S1 E6 - From Behind the Sun

NADIA AL-BUKAI Just before we begin, I wanted to let you know that this podcast contains some descriptions of physical and psychological violence. Please use discretion.

In 2015, during my last call with Riyad before I left Syria with my family, someone came to meet me to take over connecting Riyad with his family in Turkey, the way I used to do. That person was Angela. Angela had seen Riyad in Adra Prison while she was visiting her brother there. He was arrested from a demonstration and was Riyad's closest cellmate at that time.

RIYAD AVLAR I saw Angela. And Angela fall in love with me. She began to help me, and she went to ask the lawyers about my papers and how they can help me.

NADIA AL-BUKAI From Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, this is Behind the Sun. I'm Nadia al-Bukai.

By 2015, Riyad had spent almost twenty years in detention. Wanting to do everything she can to help him, Angela hired a lawyer to write an appeal for Riyad to get a pardon.

RIYAD AVLAR She told me, "Riyad, when I saw your file, it was maybe thousands paper. I will fall down and died."

The judge open it, reading it. "No pardon to this man. No pardon."

NADIA AL-BUKAI Riyad had served his full sentence at this point. A life sentence in Syria means twenty years behind bars. So, they kept pushing.

RIYAD AVLAR They went to – to another court and a judge, and he said, "Okay. I will let him."

After twenty years, they began to working in my papers, and it took almost one year to finish.

NADIA AL-BUKAI In 2017 after spending over twenty-one years in several detention centres in Syria, Riyad was about to get his freedom back. During those times, when the guards come to the cell blocks and read the names of those who are getting released, he hears his name. "Riyad Avlar."

RIYAD AVLAR When they brought my name and that they will release me, hundreds of people began to clap, began shouting. "Oh, hey. They will release Riyad."

It was like a dream. Everybody, they was shouting. And I sit on my bed. And I – I was afraid. I was used to inside, thinking about the outside world, if they released me, what I'm going to do. How I will go and look in my mother's eyes? What the community outside do with me? Am I going to work in the street and sit under the trees? Am I going to be a free to look to the sky at night and see the stars? I was missing stars?

All the time I spent, I wasn't seeing any stars. I was forgetting the stars, how it was. I was forgetting the moon. I was missing the moon, the mountain, the sea, the forest, the trees.

I wasn't believe it, but it happened.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Upon Riyad's released from Adra Prison, the regime took him in a car to be immediately deported from the country.

RIYAD AVLAR They brought me to the Turkish border. The Turkish officers came. They was waiting me to – to take me from the Syrian intelligence. I saw a line between them. They was talking with each other, and one of the policemen began. He opened a book, and he began reading something.

I stopped him, and I asked in Turkish. I asked him, "What is this line between me and you?"

He said, "This is the border."

I said, "Okay." And I jump it immediately to other side.

And the man said, "What are you doing? What are you doing?"

I looked to the Syria intelligence. I began to damn them.

NADIA AL-BUKAI All the cursing and swearing in the world would not make up for the thousands of nights Riyad spent in Assad's dark cells, but the act itself must have felt good and intoxicating.

After that, the Turkish officers who are still in disbelief in shock about Riyad's case took him to meet his mother for the first time since his disappearance as a teenager.

RIYAD AVLAR My mum come for the first time. I hugged her, and she began to smell me. Just the smell. Smelled my neck. And she said, "Oh, I lost this for years, my son."

And I began to cry. My mom. Yeah. I let her smell me. And afterwards, she hugged me. And I wish to go back, to be a baby, a little boy, to hug me and don't leave me.

DIAB SERRIH When Riyad was released, I didn't believe it honestly. I was in touch with his immediate family, his siblings and his mother. It was like, "Wow, finally. Finally, he's out." I spoke with him.

Of course, when he just got out. He didn't have an ID. He had nothing. Even the Turkish government wasn't able to recognise him. I told him, "I will let you enjoy the time with your family, with your mother, and siblings. But I have to warn you, I will come after you. Let your mother and siblings see you properly. And then, I'll come."

NADIA AL-BUKAI Riyad and Angela didn't get to be together, but he always remembers her as the guardian angel who saved his life. Everything Riyad 1knew about his original country had changed by the time he was freed. His time in Assad's network of detention centres was longer than the time he had lived in Turkey. He knew more about living in detention than living a normal life. He read books in Arabic during his time in detention way more than he did in his native language. On top of that, Riyad was presumed dead in Turkey and had to prove that he was still alive.

RIYAD AVLAR The court said, "Okay. We have to be sure that you are Riyad Avlar. So, we have to send you and your mum to the hospital to take a DNA test."

They sent us to the DNA a test, and the test results give that "ninety-nine and up, this woman is his mother."

NADIA AL-BUKAI Riyad didn't wait for the court to prove that he was still alive to get to work, though. After one month from his release, Riyad had already met with Diab along with more than thirty ex-detainees from Sednaya, and they established the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP). They began to build a registry of the missing people in Assad's detention centres and started the process to locate them. They also started providing psychotherapy support for the families of the missing and the survivors.

At their centre in southern Turkey, they often held open sessions, so that those who needed support could attend. In the summer of 2020, a woman came to a meeting, asking if they can help confirm the status of her husband who was once in Sednaya.

RIYAD AVLAR I saw her. I asked her husband's name. She said, "Abu Hassan."

I said, "Oh, okay. I know him. He's my friend. We were together in Sednaya."

"You're sure?"

"Of course," I said.

She said, "He's died. We don't know. He's missed."

I said, "No. No. No. No. He isn't died. He's alive. So, one of detainees, I interviewed with him, told me that he is still alive. He's alive."

She couldn't believe this. She said, "This is right?"

"Of course," I said. "This is sure." And I called the guy. I said to him, "Muhammad, could you tell Abu Hassan about her husband." And he began to give her the news. And I saw that she turned from a stone to a bird. She began to smile. She began to scream.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Abu Hassan was abducted by Syrian intelligence in 1999 for speaking about politics with a business client. The client was a Turkish man. That was during the turbulent times and the relationship between Syria and Turkey in the nineties. The same circumstances that led Riyad's arrest. The intelligence was surveilling almost every Turkish national in Syria.

For two and a half years after he first vanished in 1999, his wife, who was taking care of their six children, didn't know where he was. What happened was that Abu Hassan was eventually sent to the second field military court at Sednaya. This happened about ten months after he was taken by the authorities. And as usual with Assad's military court, Abu Hassan didn't know his sentence. They just put him in a solitary confinement cell in Sednaya 's red building.

ABU HASSAN I went to see the judge. He got up from his table and slapped me. I told him that I didn't do anything.

He said, "Yes, you did. If you don't admit, I will send you back to be beaten and tortured. You will speak whether you like it or not."

This is how he treated us.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Abu Hassan's wife lost track of her husband inside Assad's labyrinth of detention locations in 2014. She had also lost all their income when he disappeared, because he was the sole provider for the family. It was only after two and a half years of solitary confinement that Abu Hassan was transferred to an ordinary cell where he was finally allowed visitation.

ABU HASSAN I used to think of my kids the most. What happened to them? What happened to my wife? But then, when they came, I was comforted. My sister, my brother, my wife, and my kids came to visit me.

One must speak of. I told my wife, "You don't have to raise the kids alone. My future is unknown. You can leave them with my patents and have your own life."

She said, "No. God gave me six kids, and I will take care of them. Whenever you come out, we are here for you." This was her answer. Such a great person

NADIA AL-BUKAI Each month, the family visited Abu Hassan until the riots took place in 2008.

Do you remember Nizar Rastanawi, the human rights activist who was murdered during Sednaya 's riots in 2008?

Abu Hassan was Nizar's cellmate as well and was present before Nissan's death.

ABU HASSAN Nizar and I were sitting together at that moment. He asked me for a cigarette while we were drinking coffee. Diab was there and other men as well. Among them was a poet, Ahmad Hamdu al-Mahmud.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Ahmad Hamdu al-Mahmud had been detained without a trial for twenty years at that point. Since 1988.

ABU HASSAN Suddenly, people we don't know came inside. They were masked. It was chaos. They were a group, but only two of them entered the cell. They made a gesture to Nizar to come. As I was sitting next to him, I thought that gesture was for me. I got up, but they said, "Not you. Him."

Nizar was inside. There was a bed and a table and another bed with around five to six people drinking coffee. So, all of us got up, even Ahmad Hamdu al-Mahumud, and told them, "I was in Tadmor Prison, and I took a thousand lashes for defending an old man who was being insulted. Can't you leave Nizar alone?"

They told him, "It's none of your business. We want Nizar."

NADIA AL-BUKAI Nizar's death was heavy on Abu Hassan.

ABU HASSAN Nizar Rastanawi never expected to be imprisoned and sentenced to four years. And he died in prison. God bless his soul. He didn't deserve what happened to him. He must have his own platform or become a role model in the country. He must be honoured in his life and in his death as well.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The brutal response from the regime to the detainees of Sednaya's demands in 2008 and the subsequent chaos of the riots that led to many deaths like Nizar didn't shake Hassan's faith that things will get better.

ABU HASSAN I thought to myself, "I didn't die. I survived and I will survive. What happened to us will someday get out to the. We will teach it to our kids. The story of Nizar will be told. The story of Ahmad Hamdu al-Mahmud will be told."

I'm optimistic about the future. I like to think that I could be set free at any minute. I love freedom and I love life.

NADIA AL-BUKAI After the regime had demolished Sednaya around the detainees, the intelligence distributed Sednaya's inmates between other detention centres while they rebuilt Sednaya.

Abu Hassan was sent to the political guidance branch of the military police. There, he discovered that his original sentence was fifteen years in prison. This happens with so many detainees. They only find out about their sentence years and years after they've been detained. The regime denies them even that basic piece of information.

ABU HASSAN Assad hasn't got anything. He's only got oppression, killing, and everything that's arbitrary. He only speaks the language of oppression, of burning, of destroying. This is not a way to rule a country.

He's not a human being. He's a monster. He's a savage.

And this is my opinion. I would talk about it in front of all the radios of the word

NADIA AL-BUKAI Abu Hassan was sent back to Sednaya in 2009 and remained there with Riyad and Diab until 2011. When the regime was turning Sednaya into a death camp after the revolution, Abu Hassan was sent to Aleppo Central Prison in June 2011.

ABU HASSAN They took whoever was from Damascus to a prison in Damascus. And the ones from Aleppo were taken to Aleppo. And so on. They transferred each one to where his case was based. So, thanks God, I was hopeful. I said, "Now, I can at least hire a lawyer and get out."

NADIA AL-BUKAI The lawyer was trying to use the momentum of the revolution to their advantage. He tried to transfer Abu Hassan's case from the military court to a civilian one. In late 2012, the efforts would be a success.

ABU HASSAN What was left for me to be free was the consent of the penal court and Aleppo after the lawyer has secured the consent of the prison director. He prepared the papers and we submitted a request to reduce the sentence to a quarter of the original sentence.

Then, I would get out. Suddenly there was a bombing in the Palace of Justice in Aleppo where my papers were. They said the papers were burnt.

NADIA AL-BUKAI By that time, towards late 2012, the Free Syrian Army and other armed groups had advanced in some parts of Aleppo city. In response Assad's tanks and planes had started to bomb the neighbourhoods of Aleppo to the ground with zero regard for civilian lives.

ABU HASSAN I asked the lawyer to go to Damascus again and redo all the paperwork. That was in 2002. But he apologised. He said that the last time he was crossing the President's Bridge in Damascus, there was an explosion five minutes later. That terrified him. The lawyer was terrified.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Then came the siege of Aleppo Central Prison in early 2013.

NEWS REPORTER 1 And staying in Syria. Rebels have attack the central prison in the northern city of Aleppo, which has been under siege for months now. Fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front launched the assault.

ABU HASSAN The siege lasts us for one year. And we have seen horrors. We were dying every day. We were either being hit by shells, rockets, or bullets from here and there, from the doors, the windows, or the hospital. We didn't know how we would die. Four people from our ward died, including the head of the cellblock and the poet Ahmad Hamdu al-Mahmud.

Al-Mahmud needed surgery. He had a lump in his body, close to the heart and the stomach. It started to get bigger during the siege. And he died within a month. He died in our arms. May he rest in peace.

NADIA AL-BUKAI When Ahmad Hamdu al-Mahmud died in January 2014, he had spent twenty-four years in detention. He was one of the longest held prisoners in Syria at that time.

ABU HASSAN There was no water or electricity for a whole year. It became a sanitation crisis. The Red Crescents would come and bring us food and water only. The guards, stationed with their weapons, got boxes of honey, canned food, and bread dropped via aid parachutes. They had nothing to worry about, whereas we had nothing. If the Red Crescent didn't come, and sometimes they didn't come for a whole week, then twenty to thirty people would die during that week, whether due to lack of food or medicine. There were a lot of diseases spreading.

NADIA AL-BUKAI During the siege, Abu Hassan and other prisoners managed to get mobile phones smuggled in and were in contact with their families.

ABU HASSAN My last phone call was with my wife. I told her the regime army was closing in. We came close to death, but we might get out safely.

She said that one of my daughters fainted when she heard the news.

I asked her to talk with my daughter. As a father, I had to send her a message. I told her, "We are all fine, and we would be out soon."

Because there was a sanitation crisis inside the prison and it's not liveable anymore, we had to go out.

NEWS REPORTER 2 Eight kilometres northeast of Aleppo City, Assad's forces are now within reach of Castello Road, which links rebel-held parts of the city to the northern countryside. And the army's advanced in and around the prison means Assad's government will not be able to cut off weapons, food, and medical supplies to rebel fighters who are on the outskirts of the city and on the Turkish border.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The first thing Assad's forces did after breaking the siege over the prison was gather the detainees from the political cellblock and punish them. Abu Hassan and others were gathered and tortured by Assad's forces in the prison yard. Then, they were moved to the criminal security branch in Aleppo.

ABU HASSAN They told us, "Tomorrow or after tomorrow, you would go to Damascus."

We knew then that we were summoned to Damascus. But our families knew nothing. Our families received the news that we had been executed, that every one of us died in the break-in. So, our families, fifty-two of us, thought that we were dead. Some of them held funeral services, but others didn't believe the news. They continued to search with the lawyers, judges, and intermediaries.

