Thousands of people have “disappeared” within Syria’s prison system in more than a decade of civil war.
Their families are in a desperate situation, forced to pay large sums of money to middlemen, government and security officials, to obtain any type of information about their loved ones, often to no avail.
On a main street on a hill in northern Istanbul, Malak, a Syrian woman, recalls the 2012 arrest of one of two of her teenage sons.
The oldest, Mohammad, was 19 when he was in the Syrian army and was asked to shoot two protesters in his own neighborhood.
He escaped, but security forces raided the farm where he was hiding and arrested him.
Shortly after, his second son, Maher, was also arrested: “He was 15 years old and they took him out of school simply because his brother had dropped out.”
Malak has not seen either Mohammad or Maher since then, but has tried again and again to find them. The only way he has managed to obtain any information has been by paying large sums of money.
In most cases, these payments were made to intermediaries who work for or are connected to members of the Syrian authorities.
For years, Malak dealt with a lawyer who promised him information about his children, mainly Maher. Every night, he asked her for money to pay middlemen or prison officials.
Over the years, Malak paid the lawyer more than $20,000, getting nothing. Malak now feels that she was deceived by people who lied to her.
“It’s like a drowning man holding on to a burning nail,” he says. “They exploit the feelings of a mother who is looking for her son.”
In 2017, after she herself was detained for several months, Malak left Syria with her youngest son, Ramez, and started a new life in Turkey.
Everywhere in her small apartment are photos of her two missing children.
Malak is now in his 50s, with red hair and a big smile on his bright-eyed face. But his gaze hides deep pain.
His story is far from unique. Many Syrians are losing huge amounts of money searching for their missing loved ones.
Paying bribes is assumed to be the only way to achieve anything, including finding information about missing people or getting them released.
The problem is not that it never works, but that occasionally it does.
Return from the dead
The origins of Syria’s civil war date back to the peaceful uprising of 2011, when many took to the streets to demand change. But Assad’s brutal regime cracked down on unarmed protesters, killing and detaining thousands.
Mohammad Abdulsalam was one of those protesters. He was detained at a checkpoint in the city of Idlib in early 2012. The officer told him that he was only going to be questioned for five minutes.
He was locked up in the notorious Seydnaya prison, 30km north of the Syrian capital, Damascus.
“I was tortured in the most brutal and cruel way,” he says.
At one point, his captors thought he had died from his injuries, and they took him to the “salt room,” where corpses were kept (covered in salt to prevent the bad smell).
“When I woke up,” he says, “I looked left and right and started touching dead bodies.”
When security guards at Seydnaya Prison discovered that Mohammad was still alive, they took him out of the salt room and took him back to his cell.
Mohammad’s relative was given a death certificate in 2014, saying he had died of a heart attack. However, his father refused to believe it and continued searching for him.
Through different intermediaries, he reached a family connected to President Assad and they reached an agreement.
He says that his father had to raise more than US$40,000 to guarantee his release. To do this he had to sell his family’s land, but Mohammad was released in 2017.
The “five minutes” lasted five years. She now lives in Istanbul with her family. Tragically, her father was killed in an air raid before he could see his son released.
Seydnaya prison
The UN General Assembly recently adopted a resolution to establish an independent institution for the missing in Syria to find out their whereabouts.
Meanwhile, numerous organizations have emerged to work with relatives of missing persons, such as the Association of Detained and Missing Persons in Seydnaya Prison (ADMSP).
His crime was having criticized the government in a letter to a friend. Like many, Riyad disappeared into the system, and his family did not hear from him for 15 years.
He was finally released six years ago, after spending 21 years in prison. He and a fellow prisoner created ADMSP to help families whose relatives were imprisoned in Seydnaya.
They began by interviewing former detainees. “We asked them, ‘Who was with you?’” Riyad says. He told the former prisoners not to repeat anything they had heard from other people, but only to say who they had seen in prison.
Riyad and his friend then entered that information into a database and cross-referenced it with the list of missing Syrians provided to him by relatives.
“We started comparing names… and we started giving news to the families about their children and what had happened to them.”
Forms of deception
Riyad is very concerned about the amount of money that families who approach him have paid to try to get information. He says that he knows some people who had to sell his house for it.
The ADMSP has done a detailed study of how much relatives have paid in dollars, calculating the average payment amount and then multiplying it by the UN figure for missing people (100,000).
They estimate that between 2011 and 2020, the sum paid was US$900 million.
Riyad and his team hold workshops to help family members identify when they are being deceived by middlemen.
He shows me a document that was given to the family members and explains why it is obviously false. “It has a logo,” she explains. “There is no intelligence branch in Syria with a logo.”
Other forms of deception are less easy to detect.
Riyad put us in touch with Kadri Ahmad Badle, who currently lives in Idlib and is trying to find his brother who was arrested in 2013.
Kadri says that just a few weeks ago, someone posted on Facebook that he had just been released from Seydnaya, and could help identify prisoners.
“We contacted him and he gave us details about my brother that no one knew, and even described his tattoo,” says Kadri.
The former prisoner put him in contact with a lawyer, who promised to secure his brother’s release for US$1,100.
The family made a first payment of US$700, but after that, the lawyer and the former inmate disappeared and blocked their phones.
Ten days later, they received an official death certificate saying that Kadri’s brother had died in Seydnaya in 2014.
The intermediaries
Riyad says most intermediaries offering help are working for or in collaboration with security or intelligence services.
This was confirmed to us by a Syrian lawyer we spoke to who recently fled to Lebanon. The lawyer – who prefers to remain anonymous – spent 10 years handling cases in the “terrorism court”, which deals mainly with civilian detainees arbitrarily arrested by Syrian security forces.
The court was created by presidential mandate in 2012 and its officials are appointed by the security forces. “[El tribunal] can prosecute someone for even liking something on social media,” he says.
Many of the defendants in this court will be sent to Seydnaya, if they are not already detained there. The lawyer adds that the court has been baptized “the court of millions” because of the amount of money that changes hands there.
“Corruption and bribery are part of the backbone of the Syrian regime, so any part of this regime can be bribed,” he points out.
The lawyer believes that the money is shared between the Syrian authorities: “Sometimes there are high-ranking officials who want a part of the pay.”
The lawyer has spent the last decade helping relatives of the missing, and says he has managed to find and free many from prison.
However, there are other people he has helped, such as Sana (not his real name), where he has not been successful.
Sana’s case
On a hot summer day in 2012, more than 20 security officers broke into her home and took her son, her husband and her brother.
Many people approached Sana to offer her information in exchange for money. On one occasion, her family paid US$20,000. They got nothing.
With the help of the lawyer, she checks the military police death records every month to see if any family members appear in it.
Meanwhile, the only thing left are the family photos. Every morning she makes herself a coffee and sits at the table, waiting for the moment when they come back and knock on her door.
“I live here with my memories,” he says. “His photos are here. I talk to them, I say good morning, even though someone might think I’m crazy. Maybe believing in it will give me a little more hope to move forward.”
The BBC contacted the Syrian government for comment for this report but did not receive a response.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c51rz9ddl79o, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-09-25 04:00:09
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