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Fear was central to President Bashar al-Assad's control over Syria. For many Syrians, it didn't feel safe to express dissent anywhere. Even a whispered word against the government spoken at home was often enough for someone to disappear into a network of dozens of prisons where torture was routine. Since the fall of Assad's regime, many families have been searching, trying to find answers about their missing loved ones who vanished in places like this. NPR's Ruth Sherlock and Jawad Rizkallah visited one of these feared intelligence branches.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
JAWAD RIZKALLAH, BYLINE: He's saying this is the dirtiest place in Syria.
RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: Palm trees growing on either side to the entrance way, the torn picture of Bashar al-Assad - we go inside what used to be the Assad regime's state security complex. It's huge, and the rebels who now control it take us to prison branch 85.
RIZKALLAH: Here, nobody was allowed to come in.
SHERLOCK: This is a grim place. These are the solitary cells. No light - there's only a blacked out grate for air, leading to the outside world, but no window.
RIZKALLAH: Oh, look.
SHERLOCK: Oh, my gosh. Somebody's marked lines on the wall in rows to keep track of how many days they've been in here. One, two, three, four, eight weeks - someone was here for eight weeks in this cell, 1 meter wide by about 2 meters long. Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
SHERLOCK: These intelligence branches were places of torture and terror in Syria. In branch 85, we're told, both Syrians and foreigners were held. There's even been claims that Austin Tice, the American journalist who disappeared in 2012, may have spent time here.
Hey, guys. There's English here. Somebody's turned these walls into a classroom - I see you, for you, listen to me, look at me, go away, miss you.
Last week, when opposition militias took Damascus from the regime, one of the first things they did was free the prisoners. Here, everything has been abandoned, left exactly as it was, including the art prisoners etched into the walls.
Somebody's drawn a beautiful picture of a house. It looks like a log cabin somewhere in mountains and a tree beside it and a forest in the background and a bridge over a river in the foreground. They've tried to make - there's a waterfall. They've tried to make this beautiful.
UNIDENTIFIED GUARD: (Non-English language spoken).
SHERLOCK: A guard breaks down in tears as he tells me if you're in prison and you don't know how to draw, you'll be driven to madness. He remembers how his cousin was jailed.
UNIDENTIFIED GUARD: (Non-English language spoken).
RIZKALLAH: And he told them everything that he went through there. And now when he's here and he's looking at everything, he's remembering everything his cousin told him.
SHERLOCK: The guard tells us that when they arrived, they found people dead.
RIZKALLAH: There were bodies, the corpses that were found here, and they took them to the hospital. And they're still in the morgue for people if they want to come check if their families are.
SHERLOCK: And there are so many thousands of families searching all across Syria, over 100,000 missing, a conservative estimate by rights groups. They come to places like this to search for threads of their loved ones' existence.
This is just one prison in a network of prisons that are all over the city. We know about the big ones - Sednaya, where thousands of people disappeared. But there's also these. Across the capitol, there's branch after branch, security branch after security branch after security branch.
The regime was meticulous in its brutality. Bureaucrats and intelligence officials kept detailed notes of every person detained, of every interrogation, of the torture applied and of every execution.
RIZKALLAH: Ruth.
SHERLOCK: Yeah?
RIZKALLAH: Come.
SHERLOCK: Coming, coming.
RIZKALLAH: The papers are still here. We still have papers.
SHERLOCK: These documents could provide families with the answers about what happened to their loved ones. They are valuable evidence of crimes, and the guards say we have to go and get permission to see them. We make our way outside.
Gosh, you just feel relief coming back out into the fresh air. You can't imagine what it must have been like to be held there, not knowing when you'd get out.
We walk away on a road that runs above the dungeon prison that holds so many secrets, many of which will be revealed, and many more will lie in darkness. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Damascus. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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