Of all the horrors Mohammed Ammar Hamami remembers from his time in the Assad regime’s notorious Sednaya prison, the most vivid is the clanging of metal execution tables being moved around on the floor below.
About once every 40 days, prison guards would drag the tables away from under the feet of condemned men. Nooses around their necks and hands tied behind their backs, they would die by hanging. Most of the bodies were burned in Sednaya’s crematorium.
“This is the noise we used to hear,” the 31-year-old said, picking up the edge of one of the tables and letting the smash of metal on metal echo around the large room. “When we hear this noise, it means they are executing people … Imagine sitting upstairs and knowing prisoners are being executed downstairs.”
Hamami was freed from Sednaya after five hellish years on 8 December, when Syria’s longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country in the face of a lightning-fast Islamist rebel offensive. Along with the 20 other men held in his dirty, dark and unfurnished cell, he heard shouting in the corridor before collapsing in astonishment when his father’s face appeared in the cell door’s small window.
A week later, the mechanic wanted to return to Sednaya, on the outskirts of Damascus, to retrieve clothes left behind in the chaos – but also, he said, to try to understand that what he had lived through in what he called “the killing machine” was real. On release, he was very thin after experiencing complications from diabetes which was not treated properly during his imprisonment. He is missing teeth from beatings and is still suffering from three broken ribs.
“I wanted to revisualise the life we lived here,” Hamami said. “After I went out and breathed fresh air, now I can tell the difference … We were the living dead.
“It was like I was reborn. Today I am not 31, I am seven days old,” he said.
Hamami was a fighter under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, which mounted an armed opposition to the regime after a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy Arab spring protests. He was arrested in 2019 and sentenced to death. His impoverished family from the Damascus suburb of Ghouta paid £63,000 in bribes to various branches of the security apparatus to get his sentence reduced to 20 years.
They are among the luckier ones. Many families are still searching for any trace of Syria’s estimated 100,000 missing people, most of whom were disappeared into the regime’s vast network of torture and detention centres. A week after the Guardian witnessed the extraordinary moment Sednaya’s doors were flung open, relatives were still digging up floors in the hope of finding secret cells and combing through ledgers and files strewn about trashed offices.
“Until today, they did not allow us to visit or tell us where he is, and we had to pay lots of bribes. When we checked a month ago, through another bribe, we were told he was here and he was fine,” said a woman looking for her son, who gave her name as Umm Ali.
“When it was liberated, we couldn’t find anybody. Even if they are dead, we want our children … Anybody hosting these criminals, we want them back here,” she said.
After the collapse of decades of brutal dynastic rule, the full extent of the crimes Assad and his father, Hafez, committed against their own people – chemical attacks, barrel bombs, forced conscription, demographic engineering – are now known to the world. Even so, it is difficult to comprehend the cruelty prisoners endured in Sednaya, the most feared of all the regime’s detention centres.
When Hamami arrived at the prison’s “red wing” in 2019, which housed people accused of security crimes, he was placed downstairs, in the worst cellblock. For the first four days, he was not allowed food; for the next four, no water.
The smell from the damp, filthy, 1 sq metre cells – which sometimes held two men at a time – was overpowering. An orange jumpsuit used for executions lay on the floor; brown water dripped from a leaking pipe. The temperature during the Guardian’s visit was 8C.
Hamami was thrown back into the block several times during his incarceration – sometimes for offences such as making a tasbih, a string of prayer beads, from date stones.
“I’ve never seen this place with my eyes before. I knew it by touch,” Hamami said, exploring with the light from his phone. In one cell, a name had been scratched on the wall, along with a date. “That was my friend from Aleppo,” he said. “I didn’t know what happened to him … it appears he was executed.”
After eight days, Hamami was taken upstairs, naked. He was instructed to stand facing the wall before about a dozen guards lashed his back about 100 times, he estimates. The walls of the reception area are covered in black marks, which Hamami said were from whips and belts.
Cell four, down the hall, would become his home for the next five years: a five metre by five metre room, with no light, no furniture, and a rudimentary toilet, shared with about 20 other men. Some had fought in the war, like him; a few were Alawites, a sect that traditionally supported the government.
On Hamami’s return visit, the floor of cell four was covered in damp blankets and clothes. His old spot was in the left-hand corner closest to the door, where he retrieved two red hoodies to take home. He searched for but gave up on finding a homemade sewing kit he had hidden inside the seam of a blanket.
As a result of the extortionate sums of money Hamami’s family paid every few months to reduce his sentence, his parents, wife and two children were allowed to visit, separated by a few metres by metal cages in the visiting room. They brought him medicine, food, and clothes, although the guards helped themselves first to anything that came through the prison’s doors, he said.
Adjusting to leaving Sednaya has been difficult, Hamami said; he had not immediately recognised his own children waiting for him in the prison grounds. “My kids ran to me, and I opened my arms, then closed them,” he said. Dazed by the morning’s events, at first he wasn’t even sure they were real, he said.
A new Syria, liberated from more than 50 years of Assad rule and 13 of civil war, is still an overwhelming prospect. Clashes in the coastal province of Tartous this week between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that now controls the country, and remnants of the Assad regime, could be a sign of yet more dangerous times to come.
“Us prisoners used to chat and say: ‘Even if we are released while the regime is still in power, we would still live in terror.’ The first thing I thought about if I got out was, take my family, leave the country,” Hamami said.
“But now, this country is ours, and we will rebuild it, and live a new life.”
