Mick Hartley

Let's not forget about Syria. Jaber Baker and Uğur Ümit Üngör's Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System is published this week.

An estimated 300,000 people have been detained or have died in prison since the Syrian uprising broke out. Syrians can be arrested for liking a post on Facebook or for the political activities of a distant relative. They are imprisoned without trial, and tortured and starved, often to death.

This book is the first to expose the worst prisons in the Middle East, if not the world. In previous years it had been too dangerous to undertake research on this subject, but the enormous numbers of Syrians taking refuge in neighboring countries and Europe has allowed unprecedented access to their stories.

Based on interviews with both the victims and perpetrators, survivors’ memoirs and notes, as well as leaked regime archives, leaked photos, and leaked intelligence files, the book is a testament of the internment and imprisonment system in Syria under the rule of the Assads, father and son (1970-2020).

It's reviewed by Peter Carty in the Spectator:

As far as the international media is concerned, the Syrian uprising is largely over and attention has mostly shifted elsewhere. Nevertheless, monstrous internal repression continues. In order to ensure its survival, the regime terrorises the population on an enormous scale. Its main instrument is Syria’s prison system. The primary role of the prisons is not to punish wrongdoers. They are there for the annihilation of political opposition. In Syrian Gulag, Jaber Baker and Uğur Ümit Üngör present the first detailed overview of the prison system. They have carried out more than 100 interviews with surviving detainees, as well as former prisoner workers and many other eyewitnesses. They have also drawn upon a huge amount of archival material. The results are profoundly shocking. In more than 30 years of book reviewing, this is the most horrifying volume I have read….

Baker and Üngör describe how the system’s administration is split between intelligence, military and civil departments. Assad keeps them in competition to maintain his dominance. They inflict extreme torture on prisoners to show their loyalty to him. As the authors put it: ‘The more you torture, the more you demonstrate to others that you support him.’

The intelligence services run the worst prisons. Most of their inmates are routinely tortured every day. As well as whippings with electric flex, they are beaten with metal bars and wooden clubs. Many suffer broken limbs and other injuries which often result in lifelong disabilities or death. They are also electrocuted, burnt, starved, strangled and raped.

The prison overcrowding documented by Baker and Üngör beggars belief. Inmates can be crammed together so tightly that they are left with no more than 40 square centimetres of floor space each – the area of a large bathroom tile. They must sleep in shifts. Restricted ventilation kills off many of them.

The overall scale of suffering throughout the prison system is staggering. Numbers massively expanded after the 2011 uprising. Around 300,000 Syrians have been imprisoned since then. The system as a whole is a hybrid of prisons and concentration camps. The latter include extermination camps. The notorious Saydnaya military prison, 30 kilometres north of Damascus, stages ongoing mass hangings. Amnesty International estimates that from 2011 to 2015 alone, between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extrajudicially executed there. Aerial photography has shown smoking chimneys on an annexe which appears to be a crematorium.

Whether the hell on Earth Baker and Üngör describe will end in the near future is doubtful. There is some cause for optimism. Last month, protests and strikes broke out in the south of Syria, centred on the city of As-Suwayda, home to most of the country’s minority Druze population. Even so, Assad has largely regained control. Regime change appears unlikely in the absence of western military intervention.

This impressively detailed exposé strengthens the case for that – not least because, rather than subsiding with the end of civil war, the torture and extermination is likely to be increasing. As the authors explain: ‘The fact that there are no military battles only means the regime is in firmer control, which means not less but more violence.’

Those of us with long memories will remember similar tales of torture chambers and mass killings coming out of Iraq in the Saddam years.

Saddam's Iraq and Syria under the Assads were the two Ba'athist states, where a toxic mix of Arab nationalism and one-party socialism – with a strong debt to fascist and Nazi thinkers – resulted in two dictatorships of almost unimaginable brutality. We got rid of one back in 2003, but the backlash in the West to Saddam's overthrow has been so overwhelmingly negative that Western intervention in Syria was never a possibility. Instead we handed it over to Russia, where they practiced and perfected the techniques now being visited on Ukraine, and the killing and the torture continue – of those who haven't fled abroad.