NADIA AL-BUKAI After two days, Abu Hassan and others were transferred by a military plane from the criminal security branch in Aleppo to Damascus.

ABU HASSAN I prayed to God not to be taken to Sednaya again. After all that time, fourteen or fifteen years, I was waiting to go out. My sentence was served in full. I finished my sentence when I was in Aleppo's prison. Now they took me to Damascus. Not only me, but with the other prisoners.

The leadership. The wise leadership wanted us, they said. For what? We didn't know. Nobody told us.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Abu Hassan wasn't taken to Sednaya. They were sent to Adra Prison, but put in a separate building, away from other detainees. His family didn't believe that he had died and kept pushing for answers about his situation. And after a month, the guards called his name.

ABU HASSAN When my name was called, all of my fifty-two cellmates were happy. They said their farewells. They kissed me goodbye. They said, "Thank God. This is a glimpse of hope."

At the same time, one of my friends asked me for a word in private. I thought he wanted to send a message to his family. Instead, he said, "Just so you don't get surprised, Abu Hassan. They might not let you out. Because everyone of us who got out could be instead of taking to another branch."

I told him, "I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't have any other charges. My name came up for release."

He said, "Just keep this in mind. After everything that happened, they can surprise us with anything."

NADIA AL-BUKAI Well, Abu Hassan's friend was right. He wasn't being released. His name was in a memo to transfer him to another notorious military intelligence branch, 248. But when they arrived, the soldier said that something was wrong with the memo. They said, Abu Hassan should not be there, and one of the soldiers went to check the referral with his commanding officer.

ABU HASSAN He went upstairs in the same building and came after ten to fifteen minutes. He said, "You're not wanted here."

I said, "Thank God."

But the officer who was with me said, "How come he's not wanted?"

The first one replied, "Whoever referred him here, he's stupid." Then, he turned to me and said, "In which branch were you first arrested?"

I said, "285. State security."

He took the memo and scratched 248 and wrote 285.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Just like that, with a pen scratch from a security officer, since fate was decided.

ABU HASSAN We arrived at State Security Branch 285. The security officer said something to the officer who received me. Then, the latter turned to me and slapped me. He said, "Look down at the floor. Don't look up."

I told him I'm here to be released.

"What are you talking about?" He said, "Do not say a word."

NADIA AL-BUKAI The moment Abu Hassan was taken downstairs at Branch 285, he disappeared completely. That was in 2014. They put him in an underground solitary confinement cell for seven months. No interrogation. Nothing.

All of his requests to speak with the director of the branch were turned down. Until one day, they asked him to prepare himself.

ABU HASSAN I was out, and I thought they would take me to Adra Prison and we would be released. But they walked us for ten metres outside the building to a new block inside the same branch.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Abu Hassan was kept inside this underground block completely cut off from the outside world for five more years. All his please for release or for a change in his living situation were denied. He couldn't take it anymore.

ABU HASSAN After five years, the director of the branch called for me after many attempts where I tried to hang myself. What shall I do? I wanted to do something. I was done.

There were two men. One ran to tell the block warden. The other untied me. I had tied myself to the water faucet and told everyone that it's better to die than to live in in this life. Only then did the director call for me. He said, "Why did you do this?"

I said, "What do you mean? This is not a way to live? What have I done? I haven't done anything."

He said, "Okay. I will talk to my commander. Your family is waiting for you. You have a family, right?"

I said, "Sure. I have a wife and kids."

And he said, "They're waiting for you. You don't have to do that again. The director told me your case is with the National Security Command."

I said, "Okay. Check with the National Security. My sentence is done."

He said, "We can't. Enough. The high leadership knows what they are doing."

NADIA AL-BUKAI The director used Abu Hassan's wife and kids to talk him out of hurting himself. Yet at the same time, he didn't even care about the fact that Abu Hassan had been disappeared for years for no reason and that his family must be living in agony, not knowing anything about him.

The inexplicable cruelty of Assad's intelligence officers is because of the total impunity they enjoy. They could and still can detain people endlessly in horrific conditions without any fear of justice or accountability.

If it wasn't for the ex-detainee who told Riyad about seeing Abu Hassan, Abu Hassam's wife would never have known that he was still alive. His family wouldn't have kept asking about him and calling for his release.

After seven years of his enforced disappearance, the guards once again called his name.

ABU HASSAN They said the brunch commander, the general, has asked for me. They said my name had come up for release. I felt that he was joking. No. It's impossible. That can't be it. I asked one of my friends to tell them that I am sick and I can't take such jokes. But the guard opened the cell door, saying, "What jokes? Everyone's waiting for him there. The commander and the director. He must be out in less than a minute."

I put on my clothes and took some personal belongings and went out.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Finally, Abu Hassan I was able to meet the commander of the branch for his release.

ABU HASSAN I said to him, "Since I came to the branch, I have been writing you many requests, pleading to meet you. Why wouldn't you just meet me?"

He said, "Why would I do that?"

I said, "Because I stayed here for seven years. More than my sentence. Why?"

"I didn't know." He said, "Listen, I could not meet you, because I didn't have a solution for your situation."

I said, "How come?"

He said, "The National Security was in charge of your case."

I said, "Okay. You could have written to the National Security.

He said, "We did our best. And you must understand what that means."

I told them that I did. But, of course, I didn't understand anything.

NADIA AL-BUKAI It took just over twenty-one years of detention, after being so close to dying in Sednaya, Aleppo Prison, and Branch 285, Abu Hassan was united with his family in the summer of 2021.

ABU HASSAN My daughters ran to me. They wanted to kiss my hands and feet. The people were all gathered. My relatives A'zaz City and my two daughters. I hadn't seen them for such a long time. I told them, "Honey, enough. You should be happy, not crying."

They were crying with happiness, but I also saw sadness. I couldn't tell whether they were happy or sad. There were mixed feelings.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Abu Hassan went to Turkey to reunite with his wife and the rest of his family. They couldn't live in Syria, in his hometown Aleppo. Their house was turned to ruins like almost half the city.

Between 2012 and 2017, the regime, joined later by Russia, used unprecedented brutality to crush those who refused to live under Assad's rule in Aleppo. In addition to besieging thousands of families to force them to surrender and flee their homes, highly destructive weapons like missiles and barrel bombs were used to destroy homes, schools, and hospitals with no regard whatsoever to human lives.

In Turkey, Abu Hassan also reunited with his old friends, Riyad and Diab. A year and a half before Abu Hassan's release, their organisation had been the one to discover he was still alive and give the news to his family.

DIAB SERRIH With all the pain that I endured and all my sad stories, when I remember Abu Hassan and how he was released after seven years of forcible disappearance, when I remember the happiness of his family and his grandkids, the happiness of his daughters, I forget everything. I feel like there is hope in our work. There is always hope, and our work will be fruitful in the end.

RIYAD AVLAR He came our office. Now, he is with us all times. And he began to make advocacy for feminists to tell them that their songs do will come one day.

NADIA AL-BUKAI What fascinates me the most about the stories of survivors from Assad's detention centres is the strength and resilience of the Syrian people. And this sense of unity in defiance between the detainees and their families shows this to the world. They don't tire of asking for justice for their loved ones. They insist on telling the stories of all those left behind. I see this courage in every survivor I have met. I saw it in my father and in Riyad. The first thing my father Najah did after we reached Europe was to draw everything he remembered seeing inside the intelligence branch. He wanted to document and show the world all the horrors that happened inside Branch 227, where he was.

My father, Riyad, Diab, Abu Hassan, Ghufran, Noor, and thousands like them are all calling for one thing: The killings, torture and disappearances in Syria must stop. Assad and his backers must be held accountable. Justice must prevail for those who died and continue to die inside Assad's dungeons.

ABU HASSAN There are a lot of things that must be done. I hope there will be some actions, not just words.

DIAB SERRIH ADMSP is about telling our stories as detainees. Getting the stories of that place Sednaya, so they aren't forgotten. This place affected me personally on all levels. I lost my job. I lost my future, because of this prison. In this place, I saw death twenty times. It's where we wished for this to be relieved. This place affected me and many, many others.

My friends before the prison and after were not the same. Even the people I knew before told me that I had become a different person. And this is something that happened to everybody. Everybody who entered there had their lives turned upside down. The story must be told. The truth must see the light of day. This place isn't a normal place. This place is a death camp.

What motivated us to create ADMSP was the need to take care of each other, to give each other that feeling that we aren't alone. No. Quite the opposite. There are people who cared about you.

GHUFRAN KHULANI Once I saw, like, very thin elderly woman, very, very old, and she was holding, pick a chair for her son. And then, another side, the soldier hold his gun and start the soldier shouting about to make her go away and to leave the place. But she never left. She tried to explain to him and facing him by eyes. She wants her son. She was very strong and inspired all the women to keep asking. And I always remember this moment. I always dream that we'll release them, all the detainees. All of us will be happy to see them again.

RIYAD AVLAR My mother, for twenty-one years, twenty-one years, she didn't saw me. And I am helping matters every day. Always, I saw them, I talking with them. I try to give them hope. Even when we take news for their sons that he died, we try to stand beside them and try always give them hope.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Behind the Sun is a co-production between Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, in collaboration with the Association of Detainees and the Missing (ADMSP) and the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability (SJAC) under its project, On the Margins No More.

This series was written and produced by Muhammad Farouk.

Thank you to Ranim, Ola, Sarah, Mais, and Ruairi from The Syria Campaign and Rahaf from ADMSP for helping put this series together.

Additional thanks to Mahmoud Nowara and [name] for their support with voiceovers.

Editing, mixing, and sound design was done by Jarek Zaba and Ivan Easley.

Additional production support from Molly Freeman, Tom Biddle, and Lincoln Van der Westhuizen.

I would also like to say a very special thanks to everyone who bravely shared their stories in the series. The theme music is by Milo Evans. My name is Nadia al-Bukai

The theme music is by Milo Evans.

My name is Nadia al-Bukai.

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S1 E5 - The Search

NADIA AL-BUKAI Just before we begin, we wanted to let you know that this podcast contains some descriptions of physical and psychological violence. Please use discretion.

DIAB SERRIH In Syria, you could be prosecuted for not reporting a lost ID card. Also, losing your ID card in Syria means you will eventually be summoned to an intelligence branch.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Every road in Assad's Syria leads to his security services in one way or another, and everyone is searching for a way to avoid encountering those infamous people.

After 2011, the regime planted security checkpoints at entries and exits of cities and towns across the country, as well as inside the cities, so it's almost impossible for people to move around without passing through a checkpoint. Thousands and thousands of people have been and continue to be arrested and disappeared at such checkpoints. Often, they are detained based on the area they're from, their family name, or even because of information found on their mobile phone, suggesting they're opponents of Assad.

Diab is right. Even losing your ID card can be very dangerous when you have to pass through a checkpoint.

From Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, this is Behind the Sun. I'm Nadia al-Bukai.

After Diab left Syria in 2012, he went to Italy. It was supposed to be his new home away from Syria after his second arrest. But after forty-five days in Europe, he decided to go back to Syria.

DIAB SERRIH I returned, because I felt like I didn't have to stay in Europe. The regime was about to fall, and I didn't want to miss that. I didn't want to miss the joy of seeing Bashar al-Assad's regime falling apart. I couldn't imagine that moment without me being there in the street. It was impossible to imagine myself spending all of those years in the regime's presence, five years in Sednaya, and one year of the revolution that was full of war. I wasn't just relaxing with my family. I wasn't just sitting and watching. Of course, I couldn't let this moment pass me by. I felt that events like that only happened once in all of history.

NADIA AL-BUKAI But when he got back, he had some trouble. Diab had lost his ID card while in Italy and had to report that in a police station upon his arrival in Syria. That meant another interrogation by the intelligence services, and Diab couldn't just depend on luck this time.

DIAB SERRIH I consulted a guy I knew in the political intelligence branch who wanted to defect from the regime and was helping the revolution. He used to pass information to protestors. So, I asked this man to check if it was okay to tell the police that I had lost my ID in Damascus. After two days, he called back and told me, "Delete me from your life. Don't just delete my phone number, and get the hell out of the country."

I just wanted to understand what was going on, but he hung up. So, I went and spent the night at my sister's house, and I decided to leave for Lebanon the next day. There was a taxi driver I used to travel with. He wasn't there at the time. He was in Beirut. I decided I wouldn't even wait for him. I'd go immediately.

NADIA AL-BUKAI It was just few days after Diab got back to Syria. He took the difficult decision to flee once more. His dream of witnessing the victory of the revolution from inside his country was crushed by the fear of being sent behind the sun again. He knew well the grave risks of putting himself at the mercy of Assad's intelligence. He just couldn't put himself or his family through the horrific experience of enforced disappearance again.

GHUFRAN KHULANI Detention for regime, it's a way to control people. So, they always have this system, even before the revolution. For me, I found that detention is the most hardest one on families to use. They punish all the family and they make us feel the pain with the detainees himself. All his family, children, sisters, and mothers.

This kind of pain never stop. It's every day. You cannot stop thinking about them, because you know what happening inside. And the regime used this way always to control people, to make them silent, because the Syrian families know how much this kind of pain hard.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Ghufran's family had left their home in Darayya and moved to Damascus after Majed and Abd's arrest. The family stopped participating in the demonstrations, but were still active in helping protesters, the wounded, and the families of the disappeared. Sometimes, they donate money to buy medicine for those who were injured during the protests or they visit the families to comfort them.

In 2013, Ghufran had not yet known about the execution of her brothers, Majed and Abd, in Sednaya. The family was still looking for them. Years later, they would know that Assad's regime murdered both Majed and Abd back in January 2013.

GHUFRAN KHULANI In April 2013, regime break into our house at night and they took my desk brother Muhammad and my younger brother Bilal. We know later that the Security Branch 215 of Mukhabarat took them. That night, they start to search everything in the house. They threatened us by big kind of guns. Even my mom, she asked what they did my brother. He never answered he and he said only kind of routine searching.

