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Episode: Syria Unearths Years of Atrocities

Author: The New York Times
Duration: 00:30:39

Episode Shownotes

Warning: This episode contains descriptions of torture and death. It also contains audio of death and grief.Under Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian government set up a vast network of prisons and torture chambers that swallowed up tens of thousands of people. For years, those perceived as enemies of the regime would

disappear into the system, and their families would have no idea what happened to them.Christina Goldbaum, who has covered the events in Syria, takes us inside one of those prisons and tells the story of one man who survived to tell the tale.Guest: Christina Goldbaum, the Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Families of the missing are hoping that they may be reunited with loved ones or at least learn what happened to them.Amid the celebrations after the ouster of Mr. al-Assad, Syria has also found itself in the opening chapter of a nationwide reckoning over the horrors that his government inflicted.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Full Transcript

00:00:09 Speaker_00
I'm in Damascus, capital of Syria right now, and I'm walking through a prison that's underneath one of the intelligence branches in the capital.

00:00:23 Speaker_00
There are these three solitary confinement rooms, and etched onto the walls are messages from prisoners who were held here. One of the messages says, I love you, Mom. There are others that are praying to God. There's also an etching of a mosque.

00:00:44 Speaker_00
What's inside that folder? And earlier, as we were going through the building, we found a folder with pictures of what looked like prisoners who had been tortured and killed.

00:00:59 Speaker_04
And death certificates next to them.

00:01:08 Speaker_00
You know, when we first arrived in Syria, just a day after the rebels took the country, there was a lot of celebration, a lot of people out on the streets, finally feeling this taste of freedom.

00:01:23 Speaker_00
As the week has gone on and we've come to more and more of these prisons and torture facilities, it's just clear how, just how much of a reckoning the country is going to have to go through now to confront and reconcile with all of the horrors that happened over the past couple decades.

00:01:45 Speaker_02
From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. And this is The Daily. After the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the opening up of Syria, tens of thousands of people were released from prisons across the country. Many had been locked away for years.

00:02:06 Speaker_02
Today, my colleague Christina Goldbaum takes us inside one of those prisons and tells us the story of a man who made it out. It's Tuesday, December 17th. Christina, what was it like when you first got to Syria?

00:02:32 Speaker_00
So my colleagues and I drove into Syria towards the capital, Damascus, 24 hours after the rebels had seized the country. And the highway was filled with these very surreal scenes.

00:02:48 Speaker_05
Here's general security usually.

00:02:49 Speaker_01
Wow, this is the used to stop on Syria?

00:02:52 Speaker_00
There were checkpoints where usually you would spend hours being interrogated by police officers and security forces that had been completely abandoned.

00:03:03 Speaker_00
We saw posters of Bashar al-Assad that used to be ubiquitous, that had been torn down and either ripped apart or burned. And we also began to see, the closer we got to the capital, signs of the rebels who had entered the city.

00:03:18 Speaker_00
They were driving these cars that had been painted in this kind of beige mud, almost like a makeshift camouflage from their rapid offensive towards the capital. And then we saw people from Damascus who were out on the streets.

00:03:34 Speaker_00
They were putting their fingers in a V in the air, signifying victory, and they were cheering on the rebels as they drove past them. To celebrate this incredible moment in the country's history.

00:03:50 Speaker_00
But for a lot of people here, that moment is also about finally getting answers.

00:03:57 Speaker_00
The Assad government had set up this vast network of detention facilities and prisons and torture chambers that had swallowed up tens of thousands of people across the country. And for years, this was a complete black box.

00:04:11 Speaker_00
People would disappear into the system and their families would have no idea what happened to them, where they went, or whether or not they were still alive. But now, with the fall of that government, suddenly people hoped for answers.

00:04:25 Speaker_00
And as we were driving through the city, we saw a huge convoy of cars going to the epicenter of that system, a prison called Sanaya, which is one of the most notorious in all of Syria.

00:04:38 Speaker_00
And my colleague, Khawaja Saad, and I joined them as they went on that journey. As we were driving towards the prison, you can see leading to the prison there is this massive convoy of cars, all people who are trying to get there.

00:04:58 Speaker_00
We got caught in this traffic because there were thousands of people on Monday morning trying to get there.

00:05:04 Speaker_00
We ended up getting out of our car with a lot of other people and just walking down the road for about an hour until we reached the outskirts of the prison.

