Noureddine Safaya crouched on the filthy ground, his back hunched and his eyes fixed on the floor, crawling towards a tiny rectangular cell. Eight years ago, this is how he arrived at Sednaya, Bashar Al Assad’s most notorious prison, known as the “human slaughterhouse”.
He was one of a group of 27 detainees shackled together and forced to creep on the ground under the gaze of guards who treated them as nothing more than livestock.
“That was the hardest moment of my life,” he told The National, as he re-enacted his arrival, his ordeal still etched into his every move. He said the prisoners were stripped of their clothes and violently beaten, their blood forming a large pool on the ground.
Sednaya, located north of Damascus, is one of the most famous symbols of the brutal Assad regime. Human rights groups say tens of thousands of people were detained there during Syria's civil war and thousands executed after sham trials.
The National was among the first foreign newspapers to visit Sednaya, on December 8 last year, the day rebels toppled the Assad regime and freed thousands of prisoners from its dark cells. Many of them were political prisoners and civilians arbitrarily detained just because they lived in areas where opposition to the regime was strong.
A year later, The National came back to Sednaya with two former detainees, Mr Safaya, 30, and Imad Marzaq, 37, returning to the place they had been tortured, this time as free men.
“I remember everything. I can’t forget what happened to me, but remembering makes me sick,” Mr Safaya said. But he said he feels the need to speak out, because “memory must be kept alive”.
“We have to tell what happened. To open our hearts. To show the state, the NGOs, and the world what former detainees need,” he said. He said he feels he was robbed of his life, which is only now beginning “from below zero”.
“It’s like my life only started a year ago. I couldn’t marry, buy a house, anything. Now I want to start anew.”
Spider webs and cockroaches
On the evening of December 8, The National saw thousands of people flock to the facility amid a chaotic atmosphere, searching for missing loved ones and hoping to gather any evidence that might help locate them. The place was filled with the voices of thousands hoping to uncover new cells and free more detainees.
A year later, Syria’s new authorities have tightened control over detention centres. No one is allowed inside without permission, in an effort to preserve documentation and gather evidence.
The prison is now empty, but prisoners’ belongings, dirty blankets and clothes still litter the cold cells, and a tenacious stench hangs in the air. A few prosthetic legs stand oddly in the main hall leading to sprawling corridors; they belonged to amputees who were not allowed to keep them inside their cells. The National also saw documents, including detainees' identification cards, in the yard.
Underground, in the isolation wing, are small individual punishment cells where both Mr Safaya and Mr Marzaq spent weeks, unable to tell day from night. Thick spider webs cover the ceilings and cockroaches wander across the walls.
Mr Marzaq, who spent seven years in Sednaya, said that what comes to his mind upon returning is the friendship and solidarity he shared with his cellmates. Most of them were either executed or succumbed to disease and ill treatment.
Only four of the 34 who shared his cell are still alive. “I’m remembering my friends who died. This cell, do you see it? This is where they slept. This is where I sat with them,” he said. “We wished, we truly wished, that they could have lived to see this day.”
'No one helped us'
The mood only lifted when the former detainees recounted the day they were freed. Mr Safaya’s tone instantly became lighter, and a timid smile began to dawn on his face.
In the very same room where he spent the last year and a half of his detention, he remembered the fateful night, the screams, the sound of bullets, and the helicopters. The prisoners first hid behind the bathroom wall. “We thought they were going to kill us,” Mr Safaya recalled.
That was until they saw fighters wearing non-traditional military uniforms. “They told us: 'The regime has fallen. We came to free you. Allahu akbar'. But we couldn't believe it”.
Mr Safaya hurried away from his nightmare in disbelief. “We thought the jets would strike, that mortars would fall, that machine guns would sweep the yard. We could not believe the regime had fallen,” he said.
He walked 15km wearing only one shoe, which he shared with his friend, until someone picked him up and drove him to meet his father. Even then, back home, he could not sleep for days for fear that he would wake up back in prison.
The only thing he has kept from his detention is a small needle, which he made himself from electric cables. He used it to mend ripped clothes and to write chapters (surahs) of the Quran on soap, risking severe punishment from the guards, from whom he carefully hid the pin.
A year on, both Mr Safaya and Mr Marzaq, who became close friends after their liberation, want to move forward. Mr Safaya is working as a craftsman while Mr Marzaq is still looking for a job. “This chapter we are closing now, and we won’t return to it,” he said. But for all that, they say they need financial support.
“We received nothing, not from the state, not from NGOs, not from donors,” Mr Safaya said. He had to undergo two operations on his left eye, which was severely damaged by violent beatings, and he had to find the money himself. “The whole world talked about Sednaya. But no one helped us,” he said.
