Dorothy Parvaz: Inside Syria’s secret prisons – Opinion – Al Jazeera English
I was taken through a labyrinth of stairs, before entering an office where my interrogator awaited me. I managed to talk him into allowing the blindfolds to be removed.
The man – let’s call him ‘Firass’ – was slightly portly and could be affable when he wanted to be (he seemed concerned that there were women being kept at the facility, and tried to make things comfortable for me).
Firass even apologised for the fact that our “formal interview” was taking place in a room containing a bed, crates of potatoes and a refrigerator.
“It’s just that we’re so busy these days,” he said.
I wanted to ask why the Mukhabarat would be so busy if such a tiny minority was causing problems, but it didn’t seem like a prudent moment.
Firass spoke very good English and, at first, seemed convinced that I was a spy.
Then he focused on Al Jazeera, putting the network on the same level as Human Rights Watch. The network had been making a “big problem” for Syria with the UN Security Council, he said.
After four hours of questioning, he sent me to a different room, this one a long-disused office where a terrified teenage girl was sleeping on the couch.
The next morning, my new roommate and I tried to get acquainted, without sharing too many details, as we had been forbidden to do so. She too had been plucked from the streets of a Damascus suburb for reasons she couldn’t understand.
She’d been there for eight days when I met her, and she looked ill. The food we were given three times a day – fetid, random and at times, rotting – mostly had the effect of making her vomit, but she was too hungry to stop eating all together.
There was a doctor on site, parked next to a sign that read “Assad is Boss”, but the girl seemed too frightened to see the doctor – no wonder.
Most of the our days were spent listening to the sounds of young men being brutally interrogated – sometimes tied up in stress positions until it sounded like their bones were cracking, as we saw from our bathroom window (a bathroom with no running water, except for one tap in a sink filled with roughly 10 cm of sewage).
One afternoon, the beating we heard was so severe that we could clearly hear the interrogator pummelling his boots and fists into his subject, almost in a trance, yelling questions or accusations rhythmically as the blows landed in what sounded like the prisoner’s midriff.
My roommate shook and wept, reminding me (or perhaps herself) that they didn’t beat women here.
There was a brief break before the beating resumed, and my first impulse was to cover my ears, but then I thought, “If this man is crying, shouldn’t someone hear him?”
