Accounts of Syrian Prisons Describe a Volatile Mix of Chaos and Control
Accounts of Syrian Prisons Describe a Volatile Mix of Chaos and Control
By ANNE BARNARD and HWAIDA SAAD 41 minutes ago
Reports from former prisoners reveal partial breakdowns of order inside
the country’s prisons and detention centers, laced with episodes of
unpredictable cruelty.
By ANNE BARNARD and HWAIDA SAAD
Published: August 24, 2013
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.
Ahmed Hamadeh, shown at a demonstration after his
escape from jail, was picked up for leading antigovernment protests.
Multimedia
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.
Mr. Hamadeh was arrested at a pop-up checkpoint. For 45 days, he said,
investigators tortured and interrogated him, asking what kind of weapons
he had, who had supplied them, why he had taken up arms and who had
incited the protests.
Guards beat his feet with sticks, shocked him with electricity and
burned plastic bags, letting them melt onto his skin, he said. Finally,
they tied his hands behind his back and lifted him up by his arms. He
confessed to being a fighter.
With nothing to wear but underwear, he was moved to a cell with 117
other men. Prisoners slept sitting up, their heads on one another’s
shoulders. An infection made his skin “like fish scales,” he said.
Prisoners bartered with bread rations. For an antibiotic pill, he went
without bread for two days; fasting for three days brought a pair of
pants.
Worse, he said, was the guards’ vulgar talk about his sisters and
mother. “I used to cry discreetly all night,” he said. “I didn’t want
them to see my tears.”
One day, he and nine other prisoners were taken in chains to an outpost
of about 60 Fourth Division soldiers, for what guards called a “field
trial”: dig trenches or die.
It was unclear why the authorities would risk jailbreaks by using
prisoners for outside labor. Mr. Hamadeh said he was told the trenches
were needed for the troops at the checkpoint to defend against rebel
attacks. Former detainees said it appeared that the soldiers either did
not want to waste limited personnel or energy digging them themselves,
or had simply devised a new punishment for the inmates in the form of
forced labor.
“I used to beg the soldier to give me few minutes to nap,” Mr. Hamadeh
said. “Sometimes I kissed his boots for more water. Sometimes he would
agree; sometimes they beat us.”
Talking to the soldiers was technically forbidden, he said, but added,
“I know from the soldier’s face whether it’s possible or impossible to
talk to him.”
One of the talkative ones warned him of his impending execution.
Concealed by the trench they had dug and making noise as if they were
working, Mr. Hamadeh and four workmates hammered at their chains.
Once they were broken, Mr. Hamadeh said, he tossed away his chain,
making it impossible to hide what they had done. He said the move had
been inspired by the classic film “Lion of the Desert,”
about the anticolonial Libyan insurgent Omar Mukhtar in which fighters
tie their own feet before a battle to head off the temptation to flee.
“I didn’t want to retreat or change my mind,” he recalled later.
He told his fellow inmates, “We’re dead now.” They scattered and ran. The guards shot, but missed.
Walking along a mined, rutted area, he made it safely — to his disbelief
— 150 yards across the front line to rebels in neighboring Erbin.
Abu Hassan, a rebel commander there, heard heavy gunfire that night from
the government side of the line, and he put his men on alert. He was
shocked to see two men jump into a sewerage ditch and emerge with their
hands up. One shouted his name, Abu Rami Shukor, and dropped to his
knees to thank God. Abu Hassan, who gave only a nom de guerre for safety
reasons, recognized him as a long-imprisoned activist. The other was
Mr. Hamadeh. (Because the escapees ran in different directions, he is
not sure what happened to the other three.)
“I don’t know how they survived,” Abu Hassan said. The two were taken to
a makeshift hospital and then to a mosque in Saqba where, according to a
video of the proceedings, they entered to cries of surprise and joy.
“I’m like a newborn baby,” Mr. Hamadeh said. “I was afraid I would die without seeing my mom.”
Now, he said, he plans to dive more deeply into the fighting — first, he
said, by attacking the jail, where he fears inmates will face
retribution, amid rumors that many guards were executed for the blunder.
“I should move to save them,” he said.
And he is back to chanting. He sang — backed by performers dressed as cartoon mice — at a holiday celebration
for the children of detainees. And days after his escape, he was
leading a protest of about 200 people in an alleyway. Boys jumped and
danced as he called out the lines. “Syria is free and proud,” he called.
“We are calling for freedom.”
COPY http://www.nytimes.com
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