Bloomberg: The search for 150,000 Syrians in the “torture archipelago”

Faten Ramadan sat on a bed in her apartment, watching video after video on her cellphone of exhausted, tear-stained men being freed from prisons in Hama after rebels took control of the Syrian city.

One clip briefly showed a man wearing glasses, a traditional brown robe and a grey jacket. She replayed it several times to make sure before shouting, “Dad, dad, dad is still alive!”

As Syrians try to come to terms with the end of a regime that has lasted more than 50 years, they are struggling to understand everything from who will rule the country to the whereabouts of the Assad family’s wealth. But no issue is more sensitive than the fate of the tens of thousands of people who disappeared at the hands of the security services of Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez before him.

For Ramadan, 39, who was arrested and tortured in 2013, her goal is to find out what happened to her father, Mohammed. He was arrested a decade earlier and later declared dead, though his body was never returned.

Mohamed Ramadan's daughter's joy was shattered when the man in the video called her from Syria to tell her he was not who she, her mother and sisters thought he might be. However, a glimmer of hope returned once again after rebels took control of Damascus, and people rushed to the notorious Saydnaya prison north of the capital to search for their loved ones.

One of the hundreds of videos documenting the storming of Saydnaya showed the names of her hometown, her father and her brother Anwar — who was also arrested and declared dead only on paper by the regime — engraved on the walls of a prison cell.

“I will continue to search for my father and all those who are missing,” Ramadan, a doctor who was granted asylum in France in 2020, said by phone from Rouen, adding that she lost her husband and daughter in the Syrian civil war. “I want to gather all the evidence to hold the criminal Bashar, his officers and his thugs accountable.”

Human Rights Watch described the Assad family’s complex network of security services as an “archipelago of torture,” with the services running or controlling more than 100 detention centers across Syria, arbitrarily arresting and torturing regime opponents and critics.

Those agencies were also implicated in a government system “to process and conceal the increasing numbers of detainees killed in detention,” according to a December 6 report by the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism, a body set up by the United Nations to collect evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria.

The question of holding the regime accountable will determine whether Syria’s warring factions, sects and ethnicities come to terms with the past or sink into a new cycle of revenge.

European and Middle Eastern countries, which have faced waves of refugees and previous terrorist attacks linked to Syria, have a direct interest in the stability of this strategically located country in the eastern Mediterranean.

“The missing persons file is a huge, complex issue that involves many factors and variables,” says Fadel Abdul Ghany, founder and chairman of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which has investigated atrocities and collected data related to the 13-and-a-half-year Syrian civil war.

It is difficult to know how many people have disappeared, but a recent estimate by the International Commission on Missing Persons put the number at around 150,000.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that at least 160,000 people have been arbitrarily detained and forcibly disappeared since March 2011, when Assad cracked down on peaceful protests against him, sparking a multi-layered war involving internal and external parties, until last August.

But not all of them suffered at the hands of the Assad regime. Of those, about 87 percent were detained by the regime, while the rest were held by other parties involved in the conflict, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the former al-Qaeda affiliate that led the overthrow of Assad and took control of Damascus.

Fadl Abdul Ghani estimates that about 31,000 people have been released since the rebels launched their lightning offensive last month. As more makeshift prisons and mass graves are discovered, the total number of detainees and missing will eventually rise.

At the beginning of the conflict, the regime was believed to have a systematic practice of burying the bodies of those who had been hanged in prisons, tortured to death, or executed during raids on opposition areas, as well as soldiers who had disobeyed orders, in a cemetery on the road to Damascus International Airport.

But the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison and others have used satellite imagery to document the rapid expansion of two other sites north of the capital.

“The Damascus countryside has practically become one big mass grave,” says Diab Saria, the association’s co-founder and a former prisoner in Sednaya.

Sarria, who is based in Türkiye and has a team working on the ground in Syria, fears that some evidence could be lost in the chaos as people search for relatives and friends.

In her apartment in Berlin, Fadwa Mahmoud watched the scenes from Saydnaya in shock, searching for her son Maher and her husband, Abdul Aziz Al-Khair.

Al-Khair was a long-time opponent of the Assad family, having been imprisoned by Hafez al-Assad in the 1990s, then released by Bashar in 2005, only to be rearrested again in 2012.

Al-Khair and two others were arrested upon their arrival at Damascus airport after a visit to Beijing, and have not been heard from since.

“This issue concerns every Syrian,” Fadwa said. “It goes to the heart of the truth and justice we all long for.”

After the storming of Sednaya prison, Omaya Khansho, an opposition activist and protest organizer from the city of Douma near Damascus, went to the mosques where the freed detainees were taken and to the hospital morgues where the bodies of the dead were deposited, searching for “friends of the revolution.”

They were all arrested in the early years of the uprising and later released, but disappeared. “They are definitely dead because the regime was particularly vindictive towards Douma, but people still want to close this file,” said Khanshou, 51.

Malek Salim, a civil servant, says he is ecstatic to see the regime fall after decades of secret opposition. But as an Alawite like the Assad family, he fears retribution because the security services were largely made up of members of the same sect.

Salim lost his brother and nephew when Islamist militants, including Jabhat al-Nusra, the predecessor to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, launched a violent attack on his village and other nearby towns in August 2013. Many of the nearly 200 people killed and more than 100 kidnapped remain missing to this day. “We are also in pain,” Salim said.

Source: Bloomberg