A Syrian Political Prisoner's Account of 13 Years of Hunger and Torture for an Interview

One of the first images that circulated on social media from Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime was of prisoners staring in disbelief at the open prison doors, the sky, and the cameras of mobile phones, still unaware that Bashar al-Assad had fled. Samer Mando is a Syrian political prisoner who spent 13 years of his youth in various prisons of the Assad regime, solely for describing the general conditions of the Syrian people to a few French journalists in Beirut. Samer Mando traveled from Lebanon to Syria at the age of 18 in 1988, and after returning to Beirut, the father of one of his friends, who was an officer in the Lebanese army, asked him to speak with a few French journalists about the living conditions of people in Syria. "I was young and spoke with them. I told them that I went to Syria and found nothing there; no food, not even canned fish, no toilet paper. There was nothing. Everything in Syria was in a state of repression. I spoke completely honestly. They filmed me. A few months passed, about five or six months, and the forces of Hafez al-Assad arrested me in Beirut, and my 13-year journey began." Now 56 years old and residing in Turkey, Samer has described shocking details of the various prisons and detention centers of the Assad regime in an interview with Radio Farda, which you can listen to in full here. Excerpts of his account are also provided below. Samer Mando's account of Syrian detention centers and prisons. I was first taken to the Al-Hamra detention center in the Al-Hamra area of Beirut, then to the Bourj al-Barajneh detention center, and after that to the Anjar detention center in Lebanon, all of which were run by Hafez al-Assad. After Anjar, we entered Syria and I was sent to a security branch called the region. From the regional branch to the security branch, from there to the Palestine branch, then to the investigation branch. After that, I went to the Mezze prison in Damascus, from Mezze to Palmyra, and from Palmyra, I was transferred to Sednaya. After Sednaya, I returned to the Palestine branch and was finally released from there. This journey lasted 13 years from late 1988, when Hafez al-Assad was still in power. Torture in the prisons of Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad was horrific, to the extent that I don't know how to describe it. In every place, there was a specific tool for torture. For example, in the Hamra detention center, torture was done with a chair and a cable. They would place the chair between our arms and then pull it back so that our backs would arch backward. At this moment, a person could become paralyzed. They really entertained themselves with us. In the Hamra detention center, this torture lasted about two or three days. Conditions in Anjar were completely different. My detention there lasted almost 20 days, and during those twenty days, I was tortured every day. They would lift us on a device called "Blanjo," something like a crane that lifts cars. They would cuff our hands or sometimes attach them to our feet and then hang us. This torture was done purely for the pleasure of inflicting pain on a human being. When someone was taken for interrogation, they usually returned in bad condition. People were taken after torture, half-dead, and brought to the basement on blankets. One of the prisoners was a Palestinian man named Arafat Dweik, a high-ranking commander of Yasser Arafat. He was taken for interrogation, and when he returned to the cell, his toes had been severed from the severity of the wooden blows inflicted on them. Even a few days before these tortures, his wife was brought to prison, and the head of his section assaulted her in front of his eyes to force Arafat Dweik to confess and compel him to announce his separation from Yasser Arafat on television. During the period of investigation and torture, prisoners were continuously moved. This way, anyone who was not currently being interrogated was transferred to new sections, and this process was a repetitive cycle for many prisoners. Some prisoners were even kept underground for decades without any knowledge of the outside situation. Prisoners were usually from all social and religious groups, and there was no difference in the treatment of them. Even individuals from different countries, including Indians, were mistakenly transferred to Syria as Islamic terrorists, solely due to their erroneous presence in inappropriate situations or locations. There were ridiculous accusations. For example, three people were imprisoned because each had helped the wife of a prisoner with five lira a month. When I entered prison, they had spent 17 years in prison. In the past, each prisoner received at least three pieces of bread a day, but in the last years, this amount was reduced to half a piece of bread a day, and it was even possible that no food would be distributed on some days. In the Palmyra prison, we divided one egg with a thread into eight parts so that eight people could eat it. An apple, for instance, would come every six months, and we would divide it with a thread into twenty parts so that twenty people could eat it.