Two women and a man, desperate, their eyes hollowed out by dark circles, pace like sleepwalkers on the road which leads to the entrance gate of Saydnaya prison, about twenty kilometers from Damascus, Monday December 9. “My son, Manhal Nuail Salem, he was 15 years old when they arrested him in 2014” ; “mine is called Youcef Abdallah Jassem. We are from Mazraat Al-Nafour, he was kidnapped in 2018” ; “my son is Ahmed Al-Majari, arrested in 2018 too… A neighbor released in 2021 assured me that he had seen him alive…”
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The day after the fall of the regime, thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of families of the disappeared crowded around and into Saydnaya, driven by a mad hope: the presence of thousands of detainees in the basements of the prison. 'pregnant. In distress and tears, a slow procession advances for several kilometers, in the hope that the concrete monster will release prisoners alive, perhaps a relative swallowed up by the prison hell of the Al-Assad family.
-As they go up the dirt road traced through the barbed wire and trenches surrounding the prison, located higher up on a hill, these families discover this place so feared, so guarded, where the telephone network does not reach. Each person carries within them the story of an arrest, a detention, the disappearance of a father, a son, a cousin or a friend. Each phone contains the last memory of a deceased person. Arriving in front of the building, men go through fragments of archive notebooks in search of the names of their loved ones before heading towards the main building.
On the ground in front of it, there are hundreds of them waiting tirelessly, lying on the sand, sitting in the shade of a shrub. Standing on Russian-made infantry fighting vehicles, abandoned there by army soldiers in the face of the arrival of rebel forces, fighters and civilians indulge in a burst of pride by taking photos of themselves with their phones .
A sprawling surveillance network
At the entrance, a car registered in Lebanon tries to make its way through the crowd. The release of a Lebanese detainee from Hama prison after thirty-five years of detention has revived fragile hope among the families of the missing from the country of Cedar, kidnapped at the checkpoints of the Syrian army which intervened in the country in the 1980s.
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