00:05:15 Speaker_00
We then walked with people up this kind of footpath that led up the hillside and to the prison gates.

00:05:21 Speaker_01
People inside were in an absolute frenzy. There were these crowds of people cramming into different cells.

00:05:24 Speaker_00
My brother-in-law, he's been in prison 2012. They were screaming the names of their relatives who had been lost into this prison. Some of them had printout photos of their sons or brothers or husbands.

00:05:55 Speaker_00
And were shoving them in people's faces, asking, have you seen this person? Have you seen this person?

00:06:00 Speaker_01
And walking around, there were these quiet testimonies of what life was like inside this prison.

00:06:12 Speaker_00
There were feces across the floor and messages scrawled into the walls, some of which were begging for death rather than staying there.

00:06:22 Speaker_00
And a lot of prisoners had escaped on Sunday morning after the government fell, but there were still thousands of others that families suspected of being in Sednaya who were still unaccounted for.

00:06:35 Speaker_00
And so these families were going around the prison looking for any kind of scraps of information, any clues as to where their relatives were.

00:06:43 Speaker_01
— What's over here? — This is another section of the prison. Look.

00:06:49 Speaker_00
You know, one of the first rooms that we walked into looked like maybe it had been an electrical room in the prison. And we came across one guy there who had a shovel in hand.

00:07:02 Speaker_03
What is he doing?

00:07:04 Speaker_00
And he was knocking against the wall and the floor, trying to hear an echo that maybe would signal there was something hollow underneath, maybe a room beneath the floor.

00:07:17 Speaker_01
He can see wires here, but where these wires are going?

00:07:20 Speaker_00
He started also kind of pulling apart the wires, saying, you know, where does this go? You know, again, thinking that maybe it led to something underneath the prison, some cells that were there.

00:07:31 Speaker_03
— There are people here, she said.

00:07:36 Speaker_01
I can hear.

00:07:36 Speaker_00
— As we stepped into another room, there was also a woman who seemed to be just convinced that she was hearing voices on the other side of a wall, and she was trying to get the guys around her who had these pickaxes to tear through it.

00:07:51 Speaker_00
Because she was saying that she heard voices there, she heard them there.

00:07:53 Speaker_01
— 12 years, her son. She doesn't know which prison, maybe he's here.

00:08:01 Speaker_00
She was looking for her son, who had gone missing 12 years ago. At one point, people believed that maybe there were hidden cells like three stories underground.

00:08:13 Speaker_00
And so they started picking up pickaxes and hammers and shovels and just tearing into the floors, trying to find any kind of shaft or opening or room that might have been hidden and people were maybe stuck inside.

00:08:28 Speaker_00
And as they were doing that, this kind of massive crowd started forming around them, because people thought that maybe they had discovered something, that they had discovered a secret door or a secret stairwell, and they wanted to get a glimpse of what was underneath.

00:08:40 Speaker_01
Move backward, move backward, let us work.

00:08:46 Speaker_00
And the few rebels who were there around them were screaming at the crowd, telling them to back up and give them space and let them work, because it was just such a chaotic scene. And Christina, did they find anything in all this digging?

00:09:04 Speaker_00
So hours and hours after tearing up this place, the rescue workers who were there said that they didn't think that there were any hidden compartments underneath the prison and that all the prisoners who were there and who are still alive were released already.

00:09:20 Speaker_00
But the next morning, there was also news that 38 bodies had been discovered in the prison, and they were brought to a hospital at the center of the city.

00:09:30 Speaker_00
So my colleagues and I went to that hospital and to the morgue, where there were forensic examiners going through each of these corpses. Trying to find any identifiable symbol, any tattoo, any birthmark, anything.

00:09:48 Speaker_00
Taking photos of them and then posting them on Telegram so that families could look through and see if they recognized any of these corpses.

00:10:00 Speaker_00
The doctors believed that some of those people had died days earlier, but there were others that they thought had been dead for weeks or a month.

00:10:08 Speaker_00
And you could smell that as they opened the kind of tarps and informal body bags they had, but this just stench that filled the room. Tons of people started coming there, determined to get a look at these bodies themselves.

00:10:29 Speaker_00
There were just throngs of women and men who were just shoving and trying to get into the examination room itself, saying that they didn't recognize any of the photos and they wanted to see the bodies themselves.

00:10:44 Speaker_00
And at one point as the day dragged on, one of the doctors just kind of gave up and said, OK, fine, if you want to see these people come in, open the doors.