All the family was terrified, and my nephews were a young child, and he was crying. They took them, and you cannot do anything. You feel very helpless. They took them by car. And also, they stole a lot of money from our house and the computers, laptops. My dad has his money from his shop. Also, they took this money.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Branch 215 is one of the most notorious Assad regime detention centres where torture and mass executions were carried out on a daily basis after the revolution. The Branch of Death is what many would call. Like most of the military intelligence branches, 215 is located inside a densely populated area in Damascus.

GHUFRAN KHULANI We know where is the place for 215, and we try to have any information. Also, we try to pay money to release him, because, 1at that time, this is branch called the Branch of Death, it has a bad reputation. We tried a lot of times, but we couldn't.

Later, we had a call that Bilal arrived to Adra Prison.

NADIA AL-BUKAI For Ghufran's family, getting that call from the last cellmate in 2014, months after Muhammad and Bilal's disappearance was very good news since their efforts to visit Majed and Abd in Sednaya seemed impossible at that time. At least they knew Bilal's whereabouts.

GHUFRAN KHULANI After dawn, we prepared ourself, me and my mom. We didn't took my dad, because my dad has heart issue and heart problems, and we don't him to be in this situation. And, sometimes, soldiers very harsh and rude. So, we went, only me and my mom. The trip usually, it's long, to Adra. It's full of checkpoint for regime. In every checkpoint, always, you have this fear maybe they will take me or my mom. So, it was difficult, because if they know more information about my sister and her activities or my brother and his activities also, they will punish us more. Because at that time, all the family still participate.

And there is also part of the road where is the kind of fighting between the regime and free army. And this is place very dangerous, because shorting from two side.

NADIA AL-BUKAI And in Adra, the prison was packed full.

RIYAD AVLAR Everywhere crowded with the prisoners. At the prison, just have to be three thousand. It's capacity, I mean. It become fifteen thousands prisoners in the end. Nowhere to – to sleep, to sit. Everywhere, crowded. Everybody screaming. It is a hard time.

NADIA AL-BUKAI On the day of Ghufran and her mother's visit.

GHUFRAN KHULANI We arrived there. I went to the kind of window. I have to take a visit card. And there, you meet a lot of mothers and families. They came from different county in Syria. A lot of simply don't have any information about their detainees.

Finally, the soldier gave me the visit card. And there was a picture. When I saw the picture for Bilal, I thought, "They are mistaken."

My mum at that time were behind me in secure. I saw Bilal before her. And when I saw Bilal, he was like a dead body and a lot of torture signs still visible. He cannot stand. He was crying. And directly, he told me, he said, "I want to tell you something important. I want to tell you that Muhammad passed away inside 215, in the branch of Mukhabarat."

And I start to shout to Bilal. "Please stop. Stop. Don't say that." I asked him if he is sure. And at that moment, my mum arrived to the place. So, both of us stopped talking. Only crying. And my mum start to cry also, because Bilal was in bad situation. He was very sick, and one of his leg was injured. My mum asked him about Muhammad.

He said, "I don't know."

We spoke, like, around ten minutes. And because he was very sick, he went inside, again. He didn't complete the visit.

All the way from Adra to Damascus, I was crying. And it's long road. I didn't sit near my mum, because I don't want her to see me crying. All the way, I was thinking about Muhammad and his wife and his baby. And they took him before his birth.

All the way to the house, I was thinking how I can see his baby and to answer his wife if she asked me, because I'm sure she will ask me what Bilal told us about Muhammad. I didn't go to the house that day. When we arrived to Damascus, I said to his wife, I said, "I'm very tired. I will sleep."

But I sleep that day. I decide to go to see Bilal again. But in this time, I want to see him without my mom. But my mum never allowed me to go there alone, because it's dangerous place.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Ghufran spent many sleepless nights planning on how to verify the information from Bilal without letting her mother know anything.

GHUFRAN KHULANI In second visit, only I had, like, short minutes or so to speak with Bilal when my mum was busy with the queue. And he said Muhammad was very sick, and they took him from the room, and all the detainees inside the room started to say that he is dead. He don't know what happened after they took Muhammad from their room. So, I don't have a lot of information.

It was heavy information. I told only my sister, Amina. I didn't tell anybody, because I'm not sure about the information and because I don't want them to apply about Abd or Majed, because already we have enough tragedy and enough stress.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Ghufran's family is one of tens of thousands who have gone through similar situations. That limbo of uncertainty is devastating to the families of the detainees. Dictators like Assad would hold the truth, because he wants to make it near impossible for anyone to be certain of anything. With little information present, Assad can control the definition of facts as much as he likes.

The other dilemma with this uncertainty is that it leaves people to anticipate the worst.

With each passing day of Assad's grip on power, all the government documents were losing their worth. The Syrian currency was in freefall, and prices were soaring. Living a normal day in Syria at that time was a luxury.

£S100,000 wasn't even enough to help my father Najah flee Syria to Lebanon in 2014, after he was released from detention in Branch 227. He had paid that amount and intelligence official to clear his name at the border. But the man was a fraud. My father was arrested again while crossing the border to Lebanon and was sent back again to detention. My mother and I had to go back to Damascus to figure out how we could get him out.

A couple of years earlier, in 2012, when Diab was trying to flee Syria without his ID, he was stopped by an intelligence checkpoint on his way to Lebanon at the bus station. They searched Diab's and his phone and found an SMS about an activity related to the revolution.

DIAB SERRIH They took me beneath the stairs of a bridge and stripped me naked. I felt miserable. Imagine yourself in the street completely naked. They surrounded me, so I couldn't escape. One guy started to ask me questions. "Where are you going? What are you going to do? Intelligence agents are on the way to take you to a security branch."

He asked me about the SMSs they've found, and I said, "It has nothing to do with the events."

He started a basic interrogation and pretended to speak over his walkie talkie. Honestly, I was devastated. I didn't know what to do. There was evidence against me. There was that message, though. However, I lied. When I wound up in the security branch this time, there would be no escape.

The words of the sympathetic political intelligence agent I'd ask about my ID were a clear indication, too, when he told me to leave the country, that this time they really had something on me and there would be no way out. And indeed, if they took me to the intelligence branch, I never would have gotten out. You probably would have found me in Caesar's photos.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR Caesar, welcome to the programme. It's not your name, and you are in disguise. How dangerous would it be if people knew who you were?

NADIA AL-BUKAI Caesar is the alias given to a defected Syrian army forensic photographer to protect his identity and life. In his only interview with Amanpour & Co. on PBS and CNN International in 2019, his face was blurred and his voice was distorted and voiceover.

When working for the Syrian officials before the revolution in 2011, he used to take images of the dead bodies inside the army, deaths that were mostly caused by injuries, accidents, or suicide. But after the revolution, he took tens of thousands of photographs of detainees killed inside Assad's detentions.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR Caesar, did you ever dare ask your superiors what was going on?

CAESAR Who doesn't live in Syria doesn't understand the situation of how much fear that existed within us. Even the pathologist had a high level, a high rank, but he was terrified of the intelligence, the intelligence officers that were with us. It was terrifying. It was not allowed for us to ask any question.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Eventually, Caesar defected and left Syria smuggling fifty-five thousand photos of approximately eleven thousand dead. More than half of them died in detention. Taken between March 2011 and August 2013, the collection that shocked the world became known as the Caesar Files.

In the images, a significant number of bodies show signs of starvation. Other injuries include burns, bruising, gashed eyes, marks indicating strangulation and signs of electrocution.

When the files were made public in 2015 by Caesar Files Group, families who were kept in the dark had to go through these horrific photos in search of their loved ones. Ghufran's brother Muhammad was in Branch 215.

GHUFRAN KHULANI It was very difficult and hard, because in beginning, I want to search for Muhammad's picture. But because you have to be very focused, because in my mind, I know maybe his body changed, his face changed, so I have to focus to notice if this picture correct. And they are horrific pictures. So, I start also to imagine Abd and Majed. And I couldn't sleep a lot of days, because I'm watching these pictures. I start to imagine what happened to these bodies before they died, how they felt, how they lost their hopes when they are waiting for us to help them. I stopped searching because it's affect me badly emotionally.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Bilal was fortunately released, and Ghufran's family sent him outside Syria. But despite the horrors, he injured inside Branch 215, he also looked for his brother's photo. He had hope that Muhammad might be still alive.

GHUFRAN KHULANI Bilal later finds the picture for Muhammad.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Going through the photos wasn't easy, but at least it gave them the truth. Yet they never told their mother and father who still didn't know anything about Muhammad's death.

GHUFRAN KHULANI When my mum speak about Muhammad and he will come back, it was kind of torture to me. Even when she told his son about how his dad will come and will play with him, her hope for that, it was difficult for me to hear that, because I know that maybe he will not come back anymore. It was very hard to hide my emotional and my feeling. So, a lot of time, I sit in my room. And I cannot face his wife and his son. I cannot make them lose hope, because I don't have certain information. Until we find the – the picture from Caesar pictures, I decide to tell his wife, because I believe her right to know the information. I decide not to tell my mum and dad, because my dad is sick and has heart problems. I don't want him also to lose hope about Majed and Abd. So, I told his wife. Only his wife, I told her what I know and why I didn't tell her before I told her that I wasn't certain about the information and only there is this picture.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Around this time, the regime had intensified the arrest campaign after Assad had the full backing of Russia. Vladimir Putin's war machines were bombing cities to the ground, enforcing thousands of families to flee their homes. Russia's intervention has helped us at state empowered with a twisted crusade against whoever refused Assad's rule. Ghufran's family eventually had to flee to Lebanon. They tried to stay close to Syria, because they were trying to locate Majed and Abd. But…

NOOR My mum in Lebanon was very sick. All of us were worried, because we left our brothers inside Syria. It was very heavy on me. I told them all the story from the beginning, how Bilal told me, how we become uncertain about the information, and why I didn't tell them from the beginning. I told them all the story. I told them about Caesar picture. It was very sad moment, because my eldest brother Muhammad, it's also like kind of a friend for my dad. He always with him in his shop, and he worked with my dad in my dad's shop. It was shocking, sad. They both were crying, my mum and dad.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Official Assad documents consider whoever opposes the regime, a terrorist, state destabiliser, or rioter. Regardless of the atrocities that the regime has been committing with the Syrian people, often, Assad loyalists say that victims brought terror to themselves. They say whoever lives safely and peacefully wouldn't be harmed by the intelligence forces. They will be fine as long as they don't get in the way of Assad's regime.

NOOR The older ones used to tell us that as long as you're away from problems, the problems will stay away from you. That was our rule number one.

NADIA AL-BUKAI This is Noor. It's not her real name. She chose to use a pseudonym in fear for the safety of her family who remain in regime areas. She's a senior woman with no history whatsoever with activism. She was what the Assad regime might call an obedient citizen. But in the end, it almost doesn't matter how obedient you try to be. Noor is just one example of how the injustice has found its way into everyone's life.

Noor got married one year after the revolution, in early 2012, and had a big wedding, as she says. She wanted to live a peaceful life as best she could. And with her desire to live a peaceful life, she bought into Assad's propaganda.

NOOR In our bubble, we couldn't open the TV on the big news like big channels like Al-Jazeera or Arabia or BBC. We couldn't. That was forbidden. We weren't getting away from problems. We were running from them. Whenever the war was getting closer, we were getting farther away from the war. We were running to another city, to another village. Every year, I remember I was moving to another house. I moved to – to about nine houses in about six or five years. Just moving. Moving. Getting away, getting away. Just like that.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Noor was hopeful and optimistic about the future. She had a baby later in 2012. And despite the constant moving, she wanted to have more children in Syria.

NOOR Then, I had another baby and 2013. But actually, he died. We were refusing the idea that we were hurt too. It's right that the bombs didn't come over me and the bombs didn't hurt me in person. But actually, the day that I lost my baby, it was the day that the airplane stroke my house. I got really, really sad, and I got really devastated. So, I lost my baby. So, I was hurt even though I was living into that bubble.

NADIA AL-BUKAI One day, in 2017, Noor's husband was kidnapped from the street. At the time, Noor was happily expecting another child.

NOOR They came in the early morning, about four o'clock. I wasn't afraid at all. I just was pregnant. Nine months.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The intelligence men arrested her husband's whole extended family as well.

NOOR What would they do with the pregnant woman and an old lady and another pregnant woman and a small bunch of nobodies? We're not important. We're not that dangerous. So, I thought, "Okay. It would be a day or two or three. Or a week. Nothing's going to happen." So, I was very brave. I wasn't afraid.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The whole family were taken to the Mezzeh Military Airport Camp, southwest of the old centre of Damascus. No matter how Noor tried to use logic with interrogators, they kept accusing her of assisting the rebels, along with her husband and the whole family. They didn't release her after a day or two as she anticipated.

NOOR I know the symptoms. I know what would happened. So, I felt it. I knew that I – I'm giving birth. I asked for an ambulance.

They told me, "We will – we will bring you an ambulance. Don't cry. Don't be afraid. We will bring you an ambulance."

I really wish I had birth in that place, in the cells, and didn't have birth in the military hospital. That was the worst part of the detention. It was very, very bad. Of course, the fear kills every cell of your brain and your body, and actually paralyse, your body, your thoughts, your everything. I was afraid. I was really afraid that I would die. And they didn't treat me well. The blood on the ground and the – the unclean tools of the surgery. It was really, really bad. I thought if I didn't die of birth, I would die of infection of that place. And I – I had that infection actually. When I gave birth, I got ill. I got sick really, really bad.

Of course, they didn't give me any pills, any—. Nothing. No nothing. No nothing. No needle, no nothing. And while I was – I was giving birth, the police officer, it was a girl, of course, he kept – he kept pushing me on my tummy, on my – on my chest, and, like, hitting me and slapped me a few times on my face. She was sleepy and she wanted me to finish this thing. So, she kept yelling me, "Come on. Finish. Let's get this finished. Let's—." Yeah. "Come on. Get up. Stop whining. Stop crying. Stop doing this."

It was – it was really torture. It was really torture. Of course, they – they gave me my daughter without any cloths, without any diapers, without any—. No bath, no water. No nothing. No food. No nothing. I just wanted a sip of water, but they didn't give me, even that. I—. it was – it was very tragic.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Noor wrapped her baby in her clothes and was waiting for them to take her back to the cell, to be reunited with her. Instead, they took her to another room in the hospital full of coffins.

