Steven Sahiounie, journalist and political commentator
Hundreds of people have slept outside in freezing weather in the Damascus region, hoping to find a loved one who might still be alive in one of the many prison complexes run by former president Assad, who fled Syria on December 8. Recently, the unguarded prisons began to be broken into as thousands of prisoners found freedom, some after decades of torture and horrific conditions.
Every country has prisons, but Syria's were notorious for being filled with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. Sednaya prison has been dubbed the "human slaughterhouse". It is just one of the dozens of horrific prisons. Still, it has become the focus of news reports after Syrian and international journalists have gone inside recently to inspect the bone saw, vats of acid, and the body-crushing machines utilized in the vast complex housing tens of thousands.
The dreaded, and deadly secret police, Mohabarat, hunted down citizens who said anything, no matter how slight, against Assad or his regime. A careless comment on Facebook, or a slip of the tongue on the phone, could send a person to prison, and sometimes it meant death.
There were no charges, lawyers, trials, sentencing, or family visits. A person just disappeared, and if loved ones asked questions, they were told to shut up or face the same fate. Occasionally, a judge could be bribed with huge sums of money, and a prisoner could be freed. But since poverty is rampant in Syria, even the door of bribery was locked shut.
Before the 2011 uprising against Assad, Syria had enough gas and oil wells to fulfill domestic needs for gasoline, heating oil and oil to be converted into electricity for the national grid. Once the US-supported Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish militia in the northeast, occupied the wells the Assad regime had to buy petroleum products from Iran, and the price of gasoline went up, heating oil became scarce and electricity dropped to 30 minutes in three intervals per day.
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