The 33-year-old woman is one of thousands of detainees released in recent days following the lightning offensive by Islamist rebels who seized important cities in Syria in eleven days and removed President Bashar al-Assad from power on Sunday.
Syrian blogger Tal al-Mallouhi, detained in 2009 at the age of 18 and later convicted of espionage, has been released, her mother told AFP on Tuesday, highlighting her “immense joy” at meeting her.
After 15 years in Syrian government prisons, this woman still needs time “to realize that she is free, that everything is fine now and that the fear and terror have disappeared,” her mother, Ahd al-Mallouhi, told Agence France -Presse (AFP).
At the time of his conviction, the international community mobilized, with France reminding Syria of its international commitments on freedom of expression and the right to a fair trial.
Before being arrested in December 2009, just over a year before the start of the war in Syria, the young woman wrote poetry and commented on the social situation.
Accused of working for American intelligence (CIA), which her family always denied, she was sentenced to five years in prison, but authorities never released her at the end of her sentence.
“I used to see her for visits lasting an hour and a half, and every word was monitored,” said the mother.
The family will need time “to talk again” and rebuild itself, he added.
The regime of Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father Hafez in 2000, methodically suppressed any dissenting voice.
54 years later, the ‘Assad Dynasty’ falls in Syria
Since the start of the war in Syria in 2011, triggered by the brutal repression of pro-democracy demonstrations, more than 100,000 people have died in Syrian prisons, including under torture, estimated the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) in 2022.
On December 8, the rebels declared Damascus ‘free’ from President Bashar al-Assad, after 12 days of an offensive by a coalition led by the Islamist group the Levant Liberation Organization (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or HTS, in Arabic), together with with other Turkish-backed factions to overthrow the Syrian regime.
Faced with the rebel offensive, Assad, who was in power for 24 years, left the country and took refuge in Russia.
In power for more than half a century in Syria, the Baas party was, for many Syrians, a symbol of repression, which began in 1970 with the coming to power, through a coup d’état, of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, who led the country until his death in 2000.