NOOR At first, I was afraid that there was real dead bodies in it. But there were just preparing it for the – for the people who died. There was spider all over the place and blood all over the walls. And mouses. And there were two leather beds so scratched and broken and very, very, very dirty. The place itself looked like a torturing cell. It was very, very disgraceful.

That was the point where I had this breakdown, that I really started crying, because there was nobody. Nobody's there with me. I kept crying for about an hour. That was the point I realised that it's not okay, that we're not staying for a day or two, that this is serious. I realised that it's become true. Those aren't just lies. And I – I remember all of the – the talk of the Assad regime cells and the Assad regime's methods of torturing. And I remembered everything. That's when I realised there's a difference between knowing and realising. We know the thing, but you don't realise it. We were trapped, and we need help.

The investigator said that I may stay for another fifteen or twenty years. I—. That was the moment I believed he was really honest, not really just a threat to me.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Noor's daughter was taken from her after forty days of her birth and was sent to an Assad-affiliated foster home. More than eight months had passed since her detention, and she had no idea when this ordeal would end. Until one day, they came to take another baby from their mother. Noor had the breakdown and started to knock on the door and scream unstoppably. After a while came an intelligence officer.

NOOR He told me that "You didn't do anything. You were supposed to get out. There's no charges on you. No real charges on you. You were supposed to get out." But it looks like the – the big general doesn't want you to get out. That's why you're here."

I told him, "Okay. When I'm gonna get out?"

He told me, "Soon. Actually, very, very soon."

I told him he is a liar and it's just a joke. It's just the game.

He told me, "No, no. I'm not lying on you. I didn't lie."

And he wasn't lying. We get out after about a week. I don't remember. Ten days, maybe, or seven days. I don't remember. But we didn't go home. We went to another place, another detention.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Noor was assigned to the second field military tribunal in Sednaya. Since 2010, this court has been responsible for condemning tens of thousands of Syrians to their death inside Sednaya. The proceedings before the military field courts are entirely arbitrary and often lasts just one or two minutes. They cannot be considered legitimate.

As Sednaya doesn't have a woman's cell block, all the women were kept in Adra until their sentencing.

NOOR Every single day that [unintelligible] calls and give his instructions. So, we used to wait for that call. We used to wait to hear our names, to hear our names and the last name is calling for death. But that was very nerve wrecking.

They take the girls suddenly. Like, out of a sudden, they – they pull her out of her room. They tell her to pack up her things and come with them. Of course, because they're girls there, there was an old girls there, so they tell us that "This is the day. This is the day you're going to die." So, the girl gets afraid. She cries. She – she yells. She tries to run. But the officers run after her and maybe they can pull her from her hair, from her clothes. They – they don't care. No one will punish them. No one will judge them. They can do whatever they want.

So, when the girls witnessed that, it gets really scary situation. I witnessed that day a lot of times. Maybe six or seven times. And we were waiting for our turn. It was a moment of weakness. We all have that moment. You have it in your heart and your brain. You even start to have it in your face.

Why? Why is that happening to me? I didn't do anything wrong in my life. I didn't hurt anyone.

NADIA AL-BUKAI With each passing day, Noor thought they would call her name. She was thinking at least she can save her daughter before she dies. But if she didn't manage, she was fearful of what that would mean.

NOOR I got afraid that if I died, no one will admit she was existing.

NADIA AL-BUKAI She called her mother.

NOOR I told her you have to move very fast, specially that, at the time, they gave them my husband's family a certification of death for my husband. So, I knew if my husband was dead and I was dead, no one will ask about the girl. No one will get her out. So, I wanted to get her out before I die. So, I told her, "You should move very fast."

So, we hired a lawyer. A very powerful lawyer that has his connections. Of course, I knew him by the girls in the prison. He took very strong and large cases. So, I took his number, and I told her to have the shock. So, she. She kept trying after that for nine months. Eventually, the lawyer told her I didn't have any way, but to go to the airport. "You have to go by yourself, by herself alone, and go and take the girl and sign papers."

Eventually, she took her. Of course, we paid a lot of money. Nothing works with that money in Syria. After she got out, by the age, a year and half, I've seen my children in the visits. Of course, they didn't recognise me. It was a hard moment. Actually, it was worse than the detention itself. When they see you and they cry. They think you're a stranger. You try to convince them that you're – you're – you're their mother.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The resilience of the detainees families and their determination to fight for the loved ones has always inspired me. I remember how my mother sold everything she had to get my father out of prison. However, they transferred him to Adra instead of liberating him.

There, my father met Riyad, and the rest of my story with him is history.

After his release, we crossed the borders to Lebanon in 2015. If it wasn't for the money my mother paid, maybe my father would never be free. Money and luck again were what also safety up at the borders when the regime men were searching him.

DIAB SERRIH The way they blackmailed me and threatened me with being taken to the security branches really destroyed me. I kept suffering from this encounter specifically for over five years. Especially the first three years after the incident.

The story ended when one of the two guys who were interrogating me told me, "We want to help you. But clearly you don't want to help yourself."

I told him, "Anything you want. Just tell me what you want."

He gave me my gloves back and returned the $500 they had confiscated, then gestured for me to give him some of it. I give him a hundred dollars, and he just stared again as if saying, "We are two people. Just hundred dollars?"

I gave him another hundred dollars, and these $200 saved my life.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The border guards put Diab in a taxi heading to Lebanon. And Diab paid the driver another hundred dollars to help him sort his papers issue and cross out of the country.

DIAB SERRIH When we crossed the Syrian and Lebanese borders, passed the Lebanese, flag, and finally arrived in the border town, Al Masna, I asked the driver for a cigarette. It took me maybe two puffs to finish the cigarette. The driver was shocked.

I asked for another one.

I was in total disbelief that I was still alive. I couldn't believe that I was saved. This story stayed in my mind for around five years, three of those years with constant nightmares about this specific incident. My wife could tell. I used to see the moment when they stripped me naked and put me in that place in the street while I waited for the intelligence patrol to come and take me away.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The countless atrocities committed by Assad and his allies, Russia, and Iran have forced millions of Syrians to flee their homes, sometimes with nothing but some clothes or important papers and, sometimes, with nothing at all.

After two years in Adra, Noor and her husband's family weren't executed. Their death sentences were commuted to five years in prison by a presidential pardon, meaning that they were eligible for parole. But Assad was using these pardons to show himself to be a merciful leader, forgiving the rebels. It was a public relations stunt.

In 2020, the parole was turned into a prisoner exchange agreement with the opposition. The regime got back loyalists and militia men in exchange for releasing detainees from Assad's detention centres. Noor and her husband's family were among those released. But there was one condition. Upon being freed, they would have to leave the regime-controlled areas.

NOOR We didn't want to be exiled outside of Syria, even though we know that the situation in Syria was getting really bad. But we wanted to see our parents, our families, our schools, our homes.

We couldn't sleep. We kept talking and crying and remembering things that we – we've been through. We couldn't sleep for days. They actually offered us pills for that. We couldn't sleep for a long, long, long time. We had fears that, if we went to sleep, we will see dreams or nightmares of prison again.

NADIA AL-BUKAI it was not only former prisoners like Noor who could no longer return to regime-controlled areas. Many families perceived to be opponents of the regime were also unable to return home.

GHUFRAN KHULANI For me and my family, we cannot go about back, because the regime is there, and only we can go back if then regime destroyed, because he will punish us again. We dream always to go back to Syria, but it's not our choice until the regime is over.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Far from home, Ghufran wants to understand what happened to her missing brothers, and Noor is desperate to find out the truth about her health.

NOOR I have the small paper that says that his death. I don't know if we know or realise the truth. I just know there's a paper that we don't believe. We can never believe anything that they say, that the Assad regime says. So, right now, we're not believing or not convinced yet. If he's dead, we want to have proof. It's our right to have a proof that he's death. Not a piece of paper, of course, signed by a liar probably. Of course, a liar. So, we want to a proof. Maybe somebody who saw him, maybe a body. Or anything. Or maybe he's alive, and we will still try to get him out of there. We won't stop seeking answers.

NADIA AL-BUKAI If it wasn't for the horrific photos Caesar had made public, thousands of families would have known nothing about the deaths of their loved ones.

GHUFRAN KHULANI The regime steal our right to grieve like normal people or to – even to be sad, you cannot. My nephew asked me. Always, they have this kind of hard questions. "Where my dad? Why he is not with us in this important moment?"

"Where his grave now?" When we told him they are dead. "Where there grave? Why we cannot visit their grave?"

And it's very hard to explain to children's this information or this situation, because they are young and it's hard information. I don't like any family to have this situation or this kind of pain when you are not certain. Even now, we still – we're not certain, because we don't have anything solid or solid information. So, I don't like any family to be in our case or even there's now lots of family in Syria who have same situation.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Ghufran joined the Caesar Families Association, a group of families who identified their loved ones in Caesar's photos. Her sister Amina, co-founded Families for Freedom, a women-led movement that calls for freedom for all detainees in Syria They both continue to campaign tirelessly, alongside many other families and activists, to demand truth and justice for their loved ones who have been detained, tortured, and forcibly disappeared.

Next week on Behind the Sun, we find out how Riyad got out of Adra Prison and how he and his long-lost missing friend from Sednaya, Diab, found each other again.

Behind the Sun is a co-production between Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, in collaboration with the Association of Detainees and the Missing (ADMSP) and the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability (SJAC) under its project, On the Margins No More.

This series is written and produced by Muhammad Farouk.

Thank you to Ranim, Ola, Sarah, Mais, and Ruairi from The Syria Campaign and Rahaf from ADMSP for helping put this series together.

Voiceover for Diab was presented by Mahmoud Nowara.

Editing, mixing, and sound design was done by Jarek Zaba and Ivan Easley.

Additional production support from Molly Freeman, Tom Biddle, and Lincoln Van der Westhuizen. Sandra Ferrari is the executive producer. The theme music is by Milo Evans. My name is Nadia al-Bukai.

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S1 E4 - Erebus

NADIA AL-BUKAI Just before we begin, I wanted to let you know that this podcast contains some descriptions of physical, psychological, and sexual violence. Please use discretion.

In English, the word "injustice" means the lack of fairness or justice. But in Arabic, the word is a bit different. In Arabic, the word for "injustice" is "zulm." As opposed to English, the origin of the word itself in Arabic has nothing to do with justice, rights, or even law. Zulm or injustice shares the same origin as the word with "zalam," which means darkness. Arabic is a poetic language. Words often have different meanings. In this case, injustice not only means the lack of fairness or justice, but also implies the lack of life's light.

This reminds me of a story I learnt about once, the story of one of the first gods to be named in Greek mythology. His name was Erebus, the personification of the deep darkness of the universe. "Erebus," as a word, means a place of darkness between the land of the living and the eternal world of death. If Assad's network of detentions is the realisation of this idea of darkness and injustice, I think Sednaya is its Erebus. 

From Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, this is Behind the Sun. I'm Nadia al-Bukai.

In early 2012, Diab was still active in the streets like hundreds of thousands of Syrians trying to put an end to Assad's rule. While he was in Adra Prison, Riyad got sick and was rushed to hospital. Riyad had a gastrointestinal perforation, which is a condition that might cause death if complications were to develop. For about five hours, doctors operated on him to save his life. When he woke up, Riyad found himself chained to the bed with lots and lots of tubes attached to his body to support his life. He learnt from the doctors that he had holes in his stomach. 

RIYAD AVLAR The third day, they came and they said, "We have to make a test for you. We – we need money from you." 

I said, "I don't have money." 

They said, "Okay. If you don't have money, we couldn't do this test."

I said, "How I will find the money to you? I'm a prisoner. I don't have visit. My family didn't come. I don't have anybody here in this country, all the country." But I said, "Okay. I will solve this problem. I have a friend. Maybe if I called him, he will come immediately and give you the money which you want." 

They said, "No. We don't accept your friend to come and give money. Just your family who can pay to you." 

"Man, my family not here. They're in Turkey." And I said – I said, "They didn't even hear about me. How they will come and pay for you. Okay. You want money? My friend will bring and give you money, and we will solve everything." 

"Oh, no. No. No. No. Forbidden."

NADIA AL-BUKAI This rejection was heavy on Riyad. He felt so helpless, and he started to remove all the life-supporting tubes. He was crying in despair, saying that he didn't want to live anymore. Quickly, doctors restrained and calmed him. They said they would call his friend. Of course, that friend was the Diab. 

DIAB SERRIH A doctor called me and told me that a relative in the hospital needed tests and continued care, and somebody had to pay for his examinations and his medicines. I immediately knew he was talking about Riyad, which he confirmed. I asked what exactly was going on. The doctor told me not to worry. He's in the hospital and might need to stay there for a while. 

I asked him which hospital, and he told me it was Damascus National Hospital. I went there with my father. He had demanded to come with me when he knew Riyad was sick. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Diab and his father went to buy some juice for Riyad. The doctor had told them that the fluids were the only nutrition Riyad's stomach could handle after the surgery.

DIAB SERRIH The doctor told us he couldn't deliver the juice, and he couldn't tell us any further, because intelligence agents were there. He made me feel that if they found out he was helping us, they might detain him. So, we had to find a way to enter and deliver it ourselves. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI The intelligence agents prevented Diab and his father from seeing Riyad. But Diab's father argued loudly with them, which drew the attention of an intelligence officer. That was dangerous for Diab, who was freed from Sednaya a few months earlier. 

After a separate interrogation for Diab and his father in which they told the officers that Riyad is Diab's brother-in-law, they were allowed to see Riyad.

DIAB SERRIH We went. And my dad has a tender heart. So, for him, the scene we found was extremely painful. Of course, my dad wasn't used to seeing anything like this. Riyad was almost naked, with just a small towel over his body. They had shackled one of his arms and chained both of his legs to the hospital bed. My dad looked and called the guard. "The man can't even walk. Are you afraid of him escaping? There are more than ten of you. How could he escape? Why all of these chains? Untie him for a minute." 

And they did unshackle him. My dad helped Riyad up and wiped his forehead. 

RIYAD AVLAR He came. He put his hand over my head, then my cheek, and he said, "Okay. Don't worry, my son. We will be with you. We will help you all times and we will try to help you all the time. And we paid for your test. Don't worry."

I told you before. It was very sensitive feelings and sensitive time for me when – always when I remember that moment.

NADIA AL-BUKAI In 2012, Assad's grip on power tore Syria to pieces. His loyalists' rhetoric often refer to the phrase, "Al-Assad aw nahriq al-balad," meaning "Assad or we burn the country." 

This certainly became a reality. Assad's forces were mercilessly killing and kidnapping peaceful protestors in broad daylight in the streets. And the security/intelligence launched mass campaigns to arrest countless activists from their homes, especially those living in areas that were famous at the time for protesting and rising against Assad like Homs, Hama, and the others. 

Assad seemed to develop a sense of being untouchable. All the threats from the West didn't deter him.

BILL NEELY Did it surprise you that they didn't attack?

BASHAR AL-ASSAD No. No. It wasn't a surprise. But I think [crosstalk]. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI NBC's Bill Neely was referring to the West not punishing Assad for committing more crimes. He asked this if I said in his 2016 interview. As you heard him say, Assad wasn't surprised that no one held him accountable for the crimes he committed, which included gassing the people in Hota in 2013 and other similar acts of brutality. His regime also got the message and was emboldened to ruthlessly continue crushing the Syrians. 

DIAB SERRIH After my participation in the revolution, I was chased again and I was arrested again in 2012, in April. I spent one hundred days in the Air Force Intelligence branch. Those one hundred days were harder than the entire five years I spent in Sednaya Prison. There, I saw the real difference. I saw how these places changed dramatically from places where you could see human rights violations into sites of crimes against humanity. I witnessed how people were dying of starvation. I saw people dying under torture inside these intelligence branches. I saw people with the same wounds and sores, the extreme thinness. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Diab is describing a situation that would later become common for anyone arrested by Assad's men. In July 2012, my father Najah was arrested and sent to a military intelligence branch. They abducted him from the street while he was on his way to work. A Mukhabarat informant had passed his name to the intelligence, calling him a provocateur. He was crowded in a solitary confinement cell with tens of detainees. After one month of his arrest, he had already witnessed death, torture, and lost fifteen kilograms. My mother had to pay twelve hundred euros in exchange for his life and release. 

DIAB SERRIH I didn't speak about my past, that I had been detained previously. I was so worried about telling them the story of my life and how I was detained before for five years, which would mean that they would never release me, that I would die there.

But instinctively, when the interrogator asked me, "Were you detained before?", I answered, "No. Never in my life have I been in a prison." 

NADIA AL-BUKAI That kind of luck is very rare inside Assad's detention centres. 

DIAB SERRIH I was released at the end of July 2012. I couldn't stay in Syria anymore, because I felt like I was under the spotlight. I felt the grip of the security forces was tightening. The detentions were growing to a mass scale. So, I felt that it was best to get out of Syria. There was no way to stay there, in that place. I felt like I couldn't move anymore. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI It is also worth noting that Diab was from Damascus, a regime stronghold and also where he was arrested. 

Mukhabarat men were so busy subduing the hotspots of the peaceful revolution. They were focused on persecuting people based on their IDs. If you are from Homs, Deraa, Idlib, Aleppo, or Darayya, it meant you were going to be targeted by the intelligence groups. Despite this, though, the protests continued to grow across the country. 

Ghufran's family were from Darayya. During this time, they were trying to locate her brother Majed. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI We start to go searching about him. About him and Abd. About any information. Me and my mother, we visit some families that have detainees coming out. We showed them pictures of Abd and Majed to ask them if they saw Abd or Majed inside the detention centre. We went to a lot of places for regime to ask about detainees. We went for official places and non-official places, and we always have same answer. "We don't have them. We don't know anything about them."

They saw us as bad people, and they deal with us in this way. But we kept asking. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI I think that the persistence of Darayya's people is a reminder of how, despite Assad's tight grip, the people continue to fight back.

GHUFRAN KHULANI And even sometimes when we ask the regime or the soldier, they told us, "We killed him." In this very cold way, some of them to said that. "We killed them." Imagine they tell that to mother and his sister in very bad way. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI That lie devastated the family so much. The news was coming about the death of detainees and detention. Many of those who were arrested in 2012 didn't come out. The families would go and ask for their loved ones with no answers. What was happening inside the Mukhabarat branches was unthinkable. 

ABU EMAD For the first seven or eight days, nobody asked me any question. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI This is Abu Emad, the army engineer from the last episode. He's from Jabal Zawiya, a town in Idlib Governorate, north-western Syria. Since late 2011, the area had seen a brutal crackdown by Assad's army. In one of the assaults, many of Abu Emad's relatives were killed.

When his commanding officers ordered him to accompany the operational officers in his town to assist them, he refused. After that, he was arrested and sent to the Military Investigation Branch 248 on charges of "thinking of defection." 

ABU EMAD Every day, I have all hearing interrogation with civilians. "Why you are going to the protest? Who invite you to come? Who – who was with you?" And I hear the beating, screaming, torture, all kind of torture, just hearing and let my mind imagine what is happening outside the cell when I hear their screaming, the kind of the screaming. I'm sure nobody heard the scream like what I heard in the prison.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Despite being less than a ten-minute walk away from the central square in Damascus known as Umayyad Square, people passing by the Branch 248 can't hear these creams from the street. Like all the intelligence branches spread across the country, the infamous secret dungeons lie underneath a densely populated area. Their immense brutality could only be felt and heard within. That level of entrapment and isolation, I suppose, was meant to crack the minds of the detainees.

ABU EMAD I think when my turn will come, when I will scream like them. After one hour, after two hours, in this night, tomorrow, they will beat me, they will torture to scream like them or maybe they will shoot me directly, because I am an officer. Maybe nobody will ask me any question. Maybe they will execute me any time. Or they will investigate with me and they will beat me or torture me to scream like them.

NADIA AL-BUKAI After seven days of psychological torture, an interrogator came for Abu Emad. 

ABU EMAD He told me, "I have nothing about you. I don't know what I'm going to ask you. There's nothing in your file."

So, I told him why I am here. 

He told me, "Nothing in your file. So, I will release or I will make the report to release you these days. And maybe tomorrow or after tomorrow, you will be free." 

This is after eight days. And after that, I went three, four days. Nothing happened. In this time, bad dreams, bad thinking coming to my mind. That's mean they will execute me. They know that I'm not belonged to them. I will not kill people. And I'm from very hot area, Jabal Zawiya, Idlib. The best solution for them to execute me without any reason.

NEWS REPORTER Welcome to all viewers on PBS in America and also around the world. For the third time in a week, we're getting reports of execution-style shootings in Syria. The latest accounts come of people being shot on the way to work at a factory. Diplomats are now talking about an apparent pattern of attacks against Syrian civilians. Indeed, the UN says the massacre of more than a hundred last week in Houla may amount to a crime against humanity. But the international community still can't agree on what to do to stop this bloodshed. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI On the 25th of May 2012, in Houla, northwest of Homs, one hundred and eight people were killed, including thirty-four women and forty-nine children. This pattern by Assad's forces, was repeated in my village, in Jdeidet Artouz, a suburb of Damascus. 

On the 1st of August 2012, thirty-five people and some of the victims were tortured and killed execution-style. Some of them were from my family. 

The thing that haunts me the most about this massacre is that Assad men left some dead bodies under olive trees. People were murdered beneath olive branches. It was a message in response to the revolution. 

After this massacre, my family and I had to flee our home in Jdeidet Artouz and live with my grandparents in Damascus. We weren't the only people thinking that this could happen to us. The atrocities in Jdeidet Artouz stuck in the minds of everyone in Syria. 

With each passing day, the families of the detainees became more worried about their loved ones. If Assad was doing this in broad daylight, what would he do to their children in the dark detention dungeons?

For a long time, Ghufran's family were trying to locate Majed until one day their phone rang with good news. Ghufran's family learnt that their son was still alive. The man who called them was Majed's fellow detainees. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI He said only one sentence. "I have information about Majed and I want to meet you in any place." 

My brother went directly to see him. He was first person he have information about Majed. He said that he were with him, and they brought him in a small cell. Individual, not with a group. And also they give him number. When they call names, they don't call his names. They call number.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Inside Assad's death gaps and detention centres, his men give the detainees numbers instead of their names just to make it extremely hard for anyone to trace them. But the detainees inside the packed chambers and in neighbouring cells talk to each other. It's the only form of resistance they have inside these unjust places, to keep telling their stories. 

ABU EMAD We are whispering to each other. "Who are you? From where you are coming?" We know each other. For example, my neighbour, he was whispering to me about his name and his [under] arresting. And also, he telling me, "I have another neighbour beside me." And his neighbour told him also he has another neighbour like that. So, we know we – we are neighbours. There is a row of cells where they are putting in everyone, in each one of us. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Abu Emad wasn't executed as he thought he would be. After not finding anything that would incriminate him at Branch 248, they moved him to another detention, Branch 293. It's the main Military Intelligence Directorate's branch responsible for keeping Assad's control over army officers. But after 2011, there were civilians inside as well. 

The scale of the abduction was massive. The place was packed full of detainees to the extent that they used the toilets as cells. 

ABU EMAD Four or five cells from me, there is one civilian guy. He's shouting. Sometime, he's shouting in the night, especially on the night, "Stop this train. Stop this train." He was imagining himself that he's riding train or traveling by train. All the time, he's shouting, "Stop this train. Driver, stop this train. I want to go home." 

Maybe he's since one month, two months here. He – he lost his mind. And if I stay like him like that, after a few days or months or a few weeks, I will be like him. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI After torture and coercion, Abu Emad signed a confession that said he thought of defection. 

ABU EMAD After a few days, they move us around fifteen people. They came at the night time. They shout my name and other fourteen. We are fifteen people. They put us in other room. We – we name it Mihrab room. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Al-Mihrab is a curved mark inside the wall of a mosque that indicates the direction of Mecca towards which Muslims should face when praying. That room in Branch 293 had the same mark, according to Abu Emad. But it wasn't a place of God.

ABU EMAD This room, it was completely closed. Only one door, iron door, in opening area. The smell was very, very, very, very bad. Even sometime, we cannot take a breath. You feel if you breath in this musty smell or rotten smell, you will die. We are putting our clothes in our nose to try to take some good air or filter the air to breathe, and it's not work. After that, we give up. We are waiting our time to die from this smell. I just can tell you the smell – the smell was there. Yeah. And it remind you for the grave, how you will be inside your grave. 

After seven days, they released us from there and they move us to Sednaya.

NADIA AL-BUKAI As Abu Emad neared Sednaya, he got some guidance from a fellow prisoner. 

ABU EMAD There was one guy was with us in the car. He told, "We are going to Sednaya, and my advice to you, when they open the door, jump directly from the door to outside. Don't wait your turn. Jump forward. Because if you reach there and you didn't jump directly, he will push you from – from behind and you will fall down in your face. And maybe you will break your hand or your leg or your nose, or you will injure yourself."

When the car stopped, we jumped and they took us inside. They ask us to take off all our clothes. One of the guards, he said, "Now, we welcome you. And you know our welcome or maybe you don't know, but you will see now."

And after that, they asked us to lay down on the ground, on our stomach, and to raise our legs to up. And it's called, in Arabic, doulab. English, tyre. They bring one car tyre. They – they take a small piece, around one metre length. And, you know, this kind of plastic tyre, the car tyre, inside, it's coming some iron, the iron inside the tyre. And they start beating us. They lashes us on our feet. If you move your feet down, he will lash you in your back if you scream or you move or you give any sound. 

This is big crime in Sednaya. So, when he lashes us, it's not allowed, because I heard also our friend, they have some experience and they teach us, while we are in the bus. "Don't shout. Don't scream. Don't say anything. Your voice. Be careful that – that they will not hear you."

For me, when he was lashing me on my feet, the – the tyre, there is one metre inside, it stuck in my nails, in my foot nails, and it's took it out with the blood. So, I sound like this, "Mm." From the pain. 

So, he told him, "Give him four more, because his sound. Four more lashes."

NADIA AL-BUKAI Sednaya's so-called welcome parties are infamous. No one escapes from them. Whoever ends up being in Sednaya has to be welcomed by Assad men, regardless of age, status, or physical condition. It's a declaration by Assad men that they are the gods of this place. Once it's done, they stuff tens of people inside tiny, dark solitary cells. 

ABU EMAD We released to the cells. They put us inside naked for seven days. Temperature around zero, minus one. You know, Sednaya area, very high from the sea level. It was January. The temperature, it – it was very, very cold. We are five people who are warming each other. We hugging each other just to gain some – some warmth. 

We reach to the level from the cold. Sometime you cannot control the movement from your body. Your hand, your face, your lips, your legs, your stomach. Everything shaking, vibrating from the cold. You cannot control it. If I want to whisper to my friend, I cannot control my tongue and my lips to say one word from the cold, from the freezing weather inside. For seven days. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Every day, the guards would come, open the door hatch, and drop the food. And by, I mean a few olives. 

ABU EMAD And next, they took us upstairs to another big room. We were twenty-five prisoners inside. They give us our clothes. Not complete. They took the good quality one, and they give us the – the rubbish from the clothes just to cover ourself. And everyone, they gave him two blanket, military blanket. I imagine or calculating maybe around two thousand people in each floor and around like that. Our imagination count how many room from this side, how many rooms from this side. And if each room containing twenty-five people, that's mean we are two thousand. From that two thousand people in each floor, you hear nothing. Nothing. If you are on the wall, maybe you will imagine this area, it's empty. Nobody. Meanwhile, there is more than two thousand in each floor. Not any sound. 

Sometimes, I hear screaming. And when this guy scream, that means don't want to stay alive. That's why he's screaming from the beating, because he want them to beat him or lashes him again to die. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI For a detainee to get a visit in Sednaya, his family has to go through a lengthy, expensive, and hard journey. One year after her brother's enforced disappearance, Ghufran and her family knew their whereabouts. A senior officer had asked for a bribe to help them. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI Someone very high in military, he said he can make us see them. And at the same day, in the morning, me and my mother, we were asking about them in official places for government, and they said, "We don't have them. We don't know anything about them."

