As Syrian rebels led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) captured city after city on the road to Damascus, forcing Bashar al-Assad to flee the country, they also opened the doors of the regime’s notorious prisons, into which upwards of 100,000 people disappeared during nearly 14 years of civil war.
Many emerged frail and emaciated into the bright December sunlight, greeted by weeping family members who had no idea they were still alive. Some struggled to comprehend that Assad was gone; a few held even longer had never even been told that he had succeeded his father, Hafez, who died in 2000.
Verified videos from Damascus showed dozens of women and small children being held in cells, the rebels opening the doors telling them not to be afraid.
The prisons infamous for torture in and around Damascus itself – including Sednaya, the most notorious, where satellite imagery showed a new crematorium was built in 2017 to dispose of bodies – were broken open early on Sunday. There are conflicting reports of underground cell blocks yet to be reached.
The photos and videos of reunited families are bittersweet. The stories of the prisoners are astonishing; they will take years to be told in full, further grim evidence of the crimes the Assad family committed against so many of their own people.
Al-Arabiya broadcast footage of a family arriving in Damascus to meet their released son, the elderly mother’s voice breaking with emotion as she embraced him for the first time in 14 years.
Raghad al-Tatary, a pilot who refused to bomb the city of Hama during the uprising against Hafez al-Assad in the 1980s, was freed after 43 years; Tal al-Mallouhi, 19 when she was arrested in 2009 for a blogpost criticising state corruption, was found alive.
One shaven-headed, shaking man in Sednaya had been so ill-treated he had lost his memory and struggled to talk. His family said he had been 20 and a medical student when he vanished 13 years ago.
Thousands of protesters were arrested during the 2011 Arab spring revolution for speaking out against the government. Leaked documents showed the state security apparatus viewed imprisonment as a key way to crush dissent. As the war deepened, the vast network of security branches, detention centres and prisons grew notorious for their brutal torture methods, which rights groups said were applied on an industrial scale.
Many Syrians were over the years brusquely informed by authorities that their relatives had been executed, sometimes years earlier.
For many, there is still an agonising wait, hoping against the odds that loved ones will be found alive. At a large bus station in central Damascus, the activist Abdulkafi al-Hamdo, who fled Aleppo with his young family in 2016 for years in exile in Idlib, filmed himself meeting anxious families waiting for cars and buses that were dropping off freed prisoners on Sunday.
One woman said her son was 18 when he was seized in 2012; she has not heard or seen anything of him since. “All these families here have a lot of fear in their hearts that their sons are dead,” she said. “Some of them have a small hope, a window of hope, that their children will be alive.”
