Shaking, unable to speak and suffering from severe memory loss, the torturous experiences of Syrian inmates released from the Assad regime’s prisons have been laid bare in harrowing images and videos emerging from the country.
While the release of thousands of prisoners has led to joyful scenes, with families reuniting with loved ones they thought they would never see again, the impact of the brutality they endured will stay with many forever.
The psychological terror that guards subjected prisoners to has left many with signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, while ritual beatings, torture and starvation have left deep physical scars.
Some of the inmates’ ordeals began long before Bashar Al-Assad came to power in 2000, with an unknown number locked up under the brutal regime of his father Hafez and kept behind bars for decades before being released in recent years. days.
Among them was Jordanian national Osama Bashir Al-Bataineh, who this week was released from Sednaya, a prison known as the ‘Human Slaughterhouse’, after 38 years in captivity.
The emaciated figure has become a shadow of his younger self, barely recognizable as the young man photographed in Jordanian media.
He was arrested in 1986, when he was just 18 years old, authorities said, and his family reported him missing at the time.
Osama’s father had desperately searched for any trace of his son for years, allegedly paying officials hefty bribes to help secure his son’s release, but to no avail.
Osama Bashir Al-Bataineh was released from Sednaya after 38 years of captivity
Images shared by Jordanian media allegedly show Osama Al-Bataineh as a young man.
An aerial photograph shows people gathered at the Sednaya prison in Damascus on December 9.
The video shows Osama apparently unable to speak after being released, staring at the people gathered around him.
“He was transferred from Damascus to the Jaber border crossing (with Jordan), where he was handed over to border guards,” Jordan’s foreign minister said.
After years of his family not knowing his whereabouts, Osama was located in Syria “unconscious and suffering from memory loss” this week, Jordanian Foreign Minister Soufian al-Kodat said.
The video shows Osama seemingly unable to speak even as chatter rages around him, staring blankly at the people who helped rescue him after years behind bars.
“He was transferred from Damascus to the Jaber border crossing (with Jordan), where he was handed over to border guards,” Kodat said.
The minister confirmed that Osama had finally been reunited with his family on Tuesday morning.
The rebels who overthrew Assad on Sunday opened prisons across the country, freeing thousands of detainees.
Civil society groups had long accused Assad of presiding over a brutal regime of arbitrary detentions, torture and prison killings.
Many foreigners were detained, including Lebanon’s Suheil Hamawi, who returned to his country on Monday after being locked up for 33 years.
The Arab Organization for Human Rights in Jordan said on Tuesday that there were still 236 Jordanians detained in Syria.
The same year Osama was detained, Syrian soldiers arrested another 18-year-old university student, Ali Hassan al-Ali, who remained behind bars until this week.
Moammar Ali had the biggest surprise of his life when, after 39 years of searching, he found his older brother Ali, pictured on the right, outside a prison, now 57 years old.
His family had not seen or heard from him in almost 40 years, but on Thursday his younger brother Moammar Ali said he had the biggest surprise of his life when he found a man he thought was his brother.
Moammar’s phone exploded with texts and calls when people sent him a photo of a man in his 50s standing outside Hama central prison in northern Syria.
His friends said the man looked like Ali, and Moammar said he soon realized “this is my brother.”
A view of the corpses, which were tortured to death, at Al-Mujtahid Hospital as teams carry out an investigation in secret compartments of the Sednaya prison after the fall of the Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, on 10 December 2024.
talking to the guardianMoammar said: ‘There was no place in Syria that we did not visit. We went all over the country asking what happened to him. One day they would admit they had him in prison, the next day they would deny it.’
The last information he received was that he was detained accused of political agitation.
But now he will finally be reunited with his brother, who is now 57 years old. “He came out of prison as an old man,” said his brother.
Many others have not made it out of Assad’s prisons. Amnesty International has documented thousands of murders in Sednaya prison, whose name has become synonymous with the regime’s worst atrocities.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated in 2022 that more than 100,000 people had died in prisons since the start of an uprising in 2011 that led to civil war.
Disturbing images and footage released this week have shown horrified rescuers pulling dozens and dozens of body bags from the depths of Sednaya.
Amnesty International claims that dozens of people were secretly executed each week in the prison, estimating that up to 13,000 Syrians were killed between 2011 and 2016.
The leader of the Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which played a leading role in the lightning offensive that toppled Assad, has vowed to pursue officials, security forces and army officers who “tortured” Assad. Syrian people.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights says that since the start of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, more than 157,000 people remain arrested or have been forcibly disappeared, including 5,274 children and 10,221 women. It also claims that more than 15,000 people have died under torture in that time.