Thread by @AlexGSimon

Five years ago, a conversation transformed my understanding of Syria's prison sector—and the Syrian regime itself.

As Syrians excavate survivors from Sednaya, I’m sharing an edited transcript of that discussion. The speaker is an Arab researcher who spent decades in Damascus 🧵

“The Syrian authorities’ use of detention as a political tool goes back to 1958, even before this regime. During the unity government with Egypt, Nasser cracked down on the political freedoms that had existed earlier in the 1950s. Parties were dissolved, newspapers shut down.”

“When the union ended in 1961, Syria tried to revert to a form of liberalism. The Baathist coup in 1963 put an end to it, with emergency law and a new set of repressive tools. Today’s security apparatus took shape in that space, with minimal legal basis or oversight.”

“During that same period, the regime began to more consistently use detention as a political tool. There were confrontations between the regime and political dissidents, but also businessmen and influential farmers who clashed over Baathist nationalization drives.”

“Some fled the country. Others stayed and were arrested, and their families would pay bribes to get them out. These were strictly personal interactions, unrelated to laws or courts. People acquired experience in navigating this system. These were the seeds of what we see today.”

“This system expanded massively in the 1970s and 1980s, in ways that gave the security apparatus an ethereal quality: It’s impossible to believe, but it’s real and it’s boundless.

And we only know what’s on the surface. What’s below is truly terrifying.”

“The security sector grew organically, based largely on personalities, making it increasingly hard to navigate. An intelligence agency could have large numbers of facilities which are not recorded, and which not everyone within the agency’s administration will even know about.”

“Individual commanders could establish detention facilities basically anywhere. Someone once showed me a prison in the Damascus suburbs that happened to be in the basement of a print shop.”

“While some facilities would be established by the head of an intelligence branch, others could be established by lower ranking officers without informing their hierarchy. The president appoints the head of the branch, but also mid-level people who report directly to him.”

“Many such people, through their connections to the Assads, can indeed be more powerful than their superiors. So there’s technically a military hierarchy, but only on paper. In practice, these branches largely act in ways unrelated to their leadership.”

“This fragmentation makes it extremely difficult to make sense of the detention sector. It became especially tough in the 1980s, when the war with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Syrian occupation of Lebanon resulted in a massive increase in the prison population.”

“Historically, the regime would not just arrest individuals: It would arrest their entire families. The regime regards dissent as a contagious disease. In the 1980s they might arrest someone and then another 100 from his tribe, to prevent relatives from seeking revenge.”

“Because of this overwhelming density in prisons, the security apparatus stopped caring about details. In many cases, there’s no data, no lists. People could die under torture and the security apparatus itself would not know who they were.”

“This is so well known that there are jokes about it. One mukhabarat officer wants to play cards, but his colleague tells him he can’t because he’s supposed to be guarding a prisoner. The first guy says “yalla, kill him already.”

“This picture is further complicated by a lack of record-keeping. Archives are not the Syrian regime’s specialty, and Syrian officials often have shredders next to their desks.”

“The result is that you could approach an intelligence officer whom you know well and who wants to help you find a detainee held by his agency. But it may prove literally impossible for him to find that individual within his own prison system.”

[In response to a question about prisoner swaps, and pro-regime fighters kidnapped by rebels:]

“The regime doesn’t care about loyalist prisoners. From the war’s beginning, it never kept official statistics on its own dead or captured.”

“That’s not an accident: It allows the regime to lie to the families of those who were being killed fighting for it.

Specifically, it has often told families that their children—who are often actually dead—are being held prisoner by terrorists.”

“In that respect, the regime has an active interest in *avoiding* exchanges—because exchanges will expose its lies.

It may only engage in exchanges where it faces sufficient pressure from the Russians.”

“I’m skeptical, though, of the extent to which the Russians could actually play that role. That’s partly because it’s not at all clear they actually have the will to exert real pressure, as opposed to simply procrastinating.”

“But the problem is also that there is no centralized body for the Russians to apply pressure to. The regime itself is more fragmented than ever. You also have new actors in the detention sector—namely militias—who simply are not under the regime’s control.” [end quote]

I cannot personally verify every detail above. Many are unverifiable by their nature.

But, as gut-wrenching videos burst forth from the bowels of Syria’s gulag, my mind went straight to the word "ethereal": Impossible to believe, but it’s real.

The ghastly, surreal contours of Syria’s detention sector will come into greater focus in the days and months ahead; clearer focus, indeed, than ever before.

There will be joyful surprises—loved ones reunited, the presumed dead come back to life—and new horrors brought to light.

There is endless work to be done: searching for the living and the dead; gathering evidence in pursuit of accountability; and, I hope, urgently ramping up support to the individuals and families so deeply harmed by this scourge.

With all that hard, painful work ahead, the good news is that Syrians have built an extraordinarily robust ecosystem of detention-focused civic actors. They will lead the way, as they have for years; it’s for the rest of us to follow, support, and learn.