The Daily - Syria Unearths Years of Atrocities

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

Warning: This episode contains descriptions of torture and death. It also contains audio of death and grief.Under Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian government set up a vast network of prisons and torture chambers that swallowed up tens of thousands of people. For years, those perceived as enemies of the regime would disappear into the system, and their families would have no idea what happened to them.Christina Goldbaum, who has covered the events in Syria, takes us inside one of those prisons and tells the story of one man who survived to tell the tale.Guest: Christina Goldbaum, the Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Families of the missing are hoping that they may be reunited with loved ones or at least learn what happened to them.Amid the celebrations after the ouster of Mr. al-Assad, Syria has also found itself in the opening chapter of a nationwide reckoning over the horrors that his government inflicted.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

This is Christina Goldbaum. 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. There's also an etching of a mosque. What's inside that folder?

He's reading. 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. This is like a report for the death. 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 gonna 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 Taverneisi, 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. 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 capital, 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 capital. 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 Sadnaya, which is one of the most notorious in all of Syria. And my colleague, Hwaii Dassad 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 is 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. Let's go, let's try, let's try. This side. People inside were in an absolute frenzy. There were these crowds of people cramming into different cells. Where is he? 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. Wladak? Wladak, I'm a student of what today?

He has two brothers. Some of them had printout photos of their sons or brothers or husbands. And here's their sons. And were shoving them in people's faces, asking, have you seen this person? Have you seen this person? All these cases, all missing.

Their relatives are missing and they are looking. What's going on? And walking around, there were these quiet testimonies of what life was like inside this prison. There were feces across the floor and messages scrawled into the walls, some of which were begging for death rather than staying there. And a lot of prisoners had escaped on Sunday morning after the government fell, but there were still thousands of others that families suspected of being in Sednaya, who were still unaccounted for.

And so these families were going around the prison looking for any kind of scraps of information, any clues as to where their relatives were. What's over here? This is another section of the prison. Let's look. You know, one of the first rooms that we walked into looked like maybe it had been an electrical room in the prison.

And we came across one guy there who had a shovel in hand. What is he doing? And he was knocking against the wall and the floor, trying to hear an echo that maybe would signal there was something hollow underneath, maybe a room beneath the floor. He started also kind of pulling apart the wires saying, you know, where does this go? You know, again, thinking that maybe it led to something underneath the prison, some cells that were there. As we stepped into another room, there was also a woman who seemed to be just convinced that she was hearing voices on the other side of a wall and she was trying to get the guys around her who had these pickaxes to tear

through it because she was saying that she heard voices there, she heard them there. She was looking for her son who had gone missing 12 years ago. At one point people believed that maybe there were hidden cells like three stories underground and so they started picking up pickaxes and hammers and shovels and just tearing into the floors trying to find any kind of shaft or opening or room that might have been hidden and people were maybe stuck inside. trying to find any kind of shaft or opening or room that might have been hidden and people were maybe stuck inside. And as they were doing that,

this kind of massive crowd started forming around them because people thought that maybe they had discovered something, that they had discovered a secret door or secret stairwell, and they wanted to get a glimpse of what was underneath. Move backward, move backward, let us work. And the few rebels who were there around them were screaming at the crowd telling them to back up and give them space and let them work because it was just such a chaotic scene.

And Christina, did they find anything in all this digging? So hours and hours after tearing up this place, the rescue workers who were there said that they didn't think that there were any hidden compartments underneath the prison, and that all the prisoners who were there and who were still alive were released already. But the next morning, there was also news that 38 bodies had been discovered in the prison, and they were brought to a hospital at the center of the city.

So my colleagues and I went to that hospital and to the morgue, where there were forensic examiners going through each of these corpses, trying to find any identifiable symbol, any tattoo, any birthmark, anything. Taking photos of them and then posting them on telegram so that families could look through and see if they recognized any of these corpses. The doctors believed that some of those people had died days earlier, but there were others that they thought had been dead for weeks or a month. And you could smell that as they opened the kind of tarps and informal body bags they had, but this just stench that filled the room.

? ????? ????? ????? ????? ????? ????? ????????????????????????? Tons of people started coming there, determined to get a look at these bodies themselves.

There were just throngs of women and men who were just shoving and trying to get into the examination room itself, saying that they didn't recognize any of the photos and they wanted to see the bodies themselves. And at one point as the day dragged on, one of the doctors just kind of gave up and said, okay, fine, if you want to see these people come in, open the doors. And this massive crowd of people came into this

refrigerator room and started opening the tarps of bodies and looking at them in just this kind of horror. Some of them had shown signs of what looked to be torture. There were red marks around one of the necks of one of these bodies. Another had kind of puncture wounds that one of the doctors thought were from a hot iron that this person had likely been hit with many times. One of these bodies didn't have a face anymore. It was just this charred skull, just beyond recognition. It was incredibly intense. I mean, women were leaving that room in tears and screaming, cursing Assad and asking that

he burn in hell. You know, until that point, I think people had really believed that there was a way of finding folks alive, that there was some secret rooms or some other detention facility or you know somewhere where they'd be broken free from. And I think it's one thing to see the scribblings on the wall of this really grim prison. It's another to see not just that people might have died, but how they died and what they endured before they died. But we did meet one family at the prison that day who got some answers. Their son had been released from Sinaiya when the rebels took the city. And so he was able to tell us the story of life inside the prison for the first time.

