Syria: Stories of people released from Saydnaya torture prison

These stories paint a picture of a place without hope, only pain.

The prisoners spent much of their time in silence without access to the outside world, so it is not surprising that they say they knew nothing of the rapid advance of the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria until they were freed. that morning.

Qasem said they could hear what sounded like a helicopter taking off from the hospital compound before the screams of men in the hallways. But in the windowless cell they couldn’t be safe.

Then the doors opened and the freed prisoners began to run as fast as they could.

“We fled from prison. We also fled from fear,” Rakan says, thinking of his young children and wife.

At one point in the chaos, he says, “I got hit by a car. But I didn’t care. I got up and kept running.”

He says he will never return to Saydnaya again.

Adnan also says he couldn’t look back at the prison as he ran crying towards Damascus.

“I kept going. I can’t describe it. I just drove to Damascus. People were running us off the road in their cars.”

Now he fears every night, when he goes to sleep, that he will wake up in prison and discover that it was all a dream.

Qasem ran to a village called Tal Mneen. It was there that a woman who provided food, money and clothing to the freed prisoners told them: “Assad has fallen.”

They took him to his hometown, where celebratory gunshots rang out and his family tearfully hugged him.

“It’s like I was born again. I can’t describe it to you,” he says.

Nihad Al-Salem additional information