While hundreds of residents of Homs rushed onto the roads on Friday, December 6 towards Damascus, worried about the rapid advance of the rebel coalition led by the radical Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), others have regained in recent hours a freedom that they no longer dared to dream of.
By pushing the regime forces out of the cities of Aleppo and Hama, HTS fighters and their allies, commanded by Abu Mohammed Al Joulani, took control of government buildings but also regime prisons, which they immediately opened the grids. Hundreds of prisoners, including political opponents, have been released in recent days, as in the Tariq Bin Ziad and Al-Sabil prisons in Aleppo.
In Hama, an insurgent military leader named Hassan Abdel Ghani announced Thursday, December 5, that his forces “had freed hundreds of unjustly detained prisoners” at the central prison. According to Syrian journalist and activist Mansour Omari, this establishment served as a stopover before the transfer of detainees to Saydnaya prison, 30 kilometers from Damascus. A sort of “extermination camp” and torture of the regime, where around 30,000 detainees died between 2011 and 2018, mainly political prisoners.
“We were 1500, 50 per cell”
Videos filmed by Syrian journalists, who struggle to hide their own emotion, showed scenes of jubilation and embraces, Thursday, December 5, outside this prison complex. “We are done with this tyrant. We are done with Hama prison. There were 1500 of us, fifty per cell! May God destroy Assad’s heart as he destroyed ours”declared an old man, who still struggled to believe in his release, on Thursday in front of a camera on the Al-Askari channel.
Beyond the often unexpected reunions, residents have discovered members of their families whom they sometimes believed to have been dead for years. “I thought my cousin was dead. He had actually been detained by Assad since 2012”testifies a Syrian from Aleppo who took refuge in Turkey on the social network X. By posting before and after photos, he explains that his cousin Mahmoud disappeared as a child and that he emerged from detention as an adult.
Since the start of the civil war in 2011, moukhabarat – the Syrian intelligence services – are accused of being at the origin of a dizzying number of forced disappearances and arbitrary arrests, thanks to an unfair system. The NGO Syrian Human Rights Network estimated in 2020 that at least 149,360 Syrians were detained or victims of enforced disappearance. A figure taken up by the American Department of State.
Detainees declared dead by the regime
Unlike the spectacular attacks carried out in recent years and still episodically by Daesh on prisons in northeastern Syria to recover its fighters detained by Kurdish forces, these releases highlight another reality. In recent hours, they have been closely followed by the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have had to flee the country over the past thirteen years, without knowing what had happened to their loved ones.
On the social network He spent twelve years in detention but the Syrian regime declared him dead and sent a death certificate to the family.