Thank you so much for having us in your house. So his name is Bilal Shahadi. He's 26 years old. And we met him at his house. Me and my colleague Rahal Marchand, who is translating, and walked in and sat down on the floor of their living room. There was a small heater there too because it was a pretty cold day. I grew up here in this same village and it was actually good.

And he was telling us about how he had grown up in the suburb of the city with a pretty big family. He's one of four brothers and a number of sisters too. His dad worked selling fresh water to people in the neighborhood. And you know, he remembers when he was younger going to these amusement parks in Damascus with his siblings and going swimming and having barbecues on the hillside. And this life felt very peaceful and full of promise for him and his family.

There was a playing football. But when the war started in 2011, Bilal was in the sixth grade. And his parents got very nervous about everything going on, so they pulled him out of class. And pretty early on, the war started to take its toll on his family. He's... Two of his older brothers were both arrested by security forces. His dad tried to get both of them back to their families

without any luck. And at one point, he was describing this to me and said how he had asked someone in the security forces for more information on one of his sons and was told that his son would be released in two hours after questioning. And now he stayed in prison for 14 years. But it has been over a decade since. And why were Bilal's brothers arrested?

So like a lot of families in Syria, they never actually got a clear answer of what either of the brothers was accused of. And that's something that was pretty common under Assad's government. These kind of arbitrary arrests where people are picked off the street, thrown into prison, and families don't know where they went or what happened to them or what the charges against them are. But they think his brother's arrest instilled a lot of fear in him. He was conscripted into the army when he was 18 years old, as men are required to do. And soon after, when he sees the horrors of the civil war, and the risks that Syrian soldiers are facing,

he deserts the military and goes back to his family. But deserting the army is what eventually gets him arrested by the police as well. So he's moved from detention facility to detention facility and eventually put in a truck with around 150 other people, all of them with iron cuffs on their wrists tied to each other, and brought to Sednaya. We'll be right back.

So Christina, this man you met, Bilal, told you about how he got arrested and sent to Sidneya Prison. What did he say about what life was like inside the prison? He described the conditions in the prison as being just absolutely horrifying. No light. He's brought to the cell that's underground and rarely ever sees sunlight again. A spot? A tiny hole.

A tiny hole? Yeah. There were about a hundred other people in the cell with him. All the men, they have to use one bathroom inside the room. Only one toilet in the corner of the room that all of them had to share. Bad. The cell always smelled like sewage, and there was this kind of layer of grime across the floor and the walls.

How much food would they eat? He said that usually they would only get one potato for eight people in a day and that they would have to cut up that single potato into tiny portions for everyone who was sharing it with him. In the best way you will take a bigger slice. And they barely got any water with that too. So the people didn't think about anything except the food. And every morning, okay, every day in our room, they take the names.

The prison guards would come around and do a roll call of everyone in the cell. And when that happened, they had to have their faces against the wall. And he never actually saw any of the guards who were there. He only ever heard their voices. And then occasionally, he said often when they were in a bad mood or angry about something, they would drag one of the prisoners out and beat and torture him. Bilal said that occasionally he was the one who was brought out and taken to this room. When he's sitting like this, as he was describing this to me, he kind of stood up

and bent over his hands by his ankles. I don't know. Sick? Yeah. Sick? Between his legs. And said that they would usually put an iron rod between his knees. Okay. Okay, okay.

And then what happened? And then they would kick him. You can break your legs. So you can't move. Okay, okay. And then what happened? Then what did he do? And then they would kick him. He would kick two people on top of him. And two sit on my back. They stepped on his back? They stomped on his back?

They stepped on his back. They would stomp on his face and they would hit him in the back. What were they beating him with? It's leather. Leather, okay, okay. I eat a lot of leather and Leather, okay, okay. And he told us that usually when this happened, there would be other guards in the room who would be yelling curses at him and kind of cheering on whoever was actually beating him

that day. If anyone, if they beat anyone, all said no one heard the screaming. And usually other prisoners could hear whoever was being beaten or tortured that day from their cells. They could hear the sound of… They would hear them screaming and crying out for help, and they would know what would come the next time that they were pulled out of the room. How does Bilal describe his mental state through all of this?

He said it was absolutely unbearable. If I die, it will be better. So I was praying for dying. And he spent most of the two years that he was in Sadnaya praying to die, because that felt easier than enduring the torture anymore. And things continued on like that for a while. Until about a week and a half ago, when he told me he started to notice a bit of a change.

