Searching for their loved ones in a newly liberated Syrian prison
On the roof, three men pointed to a reinforced hatch from which a pipe protruded. Perhaps, they suggested, it served as a vent to the secret underground prison. There was a foul odor seeping from it, but it seemed like the smell of sewers, not the smell of corpses. As I prepared to climb back into the prison through a hole in the concrete, they shouted again and pointed to an opening at the far end of the ceiling. Another hole smelled worse, but that too didn’t seem like much more than a waste. The men went on searching aimlessly for what they could find.
Everywhere I went in Saydnaya, it was the same story. The Syrian people have been terrorized, deprived of their rights, completely cut off from their missing relatives, and even turned into a kind of ad hoc forensic anthropology. A man who lost two brothers and three cousins in Saydnaya told me that he was able to visit them once, in 2016. But then he was told that he could not return, and since then there has been only silence. I asked him if he had tried to return, despite the order, to check on his family members. He replied with a shocked look: “My relatives told me not to ask about them, as it might be harmful to them, so I stopped.”
As I was walking down the stairs, a young man motioned to me while holding his other hand over his mouth and nose. One of his friends cut a hole in the wall about six feet high and squatted in the hole. The young man asked me: “Please, smell.” This time I thought maybe it smelled like death. The man in the hole began tearing up the masonry and throwing the debris aside. A group of onlookers gathered, peering through the bars of the closed entrance below. At this moment, their faces were full of hope. ♦