And at evening, when my brother pays the money in very secret way, because not easy and you will punish, they promise, this person, to show us Majed. And because before a lot of soldiers told us they kill him, we want the very much to see him in person. So, we paid this money and we went there. They gave us kind of envelop. But this envelop, you cannot open it. They said you have to go to Sednaya Prison and to give this envelope to the guards there.

NADIA AL-BUKAI One of the reasons why the Assad regime creates uncertainties about the status of the detainees is because his men benefit from enforced disappearance. It's estimated that the regime officers amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes from the detainees' families.

GHUFRAN KHULANI We want to see him in person, he is alive. But at the same time, we are afraid to see him in bad situation, like in bad health or something. But we want to see him.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Between 2012 and 2013, the fight between the regime and the rebels intensified. The regime, of course, were much better equipped with the weapons they had. Yet the Free Syrian Army and other factions started to take control and "liberate" more and more areas from the regime that responded by besieging and bombing those areas. Checkpoints were everywhere, and the road to Sednaya wasn't easy for the families. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI We have to stop more than one point for the regime, checkpoint, and they check us and they deal also with us badly, because they know we are family of activists. 

When we arrive to the place, also they search you and search your body in very bad way to check you don't have anything. 

We were full of happiness that, oh, he is alive and we can see him finally after one year of not knowing if he is alive or not. So, we are going now to see him alive. So, it was big moment. And we wait for a long time. Waiting, waiting for nothing. Then, t they brought bus. But this bus, its window black. So, you cannot see outside. And they took the families to the building, and they put us in one rooms. It's like large, and there is desk everywhere for people to sit that's like school desk. The soldier tell you from outside I'm not allowed to tell him anything about what happening outside the prison. Only "hello" and "Hi. How are you?" Only that. They threatened us. If we tell him anything about what happening outside the prison, they will punish Majed.

When you are there, you saw the family before you go and come. They are in a queue. You saw when they come after seeing their loved how much are crying. So, there is kind of fear what they are seeing there. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI The same kind of instructions are delivered to the detainees as well. No matter what happens, you're not allowed to say anything other than "Hi. How are you? I'm fine." Disobedience won't be tolerated. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI We went there to saw Majed. And we know from before, only five minutes. They told you five minutes. We just cry. And he cry. He was very thin. But at the same time, he is – was strong from inside. His feeling and personality, you feel that. When he was speaking to us, he's still full of hope. 

"Going out. I will see you again." 

And he want to touch our faces, to see us more, because we miss him and he miss us. So, at the time, we – you cannot hug him, because there is barriers between you and him from – made from kind of iron. And also between the irons, there is kind of small space. And in this space, there is, like, very huge soldier cross this space, and he is on another side after the bus. And also on his side, there is also kind of iron. So, there is distance between him and us. Sometimes, we need to shout to make him hear us. It's like only a wink, because it's just five minutes. And they come to take him. And we start to cry again. 

You feel how much dictator they are. Not allowed to hug him, not allowed to do anything. But what was good was his spirit was very high and full of hope and faith about what he doing and what he believe. And that make the visit a little bit easier on us. At that day, we are only glad he's still alive. We were very happy he's still alive. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI The intermediary who took money from Ghufran's family told them that Abd was transferred to Sednaya, and they could see him as, though for a bigger cost. The family sold some of their properties to pay for both visits. They took Abd's children to see their father more than a year after his disappearance. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI When they brought him, we thought another person maybe for another family. We don't recognise him. We thought he is another person, because he was very skinny and there, they shaved his head. His body very weak. And only just when he arrived, from his eyes, we recognised him. Nothing – nothing the same. 

His son when also saw him, he didn't recognise his dad, because his son was young. 

He was worried about us, asking what happened, how is Majed. He don't know that Majed is also inside. Asked us if Majed good or not. 

Last time, both of them, their body was weaker than when we saw them before. You can notice they are – they are struggling inside. Even you cannot say anything and also they cannot say anything. Only emotionally, and you feel that and because you know what happening inside. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI In early 2013, news that prisoners were being killed in Sednaya started to get out. Ghufran's family tried different ways to get Majed and Abd transferred out of Sednaya, but it didn't work. Adding to the family's restlessness, the middle man who used to facilitate their visits in exchange for money defected and left the country. Without these visits, the family couldn't tell if Majed and Abd were dead or alive. 

Around that time, Abu Emad was transferred from Sednaya's red building to the white one. His family had paid thousands of US dollars for that to happen. But he didn't know that. Unfortunately, in Sednaya's white building, something sinister was happening.

ABU EMAD This is my nightmare up to this moment. There is one day during the week, they instruct us to go to sleep at the time of sunset. Around six, six-thirty in the evening, they instruct us go to sleep at this – at this time exactly. Very early. When they instruct us to go to sleep, and after that, we felt strange movement outside, a lot of precaution procedures they are taking. Every five minute, inside the door, there's a small window, ten [centi] by ten by [centi] just to watch us. 

One of the guards, he come near to our door and opened this small window. Every five minutes, approximately, he's coming and to check if we are sleep yet or not. So, we understand that there is something strange happening.

After midnight, we hear some truck coming near to us from outside. And after that, we hear that some people walking without shoes. That means they are prisoners like us. And we hear some lashes from time to time on the – the skin or flesh. We hear this – this sound. And that's that this movement, maybe for five or ten minute, they take it downstairs. We can figure from the sound, from what we are hearing. We are hearing the steps of people and guard around them, and we hear the lashes on their bodies. That means they are almost naked. 

The sound of the guards also around the – the prisoners, it's very low sound, like whispers. "Move." Like that. "Move. Move. Move. Move. Don't say anything. Don't look around. Move in front of you." Like that. The whispers of the guard. But the others, we only hear their steps outside to downstairs. And after that, we hear nothing.

'Til morning, every five to ten minutes, somebody come to open this small door to check if we are sleeping or not. In the morning, after they allow us to wake up, I hear the sound of the [unintelligible] on the mountain beside us, beside Sednaya Prison. The machine, cars, the sound of the [unintelligible], which is let you imagine or figure out without any doubt that they were executing prisoners in the night and they are [unintelligible] them now at eight or nine o'clock. 

Every week, we hear the same story. All of us, we don't have any doubt that they are doing that from the sound we are hearing. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI In a report titled "The Human Slaughterhouse," Amnesty International documented harrowing pattern of mass executions at Sednaya Prison. Between 2011 and 2015, it is estimated that thirty thousand prisoners were killed in secret there. It described in detail how the Assad's regime walked the detainees blindfolded to their death by hanging in an execution room underneath Sednaya's white building. After that, they took the Tishreen Military Hospital for registration and then to mass graves. Overall, it is estimated that tens of thousands of people died in Sednaya of starvation, torture, and execution. Until now, families don't know where their loved ones are buried.

Abu Emad's family managed to pay $35,000 to spare his life in Sednaya. But when the guards told him he would be released, he didn't believe them. 

ABU EMAD I thought they are joking. I cannot believe this. How they will release me? Because I don't know what happened with my family and they pay money. I don't—. I know nothing. So, I was completely shocked. And I don't have any doubt that they are going to execute me one hundred percent. I'm not going outside this area. Never. Only to the grave. 

If he told me, "We are going to execute you," I will believe. If you told me, "We are moving you to another room where is books allowed to read," then I cannot imagine better than this news. But you are telling me, "You are free." Like, if I told you you win $1 billion today, you are not going to believe. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI When he was freed, he discovered that his family had left the country. He had to stay at his mother-in-law's flat in Damascus while still in a state of disbelief about his release from Sednaya. The detention rules and sounds hunted him.

Detainees have to gather in the cell toilet once the door opens.

ABU EMAD First night, I have doubt they will come to arrest me anytime, but they are waiting somebody to come to say hi to me, and they will arrest us. This is a trap from them. So, all night, when I hear any sound outside (car sound, steps, knocking on the door) I run directly to the toilet, because I'm used to run to the toilet from the Sednaya time. When you hear any steps, you have to be in the toilet. 

I ran to the toilet. My mother-in-law, "What happened, [unintelligible]? What you are?" 

I – I say, "Nothing. Nothing. I just want to go to the toilet." 

First day is like that. I cannot sleep very well. Sometime, I analyse why I'm not sleeping. Maybe one of the reason I don't want to go to sleep, maybe I will wake up and this is a dream that I'm released. Really. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Detention in Sednaya leaves the scars and survivors that would never heal. What they experienced inside Sednaya's tight and dark cells lives with them for the rest of their lives. 

ABU EMAD Sednaya should be removed from the earth. It should be removed completely. It's better to remove it like cancer. 

After a few months, when I am able to go out of Damascus, my family, they come to visit me. I left behind me, my little daughter, [Ruru], one year and two months old. She was trying to make her first steps. I left her in this situation. So, all time, in the prison when I remember my family with a smile, you know, like mine – mine right now, I imagine her one-point-two years old and the trying to make his steps, and falling down and I catch it like that. Always, I'm playing with her. And she's fourteen months old. So, she's still in my mind fourteen months old, trying to make her first steps, for more than two years. 

Every day, this photo, this video, this imagination, I'm living with this girl fourteen months, trying to make her first step. So, when I saw her, it become more than three years. 

This is not [Ruru]. Where is that [Ruru], the child trying to make her first steps? I miss that girl. They killed her. 

This is my story. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI For five years, Ghufran's family searched tirelessly for Majed and Abd. If they could, they would have turned the earth upside down to know where they were and what happened to them. 

In the summer of 2018, the family received Majed and Abd's death certificates.

GHUFRAN KHULANI It was shocking, deadly shocking for all the family. My sister told me in the phone what she know about. But in beginning, my mom and dad, they don't know. I told her and told my dad. It was very difficult and shocking. Hard to breaking. And I want to tell them what happened. But at the same time, I'm afraid about them, their health.

NADIA AL-BUKAI After a campaign led by the families demanding answers about the missing detainees inside Assad's death camps, in 2018, the regime began to release death certificates to some family members visiting their local civil registry office in search of their loved ones. Instead of acknowledging that detainees' deaths were caused by starvation, torture, and executions, the Assad regime said all the deaths were due to natural causes.

GHUFRAN KHULANI According to the official record, they both had passed away on the same day, 15h of January. And I don't know how the regime in beginning all the time denied they have them. And now, he release certificate death for this – for all these detainees, not only my brothers.

And after waiting all this long time and searching with hope and fear at the same time and in very bad way, the regime released information without any kind of feeling. 

My family situation were similar to a lot of families in my city who received same certificate of death. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Ghufran and so many other Syrian families continue to fight for their right to find out the truth about their missing loved ones and for the detainees in Syria to be freed. 

Currently, there are still hundreds of thousands of people inside Assad's network of prisons, including Sednaya. Behind each is a heartbreaking story of pain and loss, and justice is nowhere in sight. 

Next week on Behind the Sun, we continue with Assad's use of official documents to consolidate his grip on the country, Riyad sees horrors in Adra, Diab gets back to Syria, and Ghufran's family is facing another tragedy.

Behind the Sun is a co-production between Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, in collaboration with the Association of Detainees and the Missing (ADMSP) and the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability (SJAC) under its project, On the Margins No More. 

This series is written and produced by Muhammad Farouk. 

Thank you to Ranim, Ola, Sarah, Mais, and Ruairi from The Syria Campaign and Rahaf from ADMSP for helping put this series together. 

Additional thanks to Mahmoud Nowara for providing voiceover and translation. 

Editing, mixing, and sound design was done by Jarek Zaba and Ivan Easley. 

Additional production support from Molly Freeman, Tom Biddle, and Lincoln Van der Westhuizen. Sandra Ferrari is the executive producer. The theme music is by Milo Evans. 

My name is Nadia al-Bukai.

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S1 E3 - Icarus

NADIA AL-BUKAI Just before we begin, I wanted to let you know that this podcast contains some descriptions of physical and psychological violence. Please use discretion.

It's been said that nations are built on stories. The tales pass through time from one generation to another. Stories that go beyond the official accounts of history, which we know don't often capture the realities of a nation's growth and evolution. Among these tales are accounts so powerful and influential the characters might even graduate to the status of legends. Some legends are mythical, like the gods of Olympus, Icarus, and King Arthur, and others are as real as life itself. They are stories about people, real people, doing extraordinary things in crucial moments of a country's history that change everything.

Today, I have a legend to tell about my country, a tale of true heroes. And where there are heroes, there are often also villains. In this case, that's my country's president, Bashar al-Assad. 

BARBARA WALTERS Do you think that you forces crack down too hard? 

BASHAR AL-ASSAD They are not my forces. They are military forces belong to the government. 

BARBARA WALTERS Okay. But you [crosstalk].

BASHAR AL-ASSAD I don't own them. I'm president. 

BARBARA WALTERS Okay.

BASHAR AL-ASSAD I don't own the country. So, they're not my forces. 

BARBARA WALTERS No. But you have to give the order. 

BASHAR AL-ASSAD No. No. No. 

BARBARA WALTERS Not by your command?

BASHAR AL-ASSAD No. No. No. We don't have—. Nobody—. No one's command. There was no command to kill or to be brutal. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI That clip is of Bashar al-Assad being interviewed by Barbara Walters in December 2011. Walters was confronting Assad's use of brutal force to crack down on peaceful protest that flooded Syrian streets in March 2011, which, throughout the decade, would lead to the death of hundreds of thousands by bombs or torture and the displacement of millions as a result of that violent response. 

Inspired by the Arab Spring unfolding in Tunisia and Egypt, Syrians took to the streets in peaceful protest to demand freedom, rights, and a better life after decades of living under a brutal dictatorship. 

Assad threw everything he had at the revolution. And Sednaya, along with other underground detention dungeons, became one of Assad's key weapons to crush this revolution. And to some degree, it worked. Whoever stood up against his rule would be brutally punished. Those who weren't killed by bombs or kidnapped, imprisoned, or forcibly disappeared and tortured had to flee their homes. 

BASHAR AL-ASSAD We don't kill our people. Nobody kill—. No government in the world kill its people unless it's led by [crosstalk].

NADIA AL-BUKAI From Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, this is Behind the Sun. I'm Nadia al-Bukai. 