00:10:53 Speaker_00
And this massive crowd of people came into this refrigerator room and started opening the tarps of bodies and looking at them in just this kind of horror. Some of them had shown signs of what looked to be torture.

00:11:14 Speaker_00
There were red marks around one of the necks of one of these bodies. Another had kind of puncture wounds that one of the doctors thought were from a hot iron that this person had likely been hit with many times.

00:11:30 Speaker_00
One of these bodies didn't have a face anymore. It was just this charred skull, just beyond recognition. It was incredibly intense. I mean, women were leaving that room in tears and screaming and cursing Assad and asking that he burn in hell.

00:12:02 Speaker_00
You know, until that point, I think people had really believed that there was a way of finding folks alive, that there were some secret rooms or some other detention facility or, you know, somewhere where they'd be broken free from.

00:12:14 Speaker_00
And I think it's one thing to see the scribblings on the wall of this really grim prison. It's another to see not just that people might have died, but how they died and what they endured before they died. Oh my God.

00:12:51 Speaker_00
But we did meet one family at the prison that day who got some answers. Their son had been released from Sanaya when the rebels took the city. And so he was able to tell us the story of life inside the prison for the first time.

00:13:07 Speaker_00
Thank you so much for having us in your house. So his name is Bilal Shahadi, he's 26 years old, and we met him at his house, me and my colleague Reham Morshad, who's translating, and walked in and sat down on the floor of their living room.

00:13:23 Speaker_00
There was a small heater there too because it was a pretty cold day.

00:13:28 Speaker_04
I grew up here in this village and it was actually good.

00:13:35 Speaker_00
And he was telling us about how he had grown up in the suburb of the city with a pretty big family. He's one of four brothers and a number of sisters too. His dad worked selling fresh water to people in the neighborhood.

00:13:51 Speaker_00
And, you know, he remembers when he was younger going to these amusement parks in Damascus with his siblings and going swimming and having barbecues on the hillside. And this life that felt very peaceful and full of promise for him and his family.

00:14:07 Speaker_05
There was a playing football. But when the war started in 2011, Bilal was in the sixth grade.

00:14:19 Speaker_00
And his parents got very nervous about everything going on, so they pulled him out of class. And pretty early on, the war started to take its toll on his family. Two of his older brothers were both arrested by security forces.

00:14:36 Speaker_00
His dad tried to get both of them back to their families without any luck.

00:14:42 Speaker_00
And at one point he was describing this to me and said how he had asked someone in the security forces for more information on one of his sons, and was told that his son would be released in two hours after questioning.

00:14:56 Speaker_00
And now he stayed in prison for 14 years. But it has been over a decade since. And why were Bilal's brothers arrested? So, like a lot of families in Syria, they never actually got a clear answer of what either of the brothers was accused of.

00:15:13 Speaker_00
And that's something that was pretty common under Assad's government.

00:15:17 Speaker_00
These kind of arbitrary arrests where people are picked off the street, thrown into prison, and families don't know where they went or what happened to them or what the charges against them are.

00:15:28 Speaker_00
But I think his brother's arrest instilled a lot of fear in him. He was conscripted into the army when he was 18 years old, as men are required to do.

00:15:38 Speaker_00
And soon after, when he sees the horrors of the civil war and the risks that Syrian soldiers are facing, he deserts the military and goes back to his family. But deserting the army is what eventually gets him arrested by the police as well.

00:16:00 Speaker_00
So he's moved from detention facility to detention facility, and eventually put in a truck with around 150 other people, all of them with iron cuffs on their wrists tied to each other, and brought to Sidnaya.

00:16:22 Speaker_02
We'll be right back. So, Christina, this man you met, Bilal, told you about how he got arrested and sent to Sidnaya Prison. What did he say about what life was like inside the prison?

00:16:44 Speaker_00
He described the conditions in the prison as being just absolutely horrifying. He's brought to this cell that's underground and rarely ever sees sunlight again. A tiny hole. There were about a hundred other people in the cell with him.

00:17:06 Speaker_00
Only one toilet in the corner of the room that all of them had to share.

00:17:08 Speaker_04
The cell always smelled like sewage and there was this kind of layer of grime across the floor and the walls.

00:17:28 Speaker_05
How much food were they getting?

00:17:30 Speaker_00
He said that usually they would only get one potato for eight people in a day and that they would have to cut up that single potato into tiny portions for everyone who was sharing it with him.

