Jihad Dalain, 40, outside his home in Gaziantep, Turkey. His brother was freed from Adra Prison after the Assad regime fell. Photo / Salwan Georges, the Washington Post
Jihad Dalain, 40, outside his home in Gaziantep, Turkey. His brother was freed from Adra Prison after the Assad regime fell. Photo / Salwan Georges, the Washington Post
Sednaya Military Prison’s guards fled as rebels advanced, allowing families to search for missing loved ones.
By Sunday, the guards had fled, its doors were flung open and this fortress of terrified silence was alive with the sounds of parents and children calling out for their missing.
Videos onsocial media showed families streaming towards the prison they had known as a “slaughterhouse”, searching for loved ones who had disappeared there – ready, at long last, to bring them home, or to know with finality that they were gone.
The lightning advance of rebels, culminating in the fall of Damascus, saw prison guards abandon their posts in cities from north to south.
Now, Syrians were bracing to learn who among the country’s more than 100,000 unaccounted-for detainees are still alive.
The insides of government jails, once known only to those who had suffered or served there, were broadcast on televisions across the country. Videos showed freed inmates – exhausted, stunned, often barefoot – staggering out into the night.
Although all sides in Syria’s conflict have arrested, disappeared, and killed prisoners, the Syrian Network for Human Rights monitoring group estimates that as many as 85% were held throughout the state’s network of prisons.
Over the years, rights groups documented the systematic use of torture, starvation and other forms of lethal abuse by Assad’s security forces.
Dalain, 40, shows a photo of his brother, Majd Dalain, arriving home after he was freed from prison. Photo / Salwan Georges, the Washington Post
At one point, Sednaya alone had up to 20,000 inmates, according to Amnesty International. Many were executed or died of neglect, former inmates said, as guards enforced near-total silence among the prisoners, who slept under bug-ingested blankets on stone floors sticky with blood and sweat.
Diab Serriya, co-founder of the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison, and a former detainee there himself, said that up to 8000 relatives were combing the cells, as civil defence workers struggled to reach secret chambers farther underground.
“Some of the rebels are trying to organise the search, but until now there are no proper lists,” Serriya said.
In other prisons, video showed rebel fighters shooting the locks off one by one.
The inmates hailed from all over Syria. Some had been missing for decades, and there were tearful reunions in almost every major city.
Overseas too, where the war had turned more than five million Syrians into refugees, families prayed for calls they had feared would never come.
Over the years, relatives of the disappeared likened the loss to a wound that couldn’t heal. One man recalled turning on the radio to drown out his thoughts, only to turn it off again when his missing wife’s favourite songs would play.
In the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep, Jihad Dalain, 40, had been waiting to hear the voice of his youngest brother, Majd. The 24-year-old was arrested by Government security forces last summer from the family home in Daraya, alongside their elderly parents. Their mother and father were missing for 100 days before middlemen agreed to secure their release, Jihad said.
His father refused to speak about what had happened inside the prison, no matter how many times Jihad asked, worried the Government was surveilling their phones.
Majd, who has a degree in physics, had remained behind bars and was eventually moved to Adra Central Prison in Damascus. He called his parents yesterday “with these exact words”, Jihad said. “He said: ‘There’s something happening, I can’t talk much’.”
The next call was to the whole family, Jihad said, at exactly 9.22am local time. “He said he was coming home,” Jihad said, struggling to describe everything he felt in that moment. Jihad had married in the year and a half since Majd had been taken; the video call was the first time he had seen his sister-in-law.
Lists shared by activists on social media purported to name the newly released. Some Facebook posts showed men with shaved heads, said to have been freed from Sednaya, alongside phone numbers for their loved ones to call. On other pages, website administrators urged people to write the names of those still missing.
From the northern city of Azaz, Mayasa Marie, 40, said she was looking for her husband Mohammed, arrested for his anti-government activism in 2012, in the early days of the revolution.
She had heard rumours that he had died inside Sednaya, but refused to believe it. Their son was 6 when Mohammed was arrested. He is 18 now, she said, studying to become a lawyer to help the unjustly detained.
“My son and his uncle went to Sednaya immediately … but still they didn’t find anything,” Marie said. “We are finally free but I need my husband with us again.”
In the German city of Hanover, Hussien Idris, 40, posted in search of his brother, Ahmed. “I believe he is still alive, he should be 32 years old,” he wrote. “I will go back to find him myself.”
The families said their phones were flooded with messages, but none brought solace. There were lists their loved ones weren’t on; well-meaning questions from contacts, but no answers.
Naila Alabbasi has spent 12 years without her sister, Rania – a proud mother, dentist, and Syria’s two-time national chess champion.
Members of Syria’s military intelligence arrived at her home in March 2013, arresting her husband, Abdul Rahman. Later, they returned to take Rania and her six children, aged 2 to 14. On one occasion, an intermediary suggested that Rania had been seen near Damascus, but that was all Naila had ever heard.
In early October, her brother Hassan found a letter Rania had written to a friend years before the country’s uprising.
She was sitting outside in the soft Damascus breeze, she had written, wondering whether she should leave Syria altogether and join Naila in Saudi Arabia. “I felt a burn in my heart and a lump in my throat,” Hassan wrote in a post to Facebook. “I felt for a moment like I was communicating with her.”
Naila had been glued to the news since the rebels’ offensive gathered pace, and stayed up late watching the news, unable to sleep. On her rounds as an obstetrician in Riyadh, she said, she thought only of her sister, and her nieces and nephews.
Her voice broke as she started to describe the videos she had watched of the freed prisoners. She had been studying their faces, she said, knowing that the children might be unrecognisable after so many years.
“We should be happy, we should be celebrating, but Rania is not here,” she said. Her hope was diminishing, but still she clung to it.
“There’s no news, no news,” she kept saying. “I’ve tried everyone.”