During the Assad's family rule, before 2011, I always felt like there were two different versions of Syria, one for Assad and his loyalists and the other for us, the Syrian people. In ours, Assad and his men did their best to make our country feel like a giant prison. 

In Walter's interview, Assad said he didn't own the country or the military. But I don't think he believes that. He acted then and still acts today as if he owns Syria. Before the revolution from his fortified palace that overlooks Damascus, Assad tasked his supporters to fill the air with false propaganda about this very idea. While his intelligence and security services were kidnapping and murdering whoever challenged the status quo, countless photographs of Assad and his father filled every corner in Syria.

All day long, on public TV and radio, Assad, whose name means "lion" in Arabic, had songs like the one you are hearing saying, "Syria is our country and Bashar is our lion." Catchy sounds repeating over and over everywhere to make sure that all Syrians always remember who he is and what he's meant to represent for the people.

And when you try to turn your country into a prison, as a consequence, you make your citizens prisoners. And Syrians wouldn't accept being held prisoner. In January 2011, the winds of change were coming fast for Assad and were set to shake his rule. 

NEWS REPORTER 1 Massive protest over government corruption, political repression, rising food prices, and unemployment forced President Ben Ali to flee to [crosstalk]. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI After Tunisia's dictator was removed in January, another one was about to face the same destiny. Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt for thirty years, was facing the knock-on effect of the Arab Spring as well. 

NEWS REPORTER 2 The Egyptian military has promised not to harm protesters. But as we saw today in Liberation Square, this situation can turn violent very, very quickly. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Close friends, Diab and Riyad, were still in Sednaya during the early days of the Arab Spring in 2011. 

DIAB SERRIH We started turning the radio on three times a day even though getting new batteries for the radio was so difficult. But we really wanted to listen. We really lived on the news moment by moment. We'd sleep awaiting what would happen the next day. Wake and ask, "Is there any news?"

NADIA AL-BUKAI In early February 2011, Mubarak's rule was coming to an end. 

NEWS REPORTER 3 He is on the ground there in Cairo where, as you can see, the situation is absolutely electric. Dominic, if you're able to hear us, give us some sense of what it feels like there. 

NEWS REPORTER 4 John, today was labelled a day of confrontation. And Hosni Mubarak could no longer stand up to three two hundred thousand people that are just roaring their victory cry. This is the sound of a popular victory, of people finally getting what they have been demanding for eighteen straight days. 

DIAB SERRIH I was asleep, and Riyad was listening to the radio. Suddenly, people were waking up excitedly. "Get up. Get up." 

"Guys, what's going on?"

"Hosni Mubarak fell." 

My God. I was just waking up. It was just like a dream. Was it possible? I looked at them, and I saw radical Islamists hugging communists. Muslim brothers were celebrating. The detainees were cheering. "Hooray. It succeeded in Egypt. We won."

It was a state of joy beyond limits. 

"Now. Tomorrow, Syria. By God, we will show you. You Syrian regime, you arseholes, your turn is next." 

There was a constant state of anticipation. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI In Syria, people were closely following what was happening in Egypt. Syrians were waiting for the spark to be made in their homeland. 

DIAB SERRIH Riyad and I had an agreement that the uprising in Syria would come from a place that nobody expects. Nobody would imagine what shape it would take. We both thought about many scenarios—"This would work. That wouldn't."—until the March 18, 2011. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI A few days before the 18th of March, graffiti appeared on a school wall at Deraa, in the south of the country. It read, "It's your turn, doctor."

Before ruling Syria, he attended post-graduate studies at the Western Eye Hospital in London. But when his brother, Bassel, died in a car accident in 1994, Bashar was recalled to Syria to take over Bassel's role as heir to his father, Hafez. 

But back to 2011, like all other Syrians, Dr. Bashar was watching the news from Tunisia and Egypt as well and so was his security forces called the Mukhabarat. Their initial response was detecting their grip on the country and instruct their force not to allow any form of gathering anywhere.

But the graffiti was a huge act of defiance. Next to the anti-Assad phrase was another line reading: "To remember, with Bashir." 

It was the kind of expression most of the children used to add their names on the walls and desks of their school just to leave their mark on the place, to say they were there. But the tension was high, and Mukhabarat wanted to make an example to crush any kind of discord before it began.

They arrested the two children whose names were on the wall, Bashir and Naief Abazid. Naief was a thirteen-year-old and in the seventh grade, four years older than I was at that time. He and Bashir didn't write the anti-Assad phrase on the wall. They had only written their names in 2009. Mukhabarat tortured them to confess that they had sketched the graffiti against Assad. And under that severe torture, the children confessed and have to turn in dozens of others as their accomplices. 

That has always been how Mukhabarat worked, forcing people to name accomplices under torture, whether or not they committed a so-called crime. 

But this time, when the news came out about what had happened to the children, people didn't stay silent. On the 18th of March 2011, the people of Deraa took to the streets, demanding the return of the children. That act was the spark, and it lit the country afire. Syria's turn in the Arab Spring was finally here. 

DIAB SERRIH I remember those days. I remember that moment. Honestly, I was tearing up at that moment. I really cried. Every time I remember that, I remember how it happened. The dream, you know. The dream had come. I couldn't believe it. The revolution had started, and we would get out and get rid of the regime, like other regimes, like what happened in Egypt. 

Too many ideas were running back and forth in my mind. I really don't know how to describe them. But I felt, "That's it. It is the beginning of the end of this era." 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Hope was in the air. Everywhere in Syria, people raised their heads as they felt the possibility of a brighter future, freedom of speech, and living normal lives. A country that hadn't dare to hope in forty years was experiencing it for the first time. Even inside Sednaya, hope filled its dark hallways and cells. 

RIYAD AVLAR The revolution was a dream for me. I was waiting all my times these revolutions, because I know I will not go out from this place if there will not be a revolution. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Riyad wasn't alone thinking that the revolution would finally set him free. Everyone inside Sednaya had the same hope. They were all political prisoners. And if the Assad regime fell, they would be free.

Even I thought this way. At that time, I was only nine years old, and watching the news wasn't my thing. I watched cartoons. But on those days, I had to watch the news with my family. In the beginning, when I followed what was happening, I got scared. I felt that we were in danger. But when my parents told me that we were putting the dictator in his place, that Syria would be a better place without him and the future would be mine, I jumped off my chair happily, saying, "I'm in. I'm with you." And these rumblings of change were shaking the core of the regime establishment.

In March 2011, the revolutionary sun was rising in Syria, and Assad was trying to block it with every tool at his disposal. 

NEWS REPORTER 5 Elsewhere, the city of Deraa, in Southern Syria, was again a flashpoint today. President Assad's security forces trying to crush the latest democracy uprising. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI But Assad's attempts didn't deter the people protesting in Deraa or those in dozens of other Syrian towns and cities who started taking to the streets.

GHUFRAN KHULANI We broke this kind of wall, because Assad in Syria like kind of dictator god. You cannot touch anything near him. So, you feel you break this fear and, finally, you can speak what you want. And like you are afraid inside, because you know what will happen after the demonstration. But you have hope and you can change. Finally, we can make one step toward changing. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI This is Ghufran. She was a university student during the revolution. Ghufran comes from a family with a history of local civic activism. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI Even in university, in class, and anywhere, you cannot say what you believe or what your ideas, only between very small groups that you trust them very much. And so, when you can speak, it was a nice moment to feel you can do.

NADIA AL-BUKAI On the same day, the 18th of March, fate was smiling at Diab, and he got good news. He was going to be released 

DIAB SERRIH In the morning, they came and took me. It was a Friday. I remember that vividly. The intelligence patrols were always late on Fridays. So, they took me from the cell around noon. Of course, I bid farewell to my friends, especially Riyad. It was emotional. There was sadness and joy at the same time. I felt sad. I was leaving these people behind me. But I was happy to be finally getting out. After everything that had happened, somebody could get out.

RIYAD AVLAR I was sorry, because he will go. I don't know why. But something always inside me telling me, "Oh, he has to stay with me." I wish he stayed with me.

Ah, no. I – I was very happy, because he – he will be free now. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Diab didn't believe that he would be freed from Sednaya after what he had been through during the riots in the prison, but he had finished his sentence in full. He went home happy for two reasons: The first one was that he was freed from Sednaya, of course, and the second was that he would get to witness the Syrian revolution.

Riyad also was happy, because he knew that his best friend would help him from the outside. 

RIYAD AVLAR I was happy, because he got out. Because he knew who is Riyad, who is this man. And I believe he will always talking about me. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI For the first time, after five years of sleepless nights in detention, Diab would finally asleep well in a comfortable bed in his home. 

DIAB SERRIH The first thing I remember, my first impression, was the softness of the mattress. The feeling that you are sleeping on a real soft thing, whether cotton or wool or whatever, other than the ground or the military blanket on the ground, which is very bad. You feel like you are king of the world. 

The first day, I was like, "Wow, I'm sleeping on a real mattress. I'm covered by a clean blanket." I felt like a bear in a little nest, in his little house. "This is home. This is what I want." Like a bird returning to his house or his nest. That was my first impression. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI In the streets, armed, plain-clothes regime supporters known to Syrians as shabiha, were assisting regime forces to suppress the revolution. Many demonstrators at that time witnessed violence and enforced disappearance. 

DIAB SERRIH My family, my siblings tried their best to keep me from participating in any protests or in anything at all. "You paid the price. You were imprisoned for five years. You shouldn't participate." 

My mum told me that she cried a lot for me. "So, just respect my tears and the pain I felt for you. Don't participate in any of these protests. I don't want you to be taken away from me again."

At first, I respected my mother's feelings. A mother who didn't see her son for five years and suffered all of this. I didn't want to hurt her again. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI The tears of Diab's mother couldn't hold him for long. This was a historic moment for Syria. Syria was in a state of complete revolt. 

DIAB SERRIH After a while, I couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't be sitting and watching TV and seeing people in the streets, and I'm not joining them. 

A friend of mine, a doctor who was active in the Barzeh and al-Qaboun neighbourhoods, used to joke with me. "In our area, the regime has already fallen. And in your neighbourhood, the regime is still here." 

Then, once he visited me and told me, "The protest will start soon. Would you like me to take you?"

I said, "Let's go."

My mum saw us and asked us where we were going. We told her we were going to a café, to have coffee and get out of the house. I felt like she initially wanted to come with us. But at the same time, she didn't want to embarrass her son. She followed us to the gate and was begging my friend not to take me to the protest. 

"Please come back here."

And we promised him that we would not go. But, of course, we immediately took a car to join the protest in Barzeh. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Despite the brutal response from Assad, in March 2011, many Syrians expected that he would go eventually. No matter what he did, they thought he wouldn't be able to kill the entire population, right? And so, peaceful protests continued in most Syrian cities. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI My brother and his friend, they give the bottle of water and they stick a flower on it. And there is a small sign to say, "We and you in the same side. Why you kill us?"

And at that time, I see it as a dream. It's finally happening. And because all the time, we believed in these ideas, but we cannot do it. And finally, you can do it. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Ghufran's whole family, five brothers and two sisters, along with their mother, were involved in organising demonstrations in another city, Darayya, in south-western suburbs of Damascus. Darayya would become known as a school of nonviolent activism and, for a time, the beating heart of the Syrian revolution. But that also meant Darayya would be brutally punished by Assad in the months that followed. And one by one, every city that rose up against Assad would meet Darayya's fate. 

Ghufran's youngest brother, Majed, was among the young people in Darayya who became very passionate about the revolution.

GHUFRAN KHULANI He leads a demonstration and also he speak in high voice in mic and, in kind of way, he leads a demonstration. And for the regime, this kind of person is important, so they want him by name. Because in Syria, first moment to start the demonstration is the most difficult one. And so, the person who will start it, regime always want him by name, because they know people will follow him.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Mukhabarat collaborators were working day and night trying to locate the leaders of the demonstrations in hopes of stopping them or at least diminishing their impact. They tried everything: random street arrests, house arrests, phone tapping. Everything. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI They start searching for him. And at that time, he start not to sleep in our house. He sleep every day in different house to not make the regime catch him. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Like all the brave people in Darayya who marched together without fear of Assad's forces, they supported each other against the heavy hands of Mukhabarat. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI We start a group of women to go also to visit families who have detainees and to support them, because my family has this situation of detention from 2003. So, we know how difficult it is. So, we start to go to that. To go to visit these families, to support them, to show them they are not alone.

NADIA AL-BUKAI When Sednaya detainees rebelled in March and July 2008, the regime was in its utmost power. But during the early days of the revolution, in 2011, Assad's men were floundering in their failure. They seemed to not know what the right move should be. Should the regime act as if it's listening or should it play on division? Or was their best course of action to increase violence?

The reality was the regime didn't have the luxury of time. Ben Ali of Tunisia fled his country after four weeks of protests. Mubarak of Egypt stepped down in eighteen days. Libya was on fire. Yemen was revolting. And Syrian tensions had been growing for weeks now. So, Assad started working through his playbook. 

NEWS REPORTER 6 One refugee recently asked or CNN correspondent, Arwa Damon, "Why is our president?" They ask that daily in Syria. And daily, they were answered with lies and with gunfire and with torture. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Now, I've mentioned this before, but among Assad's lies was this act of fake listening. On the 21st of April 2011, Assad ended the state of emergency in Syria that had been imposed on the country since 1962. Consequently, he abolished the State Security Court, the same infamous court headed by Fayez al-Nouri, who sentenced Riyad and Diab to years in prison. 

Assad wanted to create a new narrative, that he was serious about reforming the country and that he was listening. At the same time, Assad started to promote a counter narrative that protestors weren't peaceful, that they were paid by the West and other outside powers, that the scenes of violence against protestors were fabricated in the studios of Al-Jazeera in Qatar. 

Spokespeople of the regime kept repeating these lies in the media, insisting that Syria was a victim of a universal conspiracy to bring it to its knees and that his forces were fighting armed protestors.

ABU EMAD I was living in al-Hajar al-Aswad, which is in Damascus area. And every Friday, there is the revolution protestors. After Jummah Salah, they are went out to say, "Allahu Akbar. [speaks in Arabic]."

You know what it is in – in English? No Bashar al-Assad. No Bashar regime anymore.

