Hoping for a miracle amid the stench of death

Heartbroken Syrians searching for missing loved ones are combing the grounds of the country’s most ­notorious prison in the desperate hope they might still be alive.

Hilala Meryeh, a 64-year-old Palestinian mother of four, weeps in the middle of the dingy identification room after finding her son's body at the Al-Mojtahed Hospital morgue in Damascus, Syria. He had been imprisoned and murdered by the Assad regime. Picture: AP

Syrians searching for missing loved ones are combing the grounds of the country’s most ­notorious prison, rifling through lists of detainees and chipping at the concrete floor looking for ­hidden cells or tombs.

Civilians, militia soldiers, lawyers and a rescue team from Turkey picked through heaps of clothes left in the cellblocks of the military-run Saydnaya prison, and stared at the red rope nooses hanging from a concrete wall behind the building.

As many as 50 people were hanged each day in the prison, the US State Department said in 2017.

Tens of thousands of people disappeared into the country’s sprawling detention network since the regime of President ­Bashar al-Assad moved to suppress a 2011 uprising.

Rebels opened Saydnaya on Sunday after ousting Assad, freeing detainees and allowing the public to look for the missing.

“Ninety-nine per cent of them are dead,” said Ammar Al-Bara, a lawyer asked by families to search for their relatives.

He pulled a sheet from a bundle of prison records and read from a table of names. “Executed, executed, dead from sickness, ” he said, pointing at the list.

Sadeq Al-Falaj, a 48-year-old Damascus resident, said he was looking for information about his nephew who had been taken by the security services a decade earlier. “We’re hopeful, but I feel like we’re looking for a needle in a haystack. We haven’t found even a trace,” he said as he stood among a pile of papers in a prison administration office.

The nephew, Jaber Al-Falaj, who was a sophomore philosophy major at a Damascus university, disappeared after his arrest in a student dormitory, his uncle said.

Jaber had stayed out of the protests against Assad in 2011 and even avoided political posts online, his family added. They had received no information about his whereabouts.

“If he’s dead, then there’s nothing we can do about it,” his uncle said. Cells that held large groups of prisoners were cluttered with discarded clothing, and thin mattresses were scattered on the floor. Etched on the wall of one cell were the words “Some day”.

Assad’s ouster has created an opportunity for Syrians to reckon with more than half a century of abuses by a police state run by the former leader’s family. With military backing from Russia and Iran, Assad remained in power for more than a decade after Syrians launched the 2011 uprising. He fled to Russia last weekend as opposition forces surged to the capital, while government soldiers surrendered.

After the uprising, the regime expanded its use of torture and mass arrests to an industrial scale, according to Western governments, human rights groups and survivors of the abuses. By 2022, some 100,000 Syrians had gone missing. Foreign nationals also disappeared.

Along with his use of chemical weapons and bombing of rebel-held areas, Assad’s prisons are a global symbol of his regime’s brutality and a key reason that an array of countries shunned him. Hundreds of thousands of people died during the course of Syria’s civil war, and 12 million people were uprooted from their homes.

Now, with rebel groups in control of the capital and working to restore order, Syrians are searching for information about the missing. At Damascus Hospital, a medical facility in the capital, tearful civilians pushed through the doors to look at dozens of bodies that medics said had been recovered from prisons since Assad’s fall. The stench of decaying bodies filled the air.

The bodies were on stretchers, in stainless steel lockers and on the ground in the courtyard adjacent to the hospital.

Women and men filed into the rooms, peeling back white sheets to reveal corpses. Some were desiccated and greying. Others had died only days earlier, according to forensic medical officials at the hospital.

Medics in white scrubs and masks struggled to hold back the crowd of civilians, some clutching photos of long-missing relatives.

“Just a second!” shouted one medic as he waved for the people to back out of a room full of corpses on tables.

“That’s my son! That’s my son!” screamed a woman, causing a ripple in the crowd. The mother, Damascus resident Amira Homsi, recognised her son from a pair of star tattoos on his chest.

“I wish my eyes went blind so I didn’t have to see this sight,” said Homsi. “I wish they hadn’t told me to come and identify him. He would have stayed in my mind the way he used to look.”

“Where are our children?” another women cried as she grasped at the walls, desperate for closure after their years-long ordeal. But no such closure was within reach for Yasmine Shabib, 37, who still could not locate her brother or ­father, both arrested in 2013.

The Wall Street Journal