EMILY KWONG, HOST:
How does a country heal from decades of brutal dictatorship? That is the road ahead for the people of Syria. After the Assad regime fell in late 2024, tens of thousands of political prisoners were freed. Most of them were kept in Sednaya Prison near Damascus. NPR's Jane Arraf and producer Jawad Rizkallah were recently shown around Sednaya by one of the prison system's longest-serving inmates who is now a free man. A warning - this report contains disturbing details of torture and executions.
FOUAD NAAL: Welcome. Welcome. Let's go.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Fouad Naal spent more of his adult life in prison than out of it - almost 21 years, most of it confined to a few square feet. On this day in December, Naal is a guide on one of the grimmest tours ever.
NAAL: (Speaking Arabic).
MOUAZ MOUSTAFA: "So after I was - they told me that I was to be executed, they brought me to this room, and I stayed in this room for over a year and a half."
ARRAF: That's activist Mouaz Moustafa interpreting. He's head of the U.S.-based organization, the Syria Emergency Task Force. Naal takes us through the huge prison, essentially untouched since the day Syria was liberated a little over a year ago.
(SOUNDBITE OF METAL CLANGING)
ARRAF: We walk through dark, dank hallways, concrete cells with metal doors wrenched open. Naal was a 30-year-old imam when he was arrested in 2004 for opposing regime policy. They detained his wife and, alone in a cell next to him, his 4-month-old daughter.
NAAL: So I can hear her cry, and they told me what I want - what I - what they need me to say, and I wrote it, and they get my kid out.
ARRAF: They released the baby after Naal falsely confessed to plotting to assassinate the president. For the next two decades, Sednaya, which held political prisoners, was a reflection of what was going on in the country. In 2011, when an uprising against regime rule started, security forces ran out of room for prisoners and sped up torture and executions. The civil war continued for 14 years. Inmates then were pulled out of their cells dozens at a time for a weekly shower. That's when the guards would beat or kick to death half of every group.
NAAL: (Speaking Arabic).
MOUSTAFA: And they keep doing it until they have half the population. So especially in 2011, 2012, 2013, at the beginning of the revolution. So every shower, half die.
ARRAF: Naal, who spent six years in this prison, then 13 years in another, does his best to describe the years of intense hunger, thirst and biting cold.
NAAL: They give me one blanket - on the ground and one blanket. So when I want to sleep, so I get down on my knees like that, and with my head between my legs so I have some warm.
ARRAF: He shows us a room where condemned men - gagged and blindfolded - would be led onto a platform and hanged.
MOUSTAFA: So you take one, two, three steps...
NAAL: And when you are up, they hang you with a rope. And they open the ground under you, and you will die in the same second.
ARRAF: In 2008, inmates rose up and took control of the prison after a guard deliberately stepped on a Quran, Naal says. Prisoners held out for more than six months, rationing supplies to a spoonful of food and a capful of water a day, he says.
(SOUNDBITE OF ITEMS CLATTERING)
NAAL: I like you to see another places where we bury our friends.
ARRAF: When guards shot prisoners with sniper rifles, the inmates buried more than 30 of them under the floors. Prisoners refused to let go of other bodies.
NAAL: The other ones, their friends - they didn't let us bury them. They want to keep them in front of them.
ARRAF: They kept the decomposing bodies with them for months. He says they considered the smell beautiful because the men were martyrs. Naal talks about the survivor's guilt of the day others arrested with him were executed.
NAAL: Very hard day because we know that our friends are going to be hanged, and we felt like it's - like, we are traitors 'cause we are going to stay alive.
ARRAF: Every wing, almost every room has a story behind it of misery and torture. And then he says something that drives home even more the sheer impossibility of outsiders ever understanding what he has been through.
Sorry.
NAAL: You know, I loved it here. Here we fight together. We slept together. We...
ARRAF: He pauses.
NAAL: We tortured together.
ARRAF: We were tortured together. He shows us a dark cell where he spent nine months in solitary, with only spiders for company. After enduring all this, Naal seems energetic and almost serene. He says what kept him sane was that he knew the Quran by heart.
NAAL: I speak to God, and God speak to me by Quran. So that's what keep me alive here.
ARRAF: Naal heads an association of ex-prisoners. Seven thousand of them have signed up.
NAAL: (Speaking Arabic).
MOUSTAFA: "We want these people to have family."
NAAL: (Speaking Arabic).
MOUSTAFA: "We want the former Sednaya prisoners to at least have opportunities to work."
NAAL: (Speaking Arabic).
MOUSTAFA: "We also need medical follow-ups and psychological help."
ARRAF: I asked him what should happen to those who imprisoned them, who tortured and killed so many Syrians. He says people need justice through the courts. Because, he says, if bloodshed starts again in Syria, nothing will stop it. Jane Arraf, NPR News, Sednaya Prison, Syria.
(SOUNDBITE OF SARAH SPRING'S "BECOMING AQUATIC") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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