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© Photo: Syrian doctor Rania al-Abbasi was arrested with her children two days after the arrest of her husband. Their fate has been unknown for 12 years (social media)
In one of Assad’s prisons, shock was spilling out of the faces of the female detainees. They were afraid to believe that they were indeed free. One of them asked the young men of the armed opposition, “Where do we go?” Others seemed confused and lost, as if getting their lives back felt even more distant than a dream.
There are many stories, of intersecting cruelty and injustice, of Syrian female prisoners who were subjected to all kinds of psychological, physical, and sexual torture in the prisons of the Assad regime that has now fallen, forever.
The search for secret prisons continues
Thousands of prisoners in Syria have experienced all kinds of torture and abuse. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), there are an estimated 300 thousand prisoners in Syria. Other reports have indicated that 40 thousand among them are women.
Rescue teams are still searching for more prisoners languishing both under and above-ground, as some prisons—which are unofficial and undeclared—have no known roads leading to them. This delay in finding them or information about them is a threat to the lives of many detainees. We can imagine what conditions they are in, what their stories are.
Rescue teams have brought drilling equipment to Sednaya prison to break through the concrete and reach the Red prison after suspicions were raised about the existence of secret underground detention centers with coded doors and secret, underground entrances. This is neither fiction nor film. It is not Guantanamo. It is Assad’s prisons.
Videos of male and female detainees taking breaths of freedom abound, among them children too, most of whom were born in prison. But available information confirms that the number of released prisoners is minimal relative to the total number of people who have been detained and the records and lists held by human rights organizations. Convoys of cars and pedestrians were seen heading towards Sednaya prison to search for sons and daughters and loved ones who were disappeared in Assad’s dungeons.
Systematic torture of women
According to the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison (ADMSP), conditions in the prison were at their worst between 2011 and 2015, the first years of the revolution, and the number of prisoners declined because they were liquidated. ADMSP confirmed that the Syrian regime executed between 30 and 35 thousand prisoners between 2012 and 2022, either in a direct manner, under torture, or as a result of a lack of medical care and starvation. Bodies were transported after execution and buried in mass graves.
Women’s prisons in particular had their own special share of torture and abuse. In a report issued in 2024, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warned of the Syrian regime’s practices against women, which range from rape and psychological torture to insults and extortion. The Monitor considered that the regime and its affiliated militias are practicing systematic and continuous violations against female Syrian detainees.
Based on international human rights reports, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor accused the regime and its supporting militias of practicing widespread and systematic violations against female detainees and of using women as bargaining chips in prisoner exchanges.
The Monitor relied on the testimonies of 10 women selected from a total sample of 53 interviews with Syrian women who were detained between 2012 and 2014.
Among the methods of extortion was the rape of female prisoners in front of their relatives to extract confessions, or the torture of women’s relatives in front of them to force them to confess.
The “human slaughterhouse” and the “black hole”
Sednaya prison was one of the most fortified military prisons during the reign of Hafez al-Assad and later with his son Bashar al-Assad. It was dubbed the “Red prison” in reference to the bloody killings and torture it witnessed. It has also been called the “black hole” and the “human slaughterhouse.”
Now that the prisons have been opened, there is no need for reports to know what Assad did to women and men. The faces of those who came out of the dungeons speak volumes. The face of a boy, no older than three, standing wide-eyed as the men of the opposition opened the doors… this face sums everything up.
One of the former detainees said in a televised interview, “Mercy was when the jailer insulted you instead of your mother, sister, and entire lineage. I spent years at the mercy of sick and spiteful people who were carefully chosen by the regime to destroy us. They harbor spite against all groups in society, all the Syrian people.”
All the United Nations and human rights reports narrating the stories of some detainees—the daily torture, weekly executions, deprivation of food and medical care, psychological torture, beatings, rape—all those reports have proven to have barely covered the reality of things. The truth has shocked us all, shocked humanity. In those dungeons lie thousands of people whose lives were frozen by Assad’s sadism. They had air and sunlight taken away from them.
After the end of 50 years of the Assad family’s rule, from Hafez to Bashar—and this is undoubtedly one of the most important political and humanitarian events of the century—the Syrian and Lebanese people have the right to celebrate. The Lebanese also endured a harsh era of Assad’s guardianship, during which thousands of Lebanese were arrested, killed, and kidnapped since the Civil War in Lebanon.
After these long 50 years, we have indeed survived. Everyone who has lived under this regime can now consider themselves a survivor. As for that beautiful woman who, when invited to leave the prison, asked, “Where do we go?” I would like to say, “To freedom.”
And to all the families of detainees whom I have met in my life and with whom I have had meetings that shook me and my humanity, I also want to say, “It’s okay. Let’s move on to freedom.”
