A horrifying glimpse of Syria’s torture cells

A young Syrian man is walking down a street in Damascus. He is a computer geek who likes rock music and basketball, and he’s enjoying his summer break from university. A car draws up beside him. He’s shoved inside and blindfolded. Shortly after, he finds himself strung up by his wrists in a dungeon. A thick power cable slices through the air and lands on his back. He screams. ‘You want freedom, right?’ yells the torturer. The lash descends again. ‘Here’s your freedom.’

The victim – the authors of Syrian Gulag protect him with the alias ‘Akram’ – had ‘liked’ a social media post criticising the Assad regime. Akram was to suffer through three months’ incarceration and torture at the Air Force Intelligence prison at Mezze military airport in Damascus. His misfortune is known in Syria as being ‘behind the sun’. Syrians who fall foul of the security forces disappear into the darkness of their country’s prison system. Akram survived his ordeal and later fled to the Netherlands. He was relatively lucky. Many detainees vanish forever, tortured to death or simply exterminated.

As far as the international media is concerned, the Syrian uprising is largely over and attention has mostly shifted elsewhere. Nevertheless, monstrous internal repression continues. In order to ensure its survival, the regime terrorises the population on an enormous scale. Its main instrument is Syria’s prison system. The primary role of the prisons is not to punish wrongdoers. They are there for the annihilation of political opposition. In Syrian Gulag, Jaber Baker and Uğur Ümit Üngör present the first detailed overview of the prison system. They have carried out more than 100 interviews with surviving detainees, as well as former prisoner workers and many other eyewitnesses. They have also drawn upon a huge amount of archival material. The results are profoundly shocking.