Financial Times: Inside the Syrian prison at the heart of Assad's police state

[Dennis Donovan]

Financial Times - (archived: https://archive.ph/dRvtY ) Inside the Syrian prison at the heart of Assad’s police state

On the outskirts of Damascus, Saydnaya holds the secrets to the fate of thousands who disappeared under the dictator



Raya Jalabi in Saydnaya and Sam Joiner, Alison Killing, Peter Andringa and Chris Campbell in London
3 hours ago

Every night for the past 13 years, Rana Aankir has dreamt of her son Raed, his delicate drooping eyes smiling at her as he walks out of the family’s front door in Homs.

In her dreams, he wears the same red sweatshirt he threw over his shoulders before running off to a protest, something she learned only weeks later when he never came home.

Raed was just 16 years old when state security forces swept him up in their crackdown on the popular uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s regime that morphed into a brutal civil war. Over the years, his mother sold most of her belongings to bribe officials for information on which of the regime’s vast network of prisons he was in. It took six years before she learned he was in the most notorious of all: Saydnaya.

“I’ve been searching for him for 13 years. He’s my entire world, he is my life,” said Aankir, who was wandering the halls of the ransacked prison on Monday, desperately searching through stacks of papers and official-looking notebooks for a trace of her long-vanished son. “I need to know what happened to him. I need to find him.”

Assad’s downfall on Sunday sparked jubilation across Damascus. Yet the scenes only a day later at Saydnaya captured the despair and devastation left amid the euphoria. Aankir was among thousands drawn to the heavily fortified building on the city’s outskirts, searching for the ghosts of the loved ones that have haunted them since their enforced disappearances. With Assad gone, they hoped they would now finally find answers to years of pain in the labyrinths of his police state.

https://on.ft.com/41s7W3A /snip

[Mike 03]

1. Hopefully the new regime is in contact with human rights groups

and the International Criminal Court(s) really should be permitted to do a full investigation as soon as possible.

The other thing: All documents should be preserved. The rebels really should do all they can to preserve papers, computers, etc... Anything that might allow families to track down what became of missing persons. Not every regime keeps great records. One reason we know so much about the Holocaust is because the Nazis kept stupendous documentation and did not destroy most of it at the end of the war.