They came a soldier to our room, and they were, they were, I assume, afraid. What made you think they were afraid? He said it started with the roll calls that they used to do every morning, and typically they would say, roll call you animals, to all of the prisoners in the cell. Because he came, he came to our room,

and for the first time, he didn't call us animals. But then one morning they said, roll call you guys, which just struck him as being a little bit strange. Somehow they were being more humane to the prisoners all of a sudden. Exactly. And then the next day they asked them, they told him, how are you? how they were in the morning, which he thought was even more strange. Bilal turned his head. And he was so surprised that he turned his head around to look at the guard.

He didn't beat him. But he also wasn't beaten for doing that. The food. What about it? It was good. And then the next day, they give them biscuits. The guard started giving the prisoners small cookies, which he hadn't had in the two years he had been there. And he told me that as this was happening he was talking to the

other prisoners trying to figure out what exactly was going on. I thought the regime made a decision that they will not leave us anymore. But they didn't even imagine that they were only days away from walking out the prison's gates and being free. And then on Saturday night, one of his cellmates shook him to wake him up and was telling him that something was going on, that maybe they would be freed. And Bilal didn't believe him. He told him to leave him alone.

He was asleep. He told him, hear, listen. Allahu Akbar. And they hear Allahu Akbar. And Bilal hears people shouting, God is great. And he realizes that something is going on. And eventually he pieces together that one of the prison guards had stripped off his

uniform, opened one of the cells, dropped the keys, and ran. And all the prisoners from that cell had taken the keys, had unlocked the other cells there, and they were rushing out of the doors out of the prison. Christina, why had the guard done that? The officer, the regime officer, changed his clothes. We don't know for certain, but it seemed like maybe the guard had heard that the rebels were nearing the prison and thought that if he opened the prison cells and wore civilian clothes, he could blend in with prisoners leaving themselves and escape. Wow.

Okay, Bilal. So you go out, you see that everyone is leaving. Where do you go? What did you do? Haraa al-Suwa. Haraa al-Suwa al-Ra'is. So Bilal gets out of his cell. He entered the offices for the officers.

He runs to an office within the prison, finds a photo of Bashar al-Assad, I burned Bashar's pictures. and burns it. And then he walks out of the prison gates. And in that moment, how would you describe how you felt? In that moment, how would you describe what happened? I'm with it.

It was a dream. It was a dream. It was a dream. All is a dream. He told me that he felt like he was dreaming this entire time, that he couldn't actually believe that he had been freed. How has it been for Bilal to be home? I think the past week and a half has been a whirlwind of emotions for Bilal and his family. I talked to his mom about this. For his mother, when you saw Bilal, tell me about that moment.

It's like a happy, this is the happiness. Crying and hugging. On the one hand, they are incredibly grateful and happy and overjoyed that they finally have one of their sons home, that he's okay, that he's with their family, that he's alive. And Bilal himself is overjoyed to be free, to be able to be with his family and be back in his home and not live in the perpetual fear of being beaten or tortured in prison. But at the same time, I think with every day that's passed since the Assad government fell, his mom, his dad, Bilal have all realized more and more that it's very unlikely his brothers are coming home.

I think I will must hold no. Why? Because they are not saying they didn't come with her son and the other son. This is what he said, which is all I hear. And a few days after we went to Bilal's home, I talked to his father, who had sent a relative back to Sinaiyah,

and he had found a death certificate for one of his sons. Oh, wow. But there still isn't any other news of the other. So they got one answer, but still don't have the other. Exactly. When you talked to Bilal's father, how was he feeling about this? He was incredibly sad and crying. But at the same time, he was talking about how he wanted revenge for what happened to

his sons. He told me the first time he went to Sinai, he wanted to burn it down. He wanted to find who did this to them and break their neck. He wanted some kind of justice for everything that his family had endured. He was also incredibly angry about the fact that he still, even now, doesn't have answers. Christina, do they plan on continuing their search in the coming days? They do. They have sent relatives back to Sennaya. They've talked to friends who've gone to other detention facilities that have rifled through

the papers there. I think that until they find something concrete, until they know where their sons were buried, if they're both killed, and can hold them in their arms themselves, there isn't really a sense of closure. ? ?

That's what his father, what his mother, kept coming back to, was wanting to have their bodies in their arms to know where they are and to be able to bury them themselves. Until that happens, their search will continue. Christina thank you. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Monday, the German government collapsed after Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a no-confidence

vote in the country's parliament. Scholz was forced to take the unusual step of calling for the vote because his three-party coalition splintered last month, leaving him without a parliamentary majority to pass laws or a budget. New elections are slated for late February. And a judge has rejected the argument made by president-elect Donald Trump that he is protected by presidential immunity when it comes to his conviction in the state of New York. Judge Juan Marchand said on

Monday that the immunity argument does not apply because the case involves unofficial and personal acts that preceded Trump's first term. If the decision withstands the expected appeal, he could become the first felon to serve as president. Today's episode was produced by Rachelle Bonja, Claire Tennesgetter, Lindsay Garrison, and Stella Tehan with help from Eric Krupke. It was edited by Patricia Willens with help from Lindsay Garrison, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano and Rowan Nimisto,

and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Huayda Saad and Raham Roshshed. That's it for the Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.