Surviving Syria's Prisons review – consistently shocking and unforgettably moving

The Guardian

3 days ago

The response to the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 is an indication of what a wretched age we are living through. What happened during Syria's civil war ought to have been globally infamous, the sort of dark blip that makes humanity reflect on the terrible things it can do – but with so much destruction, oppression and injustice elsewhere, there is a reckoning still to come. Sara Obeidat's chilling, profoundly thoughtful documentary takes a significant step towards comprehending the horror and trying to account for it.
As the Arab spring protests spread into Syria in 2011, Shadi Haroun and his brother Hadi organised rallies that they dreamed would topple Assad. When a march ended in a mass shooting by the authorities and arrests of the survivors, Shadi spent time in jail. After his release a few months later, his family begged him not to continue with his activism because they knew the likely consequences. But Shadi had seen first-hand how violent and corrupt the Syrian state had become. It had to be fought, so he and Hadi stepped up their efforts. They were rewarded with almost a decade in an abjectly cruel carceral system.
Obeidat takes the Haroun brothers back to Harasta, a building on the outskirts of Damascus run by the feared air force intelligence. They point to the high window ledges where inmates would try to find space to sleep, because 400 of them had been put in a room measuring 10 metres by eight. They show us the ceiling pipes in a narrow corridor to which prisoners would be cuffed for 72 hours without food, before 'interrogations' that were no more than sadistic beatings.
Having survived Harasta, the brothers were transferred somewhere worse: Sednaya, a prison known as 'the Human Slaughterhouse', where Amnesty International estimates up to 13,000 people were executed in one four-year period. Confessions extracted using torture would lead to death sentences handed down by a sham military 'field court'. But many prisoners did not make it that far: 'heart and respiratory failure' was routinely recorded as the official cause of death for those who did not survive the physical abuse. Obeidat has obtained photographs of some of their bodies, bruised beyond recognition. It wasn't their hearts that failed them.
Shadi and Hadi's testimony is consistently shocking and unforgettably moving. Hadi recounts how hearing Shadi screaming was worse for him than being tortured himself, so when he heard him cry out, he would start screaming so he could take his brother's place. He describes how, as the prisoners' sense of time and place melted away, his elaborate fantasies in which he pretended bulgur wheat rations were delicious fried chicken kept a packed cell of men sane for a few more precious days.
The film does not stop at documenting what the victims of Assad went through. It asks who did it to them. And how could they do it? To that end, Obeidat tracked down several regime soldiers who worked at the prisons. They talk about being brainwashed at school and during national service, and about being stripped and beaten during their initiation into the Assad regime, as a warning of what would happen to them if they disobeyed. They assigned numbers to inmates to make it harder for families to track what had become of them. They organised the digging of mass graves. One officer talks about how the prisoners 'were all one mass … they were all the same'. Another says whatever guilt he felt was overridden by the knowledge that showing any mercy would mean 'you sentence yourself to death'.
This is a valuable examination of how totalitarianism sustains itself; how oppressors who fearfully feel they have no other option can be as dangerous as those who take the role of oppressor gladly. Not that they should be excused. As Hadi calmly observes, the option to defect or flee was there, as risky as it might have been. The film strikes a difficult balance, empathising with the perpetrators without forgiving them.
As it's described here, the depravity Syria sunk into might be far beyond human forgiveness. Hussam, a former prison officer at Sednaya who says he hasn't looked in a mirror for three years because he cannot bear to see himself, recalls a tradition he and his colleagues upheld every Wednesday morning: 'execution parties'. At one such event, one of the prisoners who was hanged by the neck didn't die, so Hussam was ordered to step forward and finish the job by grabbing his legs and pulling. This put him close enough to hear the man's last words. 'Before he died he said one thing: 'I'm going to tell God what you did.''
Surviving Syria's Prisons aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer.