Amer Matar watched news footage of Sednaya prison being liberated by rebel forces last December in Germany, where the Syrian journalist and activist had sought asylum after being detained and tortured by the regime of Bashar al-Assad for covering protests in 2011.
Matar immediately saw a need to document what lay inside the notorious detention centre on the outskirts of Damascus, which was already thronged with desperate Syrian families searching for signs of their loved ones.
Matar (38) quickly organised a team to film inside Sednaya with a high-powered 3D camera, carefully capturing messages scrawled by prisoners on the walls, and scanning piles of documents left by fleeing prison staff which could provide clues to what happened to Syria’s disappeared.
More than 100,00 men, women and children detained by the Assad dictatorship since 2011 remain unaccounted for, according to Syrian Network for Human Rights, which says: “The families of forcibly disappeared people have the right to know the fate of their loved ones.”
Already, Matar has uncovered new evidence of how he was surveilled by the Assad dictatorship. A journalist recently found an 88-page report on Matar at a Syrian military intelligence centre in Damascus. “They were listening to my calls for years,” he says.
Dozens of torture techniques honed over decades of oppressive rule by the Assad dynasty were used with ferocious force to silence the wave of anti-regime protesters like Matar who took to the streets across Syria in 2011. Thousands of those detained in Syrian prisons were ultimately tortured to death.
After Matar fled Syria, his brother, Mohamed Nour, was detained by Islamic State (also known as Isis) in 2013 while working as a citizen journalist in their home city of Raqqa, which was occupied by the Islamist terror group for four years until 2017. For more than a decade, Matar has looked for traces of his brother in former Islamic State prisons. With a multidisciplinary archival and media team, Matar created an online archive called the ISIS Prison Museum with testimonials and data gathered during that long and, so far, fruitless search for his brother.
Jawab (answer in Arabic) is a sister project of the museum. Matar devised it to help Syrian families search for information about relatives who were detained in prisons run by the Islamic State and, now, the overthrown Syrian regime.
On the online platform, families can access 3D models of the prisons where their relatives were held, review messages on cell walls, listen to testimonies of other prisoners and witnesses and see information about mass grave sites.
The aim of Jawab is to help Syrian families – many of them displaced overseas – secure justice and reach some form of closure regarding their loved ones. “We can’t always give them all the answers,” says Matar, “but we can give them part of the story.”
Dozens of prisons run by the former Syrian regime contain important evidence of crimes. The emptied jails are now guarded by forces from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the rebel group that ousted al-Assad in a lightning offensive in December 2024.
Muhamad Abu Ibrahim, a young HTS fighter from Idlib, escorted The Irish Times on a visit to the Palestinian Branch in southern Damascus. The prison earned its moniker as a military intelligence branch established in the 1960s by Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar al-Assad, to monitor Palestinian groups in Syria.
Piles of documents, identity papers and hastily discarded military fatigues of former regime soldiers still litter the ground outside the prison complex that once held men, women and children. On one floor, a row of small cells have calendars, Koranic passages and messages to families etched on their walls. The cells were once used for solitary confinement, but more recently held handfuls of detainees in cramped conditions that spread disease and prevented sleep.
In a section of the building used by prison staff, several rooms were set on fire by fleeing soldiers.
The contents of some rooms have been completely destroyed, but in others, shelves and piles of slightly charred documents have survived the arson attempt, including statements made by detainees and reports on suspects compiled by regime officials. In one office, a large ledger book details the possessions detainees arrived with. One man arrived at the prison in 2007 with a wallet, a watch and a key to a house. It’s unclear if he ever returned.
Still sanctioned by the UN and several countries that cannot make funds available to them, directly or indirectly, HTS forces are ill-equipped and ill-prepared to deal with the delicate task of preserving prison sites and other crime scenes.
When the basement in the Palestinian Branch recently flooded, a volunteer group was allowed to “redecorate” the inside of another prison in a move other Syrians described as “erasing history”. Elsewhere, desperate families have been observed attempting to excavate mass grave sites by themselves.
The NGOs Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison have called on the new government in Damascus to take urgent steps to “secure and preserve evidence of atrocities committed under the government of former president Bashar al-Assad, including key government and intelligence documents as well as the sites of atrocities and mass graves.”
Ahmed al-Sharaa, the HTS leader and transitional president, has said senior figures from Assad’s government will be caught and prosecuted for the crimes they committed, but that rank-and-file soldiers will be granted an amnesty – a decision some communities have disregarded in order to take revenge themselves.
Matar is a rare Syrian who has had the opportunity to secure justice against one of his perpetrators, after he served as a witness in a case taken in Germany against Anwar Raslan.
The former Syrian army colonel linked to the torture of 4,000 people had attempted to seek asylum in Germany before being detained on charges of murder, rape and torture.
After Raslan was convicted, Matar said: “It was partial justice – an individual case of justice. In my dreams, I wish I had met Raslan again in Syria, that justice could happen inside our country.”
How the vast amount of evidence already collected and now being unearthed in Syria should be gathered together, and who should ultimately be responsible for the investigation remain open questions, says Monika Borgmann, the director of Umam, a research and documentation centre based in southern Beirut that has gathered testimonies from prisoners released from Syrian prisons, where hundreds of Lebanese were detained during Lebanon’s civil war.
“Should it be civil society who does it, or should it really be the future state, and to what extent can you trust the future state?” she says, adding that the decision by the new government in Damascus to appoint a minister for justice who personally oversaw the execution of a woman for prostitution in 2015 is not encouraging.
“I profoundly believe that it’s impossible for Syria to have a new start if there is no accountability for these huge crimes.”
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Our In The News podcast is now published daily – Find the latest episode here