00:17:44 Speaker_04
In the best way, you will take a bigger slice.

00:17:48 Speaker_00
And they barely got any water with that too.

00:17:51 Speaker_04
So the people didn't think about anything except the food. And every morning... Okay, every day in our room, they take the names.

00:18:04 Speaker_00
The prison guards would come around and do a roll call of everyone in the cell. And when that happened, they had to have their faces against the wall. And he never actually saw any of the guards who were there. He only ever heard their voices.

00:18:23 Speaker_00
And then occasionally, he said often when they were in a bad mood or angry about something, they would drag one of the prisoners out and beat and torture him. Bilal said that occasionally he was the one who was brought out and taken to this room.

00:18:45 Speaker_00
As he was describing this to me, he kind of stood up and bent over, his hands by his ankles.

00:18:50 Speaker_04
And said that they would usually put an iron rod between his knees. Okay, okay.

00:18:54 Speaker_00
And then what happened? and then they would kick him. They would stomp on his face and they would hit him in the back.

00:19:14 Speaker_00
And he told us that usually when this happened, there would be other guards in the room who would be yelling curses at him and kind of cheering on whoever was actually beating him that day.

00:19:36 Speaker_04
— If anyone, if they beat anyone, all Sidnaya heard the screaming.

00:19:43 Speaker_00
— And usually other prisoners could hear whoever was being beaten or tortured that day from their cells.

00:19:49 Speaker_03
— They could hear the sound of… — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:19:52 Speaker_00
— They would hear them screaming and crying out for help, and they would know it would come the next time that they were pulled out of the room.

00:19:58 Speaker_02
— How does Bilal describe his mental state through all of this?

00:20:03 Speaker_00
He said it was absolutely unbearable.

00:20:05 Speaker_04
And he spent most of the two years that he was in Sednaya praying to die because that felt easier than enduring the torture anymore.

00:20:11 Speaker_00
And things continued on like that for a while. Until about a week and a half ago, when he told me he started to notice a bit of a change.

00:20:38 Speaker_04
They came a soldier to our room and they were seem afraid.

00:20:49 Speaker_00
What made you think they were afraid? He said it started with the roll calls that they used to do every morning. And typically they would say, roll call you animals to all of the prisoners in the cell.

00:21:00 Speaker_04
But then one morning they said, roll call you guys, which just struck him as being a little bit strange.

00:21:16 Speaker_00
— Somehow they were being more humane to the prisoners all of a sudden. — Exactly. And then the next day they asked them… — They told him, how are you? — …how they were in the morning, which he thought was even more strange.

00:21:28 Speaker_04
— Bilal turned his head.

00:21:30 Speaker_00
— And he was so surprised that he turned his head around to look at the guard.

00:21:34 Speaker_05
— He didn't beat him.

00:21:37 Speaker_00
— But he also wasn't beaten for doing that. — Hmm. — — The food, it was good.

00:21:47 Speaker_04
— And then, the next day… — The guards started giving the prisoners small cookies, which he hadn't had in the two years he had been there.

00:22:02 Speaker_00
And he told me that as this was happening, he was talking to the other prisoners, trying to figure out what exactly was going on.

00:22:08 Speaker_04
But they didn't even imagine that they were only days away from walking out the prison's gates and being free. And then on Saturday night, he told me, wake up.

00:22:33 Speaker_00
One of his cellmates shook him to wake him up and was telling him that something was going on, that maybe they would be freed.

00:22:39 Speaker_04
I told him, I want to go to sleep. Don't lie to me. Why are you telling me this?

00:22:44 Speaker_00
And Bilal didn't believe him. He told him to leave him alone. He was asleep.

00:22:48 Speaker_04
He told him, here, listen.

00:22:50 Speaker_05
And they hear Allahu Akbar.

00:22:55 Speaker_00
And Bilal hears people shouting, God is great, and he realizes that something is going on. And eventually he pieces together that one of the prison guards had stripped off his uniform, opened one of the cells, dropped the keys, and ran.

00:23:11 Speaker_04
He'd go, all the men, go out.

00:23:15 Speaker_00
And all of the prisoners from that cell had taken the keys, had unlocked the other cells there, and they were rushing out of the doors out of the prison.

00:23:24 Speaker_02
Christina, why had the guard done that?

00:23:27 Speaker_04
The officer, the regime officer, he changed his clothes.

