Line Khatib is the author of Quest for Democracy: Liberalism in the Modern Arab World and Islamic Revivalism in Syria: The Rise and Fall of Ba’thist Secularism.
The amount of pain that Syrians endured in the infamous Sednaya Prison outside Damascus, and roughly 27 other detention centers all over Syria, is beyond words. According to estimates by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based human rights monitor, more than 30,000 detainees were killed in Sednaya alone, among over 215,000 Syrians detained and tortured in Bashar al-Assad's gulags since 2011. Assad's regime was more than a police state; it practiced torture and mass detention on an industrial scale.
For these atrocities and all his actions since the popular uprising against him in 2011, Assad will forever be remembered as the man who mercilessly crushed his own people for daring to protest against his regime's rule over Syria. When Assad's forces failed or were unwilling to do the job, he relied on Iranian and Iranian-backed militias and Russia's air force, effectively ceding control of Syrian territory to foreign countries in an attempt to secure his hold on power.
The lightning offensive by an alliance of Syrian rebels led by the Islamist faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham that swiftly took over Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus in just days showed how tenuous that hold really was. The end to five decades of brutal Assad family rule, by Bashar and his father Hafez, came quicker than anyone could have expected. The decision by the rebels to immediately take control of the prisons and release detainees in the cities they liberated provides significant insight into their identity and objectives, as well as the nature of the regime they opposed. On their march to Damascus, one of their first moves, which met with overwhelming public support, was to storm Sednaya to free Syrians from its dungeons. Perhaps more than even taking Damascus, throwing open the gates of Sednaya, the chilling symbol of Syria's prison dictatorship, signaled the end of the Assad regime.
Inmates walked free into the tearful embrace of family members who had never known whether their disappeared loved ones were dead or alive. All week, Syrians have flooded Sednaya looking for their relatives and trying to find and free inmates who they think might still be held somewhere in the prison's vast network of hidden cells. The glimmers of hope that have emerged for Syrians as the rebels forced Assad to flee for Russia exist alongside the trauma of 54 years of oppression and depravity that is this regime's legacy.
Perhaps more than even taking Damascus, throwing open the gates of Sednaya, the chilling symbol of Syria's prison dictatorship, signaled the end of the Assad regime.
- Line Khatib
As prisons burst open and families reunite, foreign powers remain active on the ground. Turkey launched strikes against U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in northern Syria, while the United States targeted sites in central Syria allegedly linked to the Islamic State. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that the U.S. "will support international efforts to hold the Assad regime and its backers accountable for atrocities and abuses perpetrated against the Syrian people." Of the new authorities in Damascus led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, who have projected an imagine of pragmatism and moderation, Blinken said: "We have taken note of statements made by rebel leaders in recent days, but as they take on greater responsibility, we will assess not just their words, but their actions. We again call on all actors to respect human rights, take all precautions to protect civilians, and to uphold international humanitarian law."
This rhetoric suggests that Blinken and the Biden administration, like previous U.S. administrations before it, either didn't understand or care what has been unfolding in Syria for years. Ample evidence was presented to them detailing the brutality of the regime, including the 53,275 pictures smuggled out of Syria by a military defector known as Caesar that showed the mutilated bodies of so many detainees, and satellite imagery revealing a new crematorium built in 2017 in Sednaya to dispose of prisoners' bodies. The U.S. certainly knew that the regime used detention centers and torture methods on an industrial scale to crush dissent. Yet the extent of the U.S. intervention in Syria was solely to "degrade" the Islamic State and secure the country's resource-rich northeast. Successive administrations, from Obama to Trump to Biden, didn't move to uphold any international laws.
So Syrians ask themselves, why does the U.S. claim to care now?
Meanwhile, Israeli leaders are already expressing concerns about chemical weapons falling into the hands of the rebels—fears they didn't have when Assad was in power and using these weapons against his own people. Israel was quick to act just hours after the regime's collapse, taking advantage of Syria's power vacuum. It has already launched hundreds of airstrikes on military sites and other strategic facilities, including three major airports, naval bases, alleged chemical weapons factories, military research centers and weapons depots. The Israeli military has seized a stretch Syrian territory beyond the demilitarized U.N. buffer zone in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, its first military incursion across the border since the 1973 war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims Israel's incursion is "temporary" and "defensive," even though it looks more like annexing territory while Netanyahu declares that "the Golan will be part of the State of Israel for eternity."
Despite the threats around them, Syrians for now are rejoicing in their new reality in a country that for so long had been "Assad's Syria.
- Line Khatib
Despite the threats around them, Syrians for now are rejoicing in their new reality in a country that for so long had been "Assad's Syria." Thousands are still out in the streets celebrating the liberation of their cities and the dismantling of the regime's dungeons. Many are already making their way back home from forced exile.
For all the fear from outside Syria about the intentions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and whether the new authorities in Damascus are just a rebranded al-Qaida, it is the Assad regime, along with its allies and patrons, that has inflicted the greatest atrocities and injustices on the Syrian people, often under the West's gaze. Syrians will not forget this as they try to move on toward an inclusive, democratic and free Syria.
The political transition already seems set on its way, with Mohammed al-Bashir, the prime minister of the proto-government in Idlib under HTS for the past several years, taking over as prime minister of a new interim government in Damascus. The new administration, which is supposed to manage a transitional period for three months until a new government is elected, is promising to uphold state institutions and has granted amnesty to military personnel conscripted into service by the Assad regime. With the economy shattered, the new transitional authorities say they are focused on ending the vast bribery system underpinning Syria's bureaucracy, establishing a competitive free market and securing basic necessities such as fuel and electricity.
As Syrians celebrate their liberation and the possibilities to come, they recall the Syrian composer Samih Choukeir and his revolutionary song, Ya Haif, ("Oh Shameful"), an early anthem of the uprising in 2011. Written just days after children were arrested and tortured in Daraa for writing protest slogans on the walls of their school, it is a song of grief that openly denounced the regime's agents, calling those who attack their own people traitors.
They said they are our brothers and they will not hurt us. They hit us, oh mother, with live bullets. We died, at the hands of our brothers in the name of national security. Who are we? Ask history. Read our page. It seems the word freedom, oh mother, shook the jailer and his pillars, and whoever chanted for the crowds, he became like someone who got stung, killing us with fire, and we are the ones who said, he whoever kills his people is a traitor. Whoever he is. And the people, like fate, don't bend, and the people are like fate, and hope, oh shameful. [Translation mine]
Choukeir wrote the song in Paris, where he lives. In the early years of the civil war, Choukeir said he would keep on singing until Assad was overthrown. Now that day has come, I hope he can return to sing in Syria, his voice this time filling its free skies.
