Idlib, Syria – “My title was quantity 1100,” Hala mentioned, nonetheless terrified of being recognized by her actual title.
Hala is likely one of the hundreds who’ve been free of the prisons of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, after it spectacularly collapsed amid a insurgent offensive in lower than two weeks.
She advised Al Jazeera that she had been taken from a checkpoint in Hama in 2019, accused of “terrorism” – a cost typically thrown at anybody suspected of opposing the federal government. She was taken to Aleppo, the place she has spent the time since in numerous prisons.
That’s till Syrian opposition forces arrived at Aleppo’s Central Jail on November 29, releasing her and numerous others.
“We couldn’t imagine it was actual and we’d see the sunshine,” she mentioned of the opening of the jail by insurgent forces led by Hayat Tahir al-Sham (HTS) in late November.
“The enjoyment was immense; we ululated and cheered, wishing we may hug and kiss them,” Hala mentioned of her liberators. “The enjoyment was even higher once I reached my household. It was as if I used to be born once more.”
The jail at Aleppo was amongst a lot of services opened up by HTS, whose lightning advance from Aleppo to Damascus has shocked many world wide and ousted al-Assad.
Hala was simply one of many greater than 136,614 individuals, who, in accordance with the Syrian Community for Human Rights, had been incarcerated inside Syria’s brutal jail community earlier than the insurgent advance.
Syria’s prisons have been a key pillar in supporting the al-Assad regime. Photos, smuggled out of Syria in 2013, confirmed what Human Rights Watch mentioned was “irrefutable proof of widespread torture, hunger, beatings, and illness in Syrian authorities detention services”, in what amounted to against the law towards humanity, the rights group mentioned.
Hala recalled the arrest and torture of one other woman, a 16-year-old who she says subsequently died. The woman’s arrest got here simply two months after her marriage, Hala mentioned, when she was seized by police together with a college pupil, an aged lady, and two docs who the police accused of getting handled revolutionaries.
Recollections ‘can’t be erased’
“It was just like the day of my start, as if it had been the primary day of my life,” 49-year-old Safi al-Yassin mentioned of his launch from jail in Aleppo.
“The happiness is indescribable,” he advised Al Jazeera.
Al-Yassin described listening with others to the sound of the combating drawing near the jail earlier than November 29, earlier than “calm prevailed, and we heard the sounds of chants”, he mentioned of listening to the victorious rebels.
“There have been about 5,000 prisoners,” he recalled. “We began breaking the home windows and smashing the doorways to get out. Even the officers and guards wore civilian garments and went out with us, benefiting from our exit from the jail in order to not be caught by the rebels.”
Al-Yassin was a blacksmith who made fishing boats in Baniyas, a coastal metropolis in Syria’s northwest, earlier than his detention.
Previous to his launch, he says he was virtually midway via a 31-year sentence for having taken half in one of many demonstrations sweeping the nation at the beginning of the Syrian revolution in 2011.
Over the following 14 years, he mentioned, he was subjected to “extreme bodily and years of psychological torture” at numerous areas inside Syria’s intensive jail system.
Moved round between services, every dishing out its personal brutal model of interrogation, al-Yassin spent a yr within the notorious prison at Saydnaya, a facility characterised by Amnesty Worldwide in 2017 as a “human slaughterhouse”, earlier than being moved to Sweida and ultimately Aleppo.
Al-Yassin mentioned his therapy in Saydnaya was “indescribable and unwritable”.
“The scenes I noticed can’t be erased from my reminiscence even till loss of life,” he mentioned, recalling the psychological picture of “an aged man coated in blood, who later handed away”.
‘Approaching loss of life’
Maher – who additionally didn’t wish to give his full title – was amongst these freed.
Arrested for “funding terrorism” in 2017, he had spent the final seven years detained with out trial inside Syria’s jail system. He thought he had been “forgotten” by the authorities “as if I weren’t human as a result of I used to be only a quantity”.
He described the horror of what he skilled and noticed in jail.
“Each minute felt like approaching loss of life because of the severity of the torture and its brutal strategies, which even an animal couldn’t stand up to,” he mentioned.
However maybe his most surprising second was when he encountered a relative within the infamous Mezzeh Jail in Damascus.
“A bus arrived and introduced prisoners who had been transferred to my cell,” Maher mentioned. “Amongst them was a detainee who resembled my brother-in-law. I hesitated at first and thought to myself, ‘This could’t be Ayman, it could’t be him – his legs weren’t amputated?’”
Maher described approaching the prisoner to verify the worst of his suspicions, solely to find that the amputee had “misplaced his thoughts”.
Ultimately, it was solely via a tattoo that Maher realised this was the person he had identified from life exterior the jail.
Mezzeh was simply one of many services the place Maher was held. After years of torture, he mentioned that he by no means anticipated to depart Aleppo jail.
However then, the surprising occurred.
“[As] the sound of gunfire drew near the jail, all of us began chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is great], and we may by no means imagine that this dream had grow to be a actuality,” he mentioned. “We left the jail after breaking the doorways, embraced the revolutionaries, prostrated to God in gratitude, and we had been saved secure till I reached the home of my sister, who lives in Idlib along with her household.”