in Syria, the uncovering of the methods of the fallen regime of Bashar al-Assad

The rebels, now in power, seize the documents that were not destroyed after the departure of the Syrian dictator, and discover the mass of those who, for years, had been collaborating in the shadows.

Mamdouh, still with his weapon in his hand, is one of the rebels who fought in the town of Soueida. “Here the regime resisted us a lothe remembers. They fought for at least six hours.”. He points to a building, that of military intelligence. Inside, a basement made up of unsanitary cells, and a labyrinth of rooms strewn with administrative documents.

What Mamdouh is reading are the regime’s official communications. The document he holds in his hands calls for increasing the salaries of the military so that they do not join the protest movement which is shaking the city. With other rebels who have come to go through the documents, Mamdouh comes across a register. “This is the name of all those who had a card given by the regime which allowed them to pass all military checkpoints without being questioned. There are only names of civilians”he notes.

In reality dozens of informants, some of whose names he recognizes. There are also, in large envelopes, thousands of pages, those of wiretaps transcribed by hand. Investigation files on thousands of local residents, that of a young woman, for example, considered suspicious simply because she had taken up yoga.

A few meters away, on El Karame Square, residents continue to celebrate the fall of the regime. Sawsan is in the middle of the crowd. “The Assad regime was really everywhere,” she says.

“We could have someone who worked with us, who wrote reports on his colleagues. That’s why we said : ‘The walls have ears’.”

Sawsan, a resident of Soueida

at franceinfo

“Luckily, finally, we got there. He fell,” rejoices Sawsan before concluding : “We have a lot of responsibilities”. Find the documents and go through them, “this is our job now.”

A job that promises to be titanic. For the town of Soueida alone, intelligence documents number in the millions and sometimes date back to the 1960s. In most buildings, the regime tried to get rid of the evidence by burning the archives.