At the country’s most notorious prison, Syrians confront their worst fears: that they will never know what happened to the loved ones who disappeared.
People came by the thousands the day after the rebels arrived in Damascus, racing down the once-desolate stretch of road, up a jagged footpath cut into the limestone hillside and through the towering metal gates of Syria’s most notorious prison. They flooded the halls lined with cells, searching for loved ones who had disappeared into the black hole of torture prisons under Bashar Assad’s government.
Protesters, activists, journalists, doctors, aid workers and students were snatched from their shops, plucked from university classrooms and yanked from their cars at checkpoints by the secret police — never to be heard from again.Daniel Berehulak /The New York Times “They were liars,” one woman, Aziza Mohammed Deek, said of those in Assad’s government. “They were all liars.”Relatives clung to hope that their children, siblings or spouses had survived. And so, after rebels swept into Damascus last week, throngs of people rushed to prisons and detention facilities across the country.
Later that afternoon, the earsplitting clap of a land mine exploding drew a throng of people to the top of an escarpment looking for what had happened. Hours later, crowds rushed to the escarpment again to catch a glimpse of the clouds of smoke from Israeli airstrikes pummelling a hilltop in the distance — which Israel says is part of its effort to destroy weapons and military facilities to keep them out of the hands of Islamic extremists.
Like thousands around him, al-Debs had abandoned his car three kilometres from the prison’s entrance and arrived on foot. He wove around the cars stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic — passing a man praying in the back of his pickup truck, the road too crowded to lay down his prayer mat, and around a group of women sobbing into their palms and crying out for God.
“They promised he would be released,” she said, wiping tears from her cheek with the palm of her hand. One man began pounding a spade into the wall, sending bits of concrete flying into the air. Syrians show photos of missing relatives at Al-Moujtahed Hospital’s morgue, where bodies of prisoners found at the notorious Sednaya prison were brought.One had no face to recognise; only a blackened skull remained.
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