in Sayndaya – one mentioned treatment was often withheld as a type of punishment.

However Adnan says the “illnesses from worry” have been even worse than the bodily ones.

At a hospital in Damascus this week, an official mentioned temporary medical checks of the detainees that have 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 surface 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 have been damaged free that morning.

Qasem mentioned they may hear what appeared 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 certain.

Then the doorways openened, and the freed inmates started operating as quick as they may.

“We ran out of the jail. We ran from worry 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 operating.”

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 stored going. I am unable to describe it. I simply headed for Damascus. Folks have been taking us from the street of their vehicles.”

He now fears every night time when he goes to sleep that he’ll wake within the jail, and discover it was all a dream.

Qasem ran to a city referred to as Tal Mneen. It was there {that a} girl who supplied the freed prisoners with meals, cash and clothes instructed them: “Assad has fallen”.

He was dropped at 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