Since Islamist-led rebels toppled Assad’s paranoid and brutal government a week ago, numerous ex-prisoners like Mohammed are shedding light on the depths of the despair visited upon Syria’s people over the past decades.
“Towards the end I just wanted to die, waiting for when they would execute us. I was almost happy as it would mean my suffering was over.”
Ghazi Mohamed al-Mohamed, a former detainee in a Damascus prison, with his mother at their home in Sarmada, Syria. Photo / AFP
It was the mukhabarat, the omnipotent intelligence henchmen and enforcers of Assad’s rule, who seized him when he visited the capital.
They took him away, hands clamped behind his back, with one of his friends, a doctor.
“That was five and a half months ago,” Mohammed said.
He doesn’t know why he was arrested, but thinks it may have been because he comes from the northwestern province of Idlib, heartland of the rebels whose lightning push south forced Assad to flee on December 8.
Manacled and blindfolded, Mohammed was taken to a detention centre in the upscale Mazzeh district of Damascus, home to embassies, United Nations offices and security headquarters.
They took him deep into a building and it was there that the blows began.
For the first few days, he was hung by his wrists from a bar high up in a cell, his feet unable to touch the floor. Then he was lowered so at least he could touch the ground.
Mohammed was beaten and fed practically nothing. His only contact was with the jailers.
“They told me to confess that my brother had joined the rebels,” he said.
“To be honest, I told them what they wanted to hear, even though my brother’s a businessman who runs an aid organisation here in Sarmada.”
He said he could hear the cries of women and children being tortured in front of loved ones to make them confess.
After a month or so, Mohammed was handed over to military intelligence, the ones who told him that, from then on, he would be only a number.
He was thrown into a narrow cell about 2m long, roughly the length of a man, and 1.2m wide. An overhead skylight provided the only source of light.
The cell had no electricity or water, and when he needed the toilet, he said the guards forced him to go there naked, bent over and with his eyes fixed on the floor.
“You’ll have your throat slit like a sheep. Unless you prefer hanging by the legs? Or being impaled?”
Towards the end, Mohammed was of course unaware of what was happening on the outside, of the rapid 11-day rebel advance from the north as Assad’s forces abandoned their tanks and other equipment.
“One night they brought us out of the cells and lined us all up in the corridor, tied to each other. Two rows of 14 prisoners. We could see each other for the first time and assumed we were going to die,” he said.
They were kept standing there for about an hour before being shoved back into random cells.
“I called out that I was sick and need the toilet, but nobody came,” Mohammed said.
“Then we heard the sound of helicopters landing and taking off again, I suppose to take away the officers.”
