Of all the horrors that Mohammed Ammar Hamami remembers from his stay in the infamous Sednaya military prison, the most vivid is the clanking of the execution tables as prison workers moved them to hang inmates.
Once every 40 days or so, prison guards removed the tables from under the feet of the condemned men. With the rope around their necks and their hands tied behind their backs, they died by hanging. Most of the bodies were cremated in the Sednaya crematorium, a prison located about 30 kilometers north of Damascus and which has become one of the symbols of the human rights violations of the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime.
“This is the noise we used to hear,” says the 31-year-old, as he drags the edge of one of the tables and lets the sound of metal against metal echo through the spacious room. “When we heard this noise we knew that a prisoner had been executed… Imagine sitting upstairs and knowing that prisoners are being executed downstairs,” he says.
On December 8, rebel forces took control of the prison and freed the prisoners. Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad and his family left the country in the face of a rapid offensive by Islamist rebels. Hamami was released after a hell of five years. He remembers being in his dirty, dark and unfurnished cell, along with the other 20 men, and hearing screams in the hallway before collapsing in shock when his father’s face appeared in the small window of the cell door.
A week later, the mechanic wanted to return to the Sednaya military prison with the intention of recovering the clothes he had left behind during his chaotic liberation, but also to try to understand that the experiences lived in what he calls “the killing machine” ” were real. He is very thin due to complications derived from diabetes that was not adequately treated during his stay in prison. Additionally, he is missing teeth due to beatings and still has three broken ribs.
“I wanted to see the life we live here from a different perspective,” explains Hamami: “After going out and breathing fresh air, now I notice the difference… We were the living dead.” “It has been like being born again. I’m not 31 years old, I’m seven days old,” he says.
Hamami was a fighter under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, which organized armed opposition to the regime after the brutal repression of the pro-democracy protests of the Arab Spring. He was arrested in 2019 and sentenced to death. His impoverished family, from the Ghouta neighborhood of Damascus, paid 76,000 euros in bribes to various branches of the security apparatus to get his sentence reduced to 20 years.
He is among the luckiest. Many families continue to search for any trace of the estimated 100,000 missing people in Syria, most of whom disappeared into the regime’s vast network of torture and detention centers. A week after The Guardian witnessed the extraordinary moment when the doors of Sednaya were flung open, relatives were still turning over the floor in the hope of finding secret cells and rummaging through account books and files strewn across vandalized offices.
“Until today they have not let us enter the prison or told us where it is, and we have had to pay many bribes. When we consulted a month ago, through another bribe, they told us that he was here and that he was fine,” explains a woman who is looking for her son and who says her name is Umm Ali. “When the rebel forces released the prisoners from jail, we couldn’t find our children. Even if they are dead, we want to have our children… Anyone who takes in these criminals, we want them back here,” he implores.
After the fall of brutal dynastic rule, the world now knows the extent of the crimes that Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, committed against their own people: chemical attacks, barrel bombs, forced recruitment, demographic engineering. Despite all the atrocities committed, it is difficult to understand the cruelty endured by prisoners in the Sednaya military prison, the most feared of all the regime’s detention centers.
When Hamami arrived at the prison’s “red wing” in 2019, which housed people accused of security crimes, he was placed on the ground floor, in the worst cell block. For the first four days he was not allowed to eat; For the next four, they didn’t even give him water.
The smell of the damp, filthy one-meter-square cells, which sometimes housed two men at a time, is unbearable. An orange jumpsuit used for executions lies on the ground. Brown water drips from a leaky pipe. The temperature inside the prison during The Guardian’s visit is 8 degrees.
Hamami was returned to the block several times during his imprisonment, sometimes for crimes such as making a tasbih, a string of prayer beads, from date stones.
“I had never seen this place with light. I knew it by touch,” explains Hamami, exploring with the light of his phone. In one cell you can read a name written on the wall, along with a date. “He is a friend of mine from Aleppo,” he says: “I didn’t know what had happened to him… it seems they executed him.”
After eight days, Hamami was taken upstairs, naked. He was ordered to face the wall before a dozen guards whipped his back about 100 times, by his estimate. The walls of the reception area are covered in black marks, which Hamami said were from whips and belts.
Cell four, at the end of the corridor, became his home for the next five years: a five-by-five room, without light, without furniture and with a rudimentary toilet, shared with 20 other men. Some had fought in the war, like him; a few were Alawites, a sect that traditionally supported the Government.
When Hamami returns to the prison to visit her as a free man, there are still damp blankets and clothes on the floor of cell four. Its old spot was in the left corner closest to the door. Hamami grabs two red sweatshirts to take home. She searches without success for a homemade sewing kit that she had hidden inside a blanket.
Thanks to the extortions that Hamami’s family paid every few months to reduce his sentence, his parents, his wife and his two children were able to visit him, separated a few meters by metal cages in the visiting room. He explains that they brought him medicine, food and clothing, although the guards first used everything that came through the prison doors. He admits that adapting to a new life outside of prison has been difficult for him. At first he did not recognize his children, who were waiting for him in the prison.
“My children ran towards me, I opened my arms and then closed them,” he remembers. Dazed by the morning’s events, at first I wasn’t even sure they were real.
A new Syria, liberated from more than 50 years of dynastic dictatorship and 13 years of civil war, remains a daunting prospect. This week’s clashes in the coastal province of Tartus between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that now controls the country, and the remnants of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, could be a sign of even more dangerous times ahead.
“We prisoners used to chat and say: ‘Even if they released us, as long as the regime remained in power, we would continue to live in terror.’ The first thing I thought about if I left was to take my family and leave the country,” explains Hamami: “But now, the country is ours, we will rebuild it, and we will start a new life.”
Translation by Emma Reverter
#living #dead #return #free #man #infamous #Syrian #military #prison #Sednaya
