On December 8, 2024, after 12 days of rebel offensive, the Syria of the al-Assad dynasty is no more. Freed from a bloody dictatorship that lasted 54 years (including 24 under the regime of Bashar), the rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) opened the regime’s terrible jails. Publicly denied by Bashar al-Assad despite the numerous reports and testimonies of these miraculous survivors, the first images reveal the terrible truth that can no longer be hidden. It is estimated that nearly 30,000 mass executions were carried out in the military prison of Saydnaya between 2011 and 2018 alone. Comparing Saydnaya, the macabre "human slaughterhouse", and the entire repressive system of the political apparatus from the regime to hell is almost an understatement. From revolt to horror, to the country where walls had ears and your own entourage could make you guilty in the eyes of the regime, there was only one step.

The famous journalist Paul M. Marchand wrote in his biography "I simply do not have the right words to express and tell what I would have liked to convey. The Human, in inventing language and its cohorts of vocabulary, could not think of the Inhuman, the Ineffable, the Unsuspected. How to formulate something you don’t imagine possible?" (Sympathy for the Devil). What could he have written in the face of the terror of the repressive mechanism of the al-Assad regime?

As soon as Hafez Al-Assad took power in 1970 after his military putsch and for more than three decades, the country closed in on itself: all forms of opposition and expression are muzzled, demonstrations banned and a state of emergency decreed. In February 1982, the regime watched in blood an insurrection of the Muslim Brotherhood, its bête noire, in the city of Hama, in the center of the country. Thus, to eradicate all dissidence and permanently install his clan in power, President Hafez al-Assad is implementing a torturing despotism with an organized and methodical oppressive system where the culture of cruelty is generalized and trivialized.

Hundreds of millions of Syrians have suffered the barbarity of the Al-Assad clan. Of all ages, all social classes, all faiths, all regions. From the moment he took power, Hafez al-Assad transformed Syrian society into a frightful vice that swarms of informants tightened around civilians through denunciations, arbitrary detentions, kidnappings, "exceptional" courts and a multitude of networks of hellish prisons where violence and torture of flesh and spirit were the political instrument of extermination and dehumanization of the dictator.

The massacre had become the foundation of Syria’s governance. Compared to the Nazi system, and for good reason, the architect who built its dark foundations was none other than Aloïs Brunner, a former Nazi who found refuge in Syria to provide his skills. Engineer of the Final Solution and director of the Drancy camp, he scalded the Syrian system of information and torture by becoming the advisor of Hafez al-Assad.

From the Mukhâbarat (regime intelligence services) to the Chabbiha (militia officiating in the neighborhoods), the "little hands" and the checkpoints, every act and gesture is spied on. The slightest breath can be perceived as a threat to the Baathist regime. The slightest word, even if it does not come from your mouth but from that of a distant cousin whom you have not seen for years or from a teacher whose class you are taking, is sufficient proof of your opposition to the Al-Assad clan. Based on denunciation, on calumnious accusations, for a word too high, a not low enough look, a phone call, or on the mention of your name during an 'interrogation' under torture, there also, you can disappear and/or end up in one of the 27 'death houses' without leaving any traces.

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In Hafez al-Assad’s Syria, more than 17,000 detainees disappeared between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. In 2015, the human rights organisation Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) estimated that 215,000 people had been detained since the beginning of the revolution, half of them without their families having any information about them. Desperate anticipation also served as a prison where the ghosts of members evaporated in the meanders of a morbid administration, corruption, ransoms and in what one could not even consider the best case scenario, the release from death-alive, forever broken and bearing the scars of this unspeakable war of the regime against its people.

A penitentiary system where all the worst abuses are methodically or even pathologically archived as proved by the Caesar file, code name given to a former military police photographer who exfiltered two years of photographs (2011-2013) is 53275 abominable pictures including 28707 representing 6786 detainees died under torture, from hunger or untreated diseases. The country’s prisons have become centers of torture and execution: places intended less to obtain information and punish crimes than to break any resistance and terrorize the population by making opponents disappear after having subjected them to degrading treatments of extreme cruelty, of which their relatives were in turn threatened. Places where the human was reduced, a number of a box, then a number of corpses and finally that of a register in turn enclosed in maze of already engorged shelves.

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Turning the page on a violent past involves setting up various mechanisms related to 'transitional' justice, which aims at a transition to a state of civil peace involving the conviction of those responsible, material and symbolic reparations, or even the establishment of facts within the framework of truth and reconciliation commissions.

The Caesar case, the Koblenz trial, the numerous NGO reports and the testimonies of victims as well as their relatives finally resonated with the fall of the regime. As if it had been necessary for the world, in full knowledge of the facts, to see with its own eyes what 54 years of torturing dictatorship looked like. On June 29, 2023, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing an independent international institution on missing persons in Syria. This institution aimed to help the families of victims, including victims of enforced disappearances, to know the fate of their loved ones. Yet these questions always come back: "Why did you do nothing to save us? You knew! Why does the international community only send us journalists or so-called experts instead of sending us means to find our missing people? Assad is the main culprit, but all those who let us down, who allowed this chaos to happen, all those who had the resources and did not use them are also responsible.” What lessons can be learned for the present and the future?

"They have destroyed our memory" confessed Mazen al-Hamada. Faced with the policy of erasure inherent in forced disappearance, the claim for truth is part of a work of remembrance indispensable to reconstruction. If some wish above all to pacify a country devastated by decades of dictatorship and mass destruction, to relaunch an economy and fragile international relations while forgetting the past, what place will then be given to the memories of the families of the disappeared and their quest for justice and truth?

The new transitional government, led by Ahmed Al-Shaara, will therefore have to be fully involved in it and act as a guarantor of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms by becoming an official signatory to the various conventions on human rights. The international community will also have to publicly recognize the war crimes and crimes against humanity of the regime as soon as possible so that the long process of mourning can begin for millions of families and survivors. A new feeling of abandonment by the different national and international actors is not conceivable. If this were still the case, it would be tantamount to granting total impunity, or even a systematic apology, to other torturers whose abuses, also documented, substantiated and relayed, are still occurring at present. So that Mazen’s questions: "How do you want them to take a moral position? Everyone plays. Governments invoke freedom and democracy but they continue to talk with murderers and criminals. How many veto rights were used at the United Nations to save the regime in Damascus?» (Forget your name, Garance Le Caisne) do not become the funeral echo of the Tower of Babel again.

Article: Audrey M-G.

Photos: Audrey M-G.

Thanks to: Asaad-Al Asaad, Adnan Farzat, Mahmoud Hamoud and Hussam Hammoud.