After Assad’s fall, Syrians search for lost loved ones – and a path forward

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Hamed is driving away from the gates of Syria’s infamous Sednaya Military Prison with a steady grip on the wheel. The sun is shining outside, but the darkness of the multistory complex – a network of torture chambers and cold cells cut off from the outside world by concrete walls and a latticework of braided barbed wire – is overwhelming.

“I, too, was held in Sednaya,” the Syrian taxi driver suddenly blurts. He had been incarcerated there for seven years.

“Thank God you are here,” replies Walaa, a schoolteacher and the Monitor’s translator. The exceptionally high death rate among inmates at Syria’s archipelago of prisons and detention centers is well known.

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For over 50 years, the Assad regime had a brutal network of prisons. Now that it has fallen, Syrians search for missing loved ones, seeking justice as they rebuild their society.

Hamed pauses and then takes a sharp breath. “Thank God I am here,” he agrees, his voice suddenly wavering from the effort to keep composed. “But I am sad for all those who are gone. All those people. What did they do? What fault do they have? I cry remembering.”

His pain pours out, like a long cry from Syria’s dungeons, a cry that was silenced during more than half a century of rule by brutal despots, Bashar al-Assad, and his father, Hafez, before him.

The former Sednaya inmate describes how his family paid exorbitant sums for “gentle” treatment in a place of torture and death. In reality, that payoff put him in the kitchen and gave him other duties – such as carrying the bodies of dead inmates into a room where they were sprayed with dissolving chemicals.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A lone chair sits in a room for prison staff in Syria’s Palestine Branch prison in Damascus, Dec. 17, 2024. Officials set fires throughout the complex, notorious for torture, to destroy evidence as the regime of Bashar al-Assad collapsed.

After stunned silence, Walaa ventures a follow-up question. “Do you remember names and faces? Was there anyone from Douma in your cell?” she asks, referring to a town near Damascus that was held by rebels from 2012 until 2018. (To protect Walaa, Hamed, and some others in this story, their surnames have been withheld.) 

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