00:23:33 Speaker_00
We don't know for certain, but it seemed like maybe the guard had heard that the rebels were nearing the prison and thought that if he opened the prison cells and wore civilian clothes, he could blend in with prisoners leaving themselves and escape.

00:23:49 Speaker_00
So you go out, you see that everyone is asleep. Where do you go? What did you do?

00:23:53 Speaker_05
So Bilal gets out of his cell.

00:23:55 Speaker_00
He runs to an office within the prison, finds a photo of Bashar al-Assad and burns it.

00:23:59 Speaker_04
And then he walks out of the prison gates.

00:24:16 Speaker_00
And in that moment, how would you describe how you felt?

00:24:19 Speaker_04
He told me that he felt like he was dreaming this entire time, that he couldn't actually believe that he had been freed.

00:24:45 Speaker_02
How has it been for Bilal to be home?

00:24:48 Speaker_00
I think the past week and a half has been a kind of whirlwind of emotions for Bilal and his family. I talked to his mom about this. For his mother, when you saw Bilal, tell me about that feeling.

00:25:01 Speaker_04
It's like a happiness. Crying and happy.

00:25:09 Speaker_00
On the one hand, they are incredibly grateful and happy and overjoyed that they finally have one of their sons home, that he's okay, that he's with their family, that he's alive.

00:25:24 Speaker_00
And Bilal himself is overjoyed to be free, to be able to be with his family and be back in his home and not live in the perpetual fear of being beaten or tortured in prison.

00:25:38 Speaker_00
But at the same time, I think with every day that's passed since the Assad government fell, his mom, his dad, Bilal, have all realized more and more that it's very unlikely his brothers are coming home.

00:25:59 Speaker_01
I think I lost hope. No. Why?

00:26:00 Speaker_04
Because they didn't come with the other songs. This is what she said.

00:26:18 Speaker_00
And a few days after we went to Bilal's home, I talked to his father, who had sent a relative back to Sinai, and he had found a death certificate for one of his sons.

00:26:29 Speaker_02
Oh, wow.

00:26:30 Speaker_00
But there still isn't any other news of the other.

00:26:35 Speaker_02
So they got one answer, but still don't have the other. Exactly. When you talk to Bilal's father, how was he feeling about this?

00:26:47 Speaker_00
He was incredibly sad and crying, but at the same time, he was talking about how he wanted revenge for what happened to his sons. He told me the first time he went to Sanaya, he wanted to burn it down.

00:27:00 Speaker_00
He wanted to find who did this to them and break their neck. He wanted some kind of justice for everything that his family had endured. He was also incredibly angry about the fact that he still, even now, doesn't have answers.

00:27:28 Speaker_02
Christina, do they plan on continuing their search in the coming days?

00:27:33 Speaker_00
They do. They have sent relatives back to Sidnaya. They've talked to friends who've gone to other detention facilities and have rifled through the papers there.

00:27:42 Speaker_00
I think that until they find something concrete, until they know where their sons were buried, if they're both killed, and can hold them in their arms themselves, there isn't really a sense of closure.

00:27:58 Speaker_00
That's what his father, what his mother kept coming back to, was wanting to have their bodies in their arms to know where they are and to be able to bury them themselves. Until that happens, their search will continue.

00:28:24 Speaker_02
Christina, thank you. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Monday, the German government collapsed after Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a no-confidence vote in the country's parliament.

00:29:04 Speaker_02
Shultz was forced to take the unusual step of calling for the vote because his three-party coalition splintered last month, leaving him without a parliamentary majority to pass laws or a budget. New elections are slated for late February.

00:29:23 Speaker_02
And a judge has rejected the argument made by President-elect Donald Trump that he is protected by presidential immunity when it comes to his conviction in the state of New York.

00:29:35 Speaker_02
Judge Juan Merchan said on Monday that the immunity argument does not apply because the case involves unofficial and personal acts that preceded Trump's first term.

00:29:47 Speaker_02
If the decision withstands the expected appeal, he could become the first felon to serve as president. Today's episode was produced by Rachelle Banja, Claire Tennesgetter, Lindsay Garrison, and Stella Tan, with help from Eric Krupke.

00:30:05 Speaker_02
It was edited by Patricia Willans, with help from Lindsay Garrison, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Rowan Nemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly.

00:30:22 Speaker_02
Special thanks to Huayra Saad and Reham Rufshed. That's it for the daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.