DIOGO BERCITO – The overthrow of Bashar al-Assad means the end of symbols of a family dictatorship of more than 50 years, and one of the most striking images was that of hundreds of people entering a regime stronghold, the feared Saydnaya prison.
Assad’s fall moved Omar Alshogre, 29, a well-known former inmate of that prison. “It’s the most beautiful thing to see a dictator fall after having tortured him and killed his family”, he tells the reporter, over the phone.
Today a human rights activist, Alshogre speaks from Sweden, where he took refuge in 2015 after escaping from Saydnaya – a labyrinth of tunnels, cells, mass graves and torture apparatus known as “the butcher shop of humanity”. Rebels have released thousands of political prisoners in recent days, one of the most important events in the context of Assad’s fall. Images are circulating of Syrians reuniting with relatives presumed dead decades ago.
“I dreamed about this for so many years and worked so hard for it,” says Alshogre. “The regime will never again imprison people in Saydnaya, and this makes me regain some of my faith in humanity.”
Built in the 1980s, about 30 kilometers north of Damascus, Saydnaya was Assad’s main political prison. According to Amnesty International, it had the capacity to incarcerate around 20 thousand people.
The butcher shop’s reputation came from the frequent executions carried out by the regime, without trial. Also according to Amnesty, around 13,000 people were killed there, between 2011 and 2016 alone, in the midst of the civil war that broke out in the country.
Videos released in recent days by activists and the international press show cells without windows, emaciated bodies and a macabre torture machinery with concrete presses and incinerators.
Alshogre was 17 years old when he was arrested in 2012. Soldiers showed up one day at his aunt’s house and detained him and three cousins - two of whom later died in prison. He says he never knew the reason for the arrest.
He passed through ten installations until he reached the hell of Saydnaya. The first thing that caught his attention were the screams of prisoners under torture, asking to die. “It’s something that breaks anyone.”
He was beaten, electrocuted and had his nails pulled out by Assad’s soldiers. He only managed to leave in 2015 when his mother managed to save US$15,000 (today, the equivalent of R$90,000) to bribe the regime.
The images that circulate now, in Alshogre’s words, are insufficient to express what that place means. The terror, he says, is not in the poor sanitary conditions or in the crowded cells, where prisoners slept standing up. “It was the scream of people being tortured, the fear between the walls, the fact that you knew you could die at any moment, that you would never see your family again, that you would never breathe fresh air again.”
The world had some idea what was going on. In 2013, a Syrian soldier known by the code name Caesar had smuggled thousands of photographs showing torture and malnourished prisoners.
There is a well-established literary genre in the region, including reporting on the reality in prisons. One example is the novel “The Shell”, published in 2018 by Syrian Mustafa Khalifa and translated into English.
Alshogre has also dedicated his life, since his release, to denouncing the regime’s crimes. He studied in the United States and collaborated with a number of large humanitarian organizations on behalf of political prisoners. Hence his frustration with the international community, which he accuses of not having done enough. The end of Assad took almost 14 years after the start of the war in 2011 – and cost the lives of more than half a million people, according to estimates.
“All these democracies have failed”, declares Alshogre, who returned to this position more than once during the conversation with the reporter. “They allowed us to suffer in silence, to be tortured in silence.”
There is now considerable concern outside Syria about the country’s future. The faction that overthrew Assad, called HTS (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, in Arabic), is considered terrorist by the US.
Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, became part of the Al Qaeda network. He only left her in 2016 and since then has made an effort to present himself as a moderate figure.
It is not clear, for now, whether Jolani will fulfill his promises to respect, for example, the rights of religious minorities and women. Your group has a known authoritarian bias.
For Alshogre, however, the rebel onslaught was precisely the reaction of a population tired of waiting for the world to help them. “The Syrians realized that no one cared about us, and we took action ourselves.”
He now hopes that foreign powers will help the country deal with the thousands of political prisoners, who need physical and mental health care. “It’s a chance to improve their reputation.”
