Inside Bashar al-Assad’s dungeons

AS NEWS OF the and the dictator’s flight spread over the weekend, many Syrians rushed to the public squares to celebrate. In Damascus, women draped in the green-and-black flag of the Syrian opposition chanted for Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, the Islamist leader who had that brought down Mr Assad in less than two weeks. Fighters fired their weapons into the sky in celebration.Thousands of others took no time for celebration. They headed straight for the prisons, thrown open by the rebels, in a desperate search for friends and family. Some had disappeared into Mr Assad’s labyrinth of secret jails and torture chambers more than a decade ago. Outside Damascus the traffic was stalled for miles on the road to Saidnaya, a town in the mountains north of the capital, which was the most notorious site of the regime’s abuses. Rebels with rifles were acting as impromptu traffic wardens.Among all the symbols of Mr Assad’s brutality, none was as potent as Saidnaya prison. Many of the tens of thousands of people taken over decades to what Syrians called the human slaughterhouse, never came out. Human-rights groups estimate that between 13,000 and 30,000 people have been murdered in Saidnaya alone since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011. And there are many other jails as well.What people found when they got to Saidnaya was even worse than they had imagined. The regime had dug hidden cells into the ground beneath the jail, packing men by the dozen into the pitch-black chambers. Screams echoed into the night air around the prison, both of agony at the prisoners’ suffering and of ecstasy about their liberation. The emptied cells reeked of urine contained in plastic bottles; sodden blankets were piled in corners. In one corridor lay a prosthetic leg, its owner nowhere to be found. On the walls of an abandoned cell someone had scribbled “take me, already” in Arabic. A group of fighters discovered an iron press, which they claimed was used to crush the remains of executed prisoners.A day after rebels captured the prison, the search for inmates still trapped inside continued. They called out for help from tunnels under the main prison building. Fighters attempted to smash through the concrete with shovels and rifle-butts, worried that the prisoners might suffocate; a power outage had disabled the prison’s underground ventilation system. Among those searching for their missing relatives was Yeman al-Eyan, an 18-year-old whose uncle had been detained for 12 years. The family had last heard from him in 2017. When they were permitted a rare prison visit, “he was just bones, like a skeleton,” said Mr Eyan.Groups of men used the light of their phones to trawl through old registry books found inside the building. Others examined scraps of paper on the floors of the staff quarters. Freed prisoners were still filing out of the building, gaunt and haggard, their heads shaved. Some were so traumatised that they had forgotten their own names. Rebels gathered them in a nearby mosque to try to identify them.Mr Eyan, who comes from a nearby village, said that helicopters arrived at the jail in the afternoon of December 7th, before rebels reached the site. He believes that they took away the guards and some prisoners that the regime considered particularly important.After they opened the prison, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group led by Mr Jolani that appears to be running Damascus for now, published a list of names of escaped prison staff. Apart from the Assad family, fugitive prison guards are probably the most hated group in Syria right now. Syrians are euphoric that Mr Assad is gone. But they have only just begun to come to terms with the depths of his cruelty.