Lebanon - Accounts of Syrian Prisons Describe a Volatile Mix of Chaos and Control

New York Times
BEIRUT, Lebanon  - Ahmed Hamadeh had spent a year in a jail in a Damascus suburb when guards chained him to fellow inmates, marched them to an outlying military checkpoint, and ordered them to dig trenches for the soldiers. He concluded that the government had “lost its mind,” he recalled later, not only because the move risked a jailbreak, but also because of the arbitrary violence that followed.

Inmates at the Tadmor (Palmyra) Prison

Groups of five prisoners remained chained together, he said, even when they slept and relieved themselves. Those who grew exhausted were shot; Mr. Hamadeh, who had been picked up at a checkpoint for leading antigovernment protests, said he was forced to help carry away two bodies.

Weakened by a diet of eggshells, watermelon rinds and two daily pieces of bread, he held out for 12 days until a guard warned that he would be next, he said. The next day — on the Night of Power during the holy month of Ramadan, when prayers are believed to gain special force — Mr. Hamadeh and his four workmates used shovels and rocks to break their shackles and ran. Within days he was leading protests again. He called his escape “a miracle.”

Mr. Hamadeh’s account, told over Skype, and those of other former prisoners suggest an uneven mix of control and chaos inside Syria’s prisons and detention centers, laced with episodes of unpredictable cruelty. Government opponents believe that more than 200,000 people have been held in those jails in connection with the country’s civil war.

The prisoners’ stories, which could not be independently confirmed, reveal partial breakdowns of order beneath the surface of a still-functioning system, as well as the day-to-day negotiations that prisoners and guards engage in to survive a patchy conflict where neither side is entirely secure.

In the restive city of Homs, a kind of easing of tensions has held for months in the central prison, said a former inmate, Mohammed, after a revolt last year by prisoners packed shoulder to shoulder with inch-deep urine sloshing at their feet.

The guards lacked the staffing — and perhaps the stomach — to restore control by force, and the prisoners could not escape because the building is surrounded by government sniper nests, Mohammed said.

“We told them, if you try to come in, you will kill some of us, and then we will get your guns and kill you,” he said recently in Beirut, asking that only his first name be published for his safety.

So, he said, they struck a truce under which the prisoners would not try to break out of the prison and the guards would grant them more space, autonomy and food. The prisoners use cellphones, enhancing the signal with antennas built from soda cans and pot lids using instructions found on YouTube. Some have made their own swords, using ceiling fans coated with sandpaper as whetstones to sharpen steel from bed frames, according to Mohammed, who said he was jailed for providing food to families in Homs and freed in June in a prisoner exchange.

Because Syria’s government has not allowed inspections by the International Committee of the Red Cross or other independent groups, it is impossible to know how many people are imprisoned and under what conditions. But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in Britain, had tallied 30,000 people jailed as of April, and 200,000 who have cycled through detention facilities during two and a half years of conflict.

Former prisoners have described numerous cases of torture and rape in prisons and makeshift jails, many documented by groups like Human Rights Watch.

Mr. Hamadeh’s account gives a window into the current state of a notorious jail, the branch office of the air force intelligence agency in Harasta outside Damascus, and how one Syrian ended up there. He said he grew up poor in the nearby town of Saqba. He left school after the seventh grade to work as a carpenter and dreamed of building a house for his family.

When the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011, he became the area’s chanter and was known as “the nightingale” for his ability to lead crowds of protesters in lilting call-and-response rhymes. At a protest in Saqba in 2011, his face was wrapped in the old Syrian flag, adopted as the symbol of the revolt.

Within a year, he said, he had acquired a weapon, even as he continued humanitarian work like helping at field hospitals. The move made his father, an imam who remembered the brutal suppression of an armed Islamist uprising in 1982, uneasy.