NADIA AL-BUKAI This is Abu Emad. He was a Syrian Army engineer at that time. He had been serving in the Syrian military since 1996. 

ABU EMAD I see how the intelligence and the police and the army dealing with this kind of people, because I was living there in the same area, and my flat was the last of the flat. Okay? So, I can go to the roof and I see what is happening. 

They choosing, the military or snipers. But from where these snipers, nobody knows. I saw them. I saw them on the other roofs. Snipers belonged to the government, to the regime, and they didn't shoot – for example, they didn't shoot anyone from the beirute stores who's carrying the – the labels or flag or is shouting. No. They choose one kid for ten or eleven years. They choose a big woman. They choose an very old man. They – they are shooting just to make the people very angry from the situation. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI These actions were repeated everywhere in Syria. Eight days after abolishing the state of emergency, a child named Hamza Al-Khateeb, who was thirteen years old, was participating in a protest with his family in Deraa. In the chaos of the shooting, Hamza's family lost him between the panicking protestors. When things became quiet, they searched for his body in the streets, but didn't find anything. They searched for him at home, in the alleys. Everywhere. There was no trace of him. They later found out that the Air Force Intelligence had taken thirteen-year-old Hamza behind the sun. He was held inside a secret detention centre. 

Weeks after his disappearance, Hamza's body emerged in the morgue, mutilated and showing horrible signs of torture, as well as bullet marks in the chest. Little Hamza became the first high-profile case of forced disappearance and death under torture in the Syrian revolution.

This horrendous crime showed the Syrians and the world that Assad lied about the reform. But he carried on anyway. On the 31st of May 2011, two and a half months after the start of the revolution, Assad announced his first presidential pardon after eleven years of presidency. He started to empty Sednaya of radical Islamists by reducing their sentences or pardoning them altogether.

Zahran Alloush, who would later command a jihadist legion called Jaysh al-Islam, was released. 

Hassan Aboud, who would later lead another Jihadi militia coalition called Ahrar al-Sham, was released. 

Issa al-Sheikh, who would later lead Suqour al-Sham Brigades, was released. 

The three were known to some scholars as the Sednaya Company. 

And dozens of other extremists, who would later join ISIS, were, like the previous names, all discharged from Sednaya and other distention centres on the same day, the 31st of May 2011. He was creating division in the country. 

RIYAD AVLAR I was the last one in Sednaya with my few friends. They came and carry us to the Damascus Central Prison. It's like to carry somebody from the hell to the heaven. Yeah. I know it is a prison, but it was different. Sednaya was like – like a hell. Because I stayed after the riots. I stayed for three years in one cell. The door was closed. I didn't saw the sun at all—at all—for three years. Just in a place for seventy--five centimetres. For three years, I sat there, not moving. 

After they carry me to the Centre Prison in Damascus, for the first time, I saw there, the sun. I looked up and I saw the sky. A blue sky. I was forgetting the sky itself, how it is. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Riyad wasn't freed from Sednaya like the radical Islamist detainees. He was sent to Damascus Central Prison, which is widely known as Adra.

RIYAD AVLAR There was a phone in Adra. I called him immediately. "Oh, Diab, I am now in the Adra Prison." 

He said, "Oh, your God. Did you say the truth? You are in Adra Prison." 

I said, "Okay. I am in Adra Prison. And they promised us to – they will let us out. Okay. We will be free, Diab."

He said, "Okay. I will come immediately." 

DIAB SERRIH I wanted to go and see him. I mean, this is Riyad. I could not not go. 

My dad heard me talking on the phone and insisted on coming, saying, "I won't let you go alone. I consider Riyad as much as son as you are." So, I accepted.

At that time, my dad knew a little bit about my activism in general. So, on the way to the prison, he asked me not to make a hero of myself with Riyad, saying, "Just shut up about it. Let's get through this safely."

When Riyad came, I saw him laughing. He was so happy about my father's visit. The happiness I saw in him meant a lot to me. The idea that you are not alone and never will be. 

"I will not leave you alone. I'll keep coming until your deliverance." 

I felt relieved that I was not abandoning my friend who remained in prison. I wouldn't leave him. Never ever. 

RIYAD AVLAR I like his father. I like the old man. I wish my father came and visit me. But I was afraid my father to see me there. 

DIAB SERRIH My father felt the same way. On top of the fact that he was a friend and like a son to him, he was also a foreigner in this country. It's not his country. It's not his homeland. And he was in a bad place. So, we couldn't leave him. And indeed, we kept visiting him. 

I started to go alone sometimes without my father. I visited Riyad every month, once or twice. Sometimes, he would call me, telling me, "Bring me some books and come over." 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Assad was emptying Sednaya to make room for other people. To collect them, his Mukhabarat started hunting. In the mind of Mukhabarat leaders, the existential threat to the regime has always been peaceful Syrian activists, and the regime wanted those people to be completely out of the equation. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI He was in Damascus, not in Darayya. And when he arrived to Darayya, the demonstration now is finishing, and Assad was coming to Darayya to stop this demonstration. So, they start beating people. At that time, directly, he went to there, to demonstration. 

This guy called [Islam], they beat him in the street. So, he went trying to help him. And they catch him with his car also, because he drove to this place to help up. Abdulsatar drove to this place to help. And they catch him, because he is helping.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Abdulsatar is Ghufran's older brother. The family called him Abd. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI Abd was a person who, for me, the person who can I ask him for anything, and he can bring me what I want, because there is a, like, a gap age between me and him. But he's kind of brother who, like, spoiled you. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Four weeks after the enforced disappearance of Abd, his car was seen moving around their city. Abd wasn't the one behind the wheel, though. Every time the car passed by them, a different Assad thug, shabiha, or militia man was driving it. The family fear that Mukhabarat would punish Abd, because of his youngest brother, Majed, who was wanted by Assad intelligence for leading the protests.

GHUFRAN KHULANI We have this fear, and we hope but not to happen, but I think it's happened. Because when they took him, you don't know what happened after. Only you start research and collect information from people who saw what happened. Because not allow for any Syrian to ask about detainees, where he is, or what happened, or if we can see him. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Ghufran's family knew Abd was taken by the notorious Air Force Intelligence. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI We start to go to the place where they catch him, and we ask people who saw the – what happening. To be sure what happened, we ask the person what did he see and if he can tell us something. And also, after that, we tried to help him, to know if we can help him. But after only when we are very sad and busy with Abd and what happening, another tragedy happened. That they catch Majed. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Majed hadn't been staying in the family house since he knew that Mukhabarat henchmen where after him. As I said before, he was very cautious. But caution wouldn't protect Majed for long. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI They arrest Majed in – in following month, after detain Abd. Majed was forced to give himself as his friend had earlier been arrested by the Mukhabarat who had threatened to kill him unless my brother Majed give himself up. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI In June 2011, three months after the beginning of the peaceful revolution, the regime's violence against protestors had reached new bloody levels, and Syrian army tanks filled the streets where protests were taking place. 

NEWS REPORTER 7 After weeks of being ordered to fire into crowds, more and more soldiers don't want to shoot anymore. Many are defecting and fleeing. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI Refusing orders to fire into their countrymen and women, some soldiers started defecting. Some would go to neighbouring Turkey while others would join the ranks of protesters, using the weapons they fled with to defend themselves from Assad's tanks and snipers. This phenomenon would later become known as the Free Syrian Army. 

When the Syrian army began to show signs of disintegration, Assad turned to his axis of resistance allies, Iran and Hezbollah, for backup. 

ABU EMAD I saw the Irani trainer coming to the military school, training the Assad militia how – how to defeat the protestors, how to kill the protestors using the motorcycle. Even I saw more than one hundred motorcycle in the military school, and they asked for a huge amount of ammunition to train them. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI The war drums were rolling for Assad. He wanted an armed conflict from the beginning, and now he got it. A war that would blur the lines between right and wrong and allow him to look like a legitimate president defending his country from the insurgents.

Every chess piece was in place on Assad's war table. Armed rebels, radical Islamists, and jihadists and Iranian soldiers and Hezbollah militias. 

Assad unleashed hell upon his people. He threw everything at them. Barrel bombs, air bombs, and plane machine guns. On the ground, his tanks and militia men burnt the streets to the ground. 

The slogan, "Assad or we burn the country," which was chanted by Assad's loyalists and shabiha would later become a reality.

And away from the cameras and the eyes of the world, his Mukhabarat went on to wage a silent war on the people. 

GHUFRAN KHULANI They brought Majed on the street of Darayya and they force Majed to call a lot of his friends. They tried to catch people the same way. But then, you knew it was that Majed catch. 

So, there is – was kind of [speaks in Arabic] or code and a regular word. If you use it in some way, that means the regime with you or they catch you. And I know that from my brother. I called him directly, because I heard this news and I hope it's not correct. So, I was happy when his phone rang, because, usually, Mukhabarat make the phone not work. So, I said, "Oh, he is safe." 

But when he answered hello and, second word, when he said [speaks in Arabic], I know that he's not – not this his voice. 

And I said to him, "Are you safe?"

And he said yes. Even he said yes. I said, I know from his tone and from his personality, I know he's not safe. 

NADIA AL-BUKAI This tactic of luring activists from hiding using phone calls from friends was used often by the intelligence forces at the time. A primary example in the city of Darayya itself was twenty-four-year-old Ghiyath Matar, one of the icons of the Syrian revolution. 

Ghiyath Matar was a lead organiser of the protests during which roses and water bottles were handed out to soldiers that Assad sent to fire at protestors. His trailblazing peaceful activism earned him the nickname "Little Gandhi." But it also sealed his fate.

A brother of Ghiyath's friend was forced by Mukhabarat to call Ghiyath, asking for help. And even though he suspected it was a trap, Ghiyath went anyway. Days later, Ghiyath's dead body was returned to his family bearing signs of torture. 

Assad's Mukhabarat went on to kidnap, disappear, and torture more, filling Sednaya and other detention centres with activists, politicians, defected soldiers and officers, and ordinary citizens whose only crime was being from an area that rose up against Assad. To them, every remaining non-violent activist, like Ghiyath and Majed, was a potential target. Forced disappearance became a weapon to instil fear in the hearts of Syrians. 

BARBARA WALTERS Do you feel guilty? 

BASHAR AL-ASSAD I – I did my best to protect the people. So, you cannot feel guilty when you do your best.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Assad laughed at the question. Of course, he didn't feel guilty, because he had done his best to protect his people. And by his people, he means his regime, his Mukhabarat, and his loyalists. Not us. He tried to eradicate us or remove us from existence. But as I said at the beginning of this episode, nations are built on stories.

When I tell the story of the Syrian revolution, I will always remember Diab and his father telling Riyad in prison that everything will be okay, soldiers and officers refusing to participate in the bloodshed, thousands of people like Ghufran and her family marching in the streets despite the disappearance and abduction of their loved ones—Majed, Abd, Hamza, Ghiyath, and thousands of peaceful protestors like them. 

I will tell people about Kafranbel, the tiny town in northern Syria that became known around the world for the witty banners carried by sons and daughters on Friday protests. 

I will talk about the White Helmets, ordinary men and women across Syria who rushed into the aftermath of bombs to pull civilians from under the rubble. 

I will talk about the heroic doctors and nurses who, after the systemic, deliberate targeting of hospitals by the Syrian regime, moved hospitals underground into caves and basements to continue saving lives. 

I will also remember my feeling when I was nine and was holding my father's hand in a demonstration in our village for the first time in our lives. I remember asking him if I could clap and chant with the people and him saying, "Of course." I remember how I screamed how it felt so good to be angry at Assad and his regime and exhaling his existence and fear off my chest. To say no aloud. 

Some would say the Syrian revolution is like the legend of Icarus in Greek mythology. Icarus had wings made of wax and feathers to help him escape from imprisonment. He liked flying and kept going up, but he got so close, too close, to the sun. The bright star melted the wax that had kept his wings, and Icarus fell towards the water. 

But our Icarus hasn't died yet. Despite the damage in his wings, he refuses to give up. He's trying to get back up again. Syria's Icarus hasn't ended his journey yet. And so, does Riyad, Diab, Ghufran, and Abu Emad. Their stories haven't ended yet.

Next week on Behind the Sun, we will continue with Ghufran and Abu Emad in the underground network of prisons run by Assad's Mukhabarat, and we will learn more about Riyad's health and Diab's luck that saved him from death. 

Behind the Sun is a co-production between Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, in collaboration with the Association of Detainees and the Missing (ADMSP) and the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability (SJAC) under its project, On the Margins No More. 

This series is written and produced by Muhammad Farouk. 

Thank you to Ranim, Ola, Sarah, Mais, and Ruairi from The Syria Campaign and Rahaf from ADMSP for helping put this series together. 

Voiceover for Diab was presented by Mahmoud Nowara. 

Editing, mixing, and sound design was done by Jarek Zaba and Ivan Easley. 

Additional production support from Molly Freeman, Tom Biddle, and Lincoln Van der Westhuizen. Sandra Ferrari is the executive producer. The theme music is by Milo Evans. 

My name is Nadia al-Bukai.

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S1 E2 - The Playbook

NADIA AL-BUKAI Just before we begin, I wanted to let you know that this podcast contains some descriptions of physical violence and psychological distress. Please use discretion.

On March 27, 2008, Bashar al-Assad was getting ready for a big day: the arrival of presidents and sheikhs of some of the Arab countries to Syria.

ANCHOR For decades, Arab League summits have been marked by rare moments of unity and even more moments of divisions just like this summit here in Damascus. Arab states came together.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Assad was keen to use the event as an opportunity to whitewash his reputation after his regime was accused of ordering the assassination of the prime minister of Lebanon, Rafic al-Hariri, in 2005.

Leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other countries said they wouldn't participate in the event. But Assad went on with hosting the Arab Summit anyway. To him, this event signalled his comeback to the Arab arena, to show them that they were wrong about him.

The situation back then is similar to what he is trying to do now: to re-join the Arab League this year after his expulsion due to the crimes he committed and is still perpetrating against his people. My people.

Little did Assad know that, right at that moment, in 2008, something extraordinary was happening inside Sednaya Prison, the impact of which is still resonating today. Riyad says it felt like …

RIYAD AVLAR The longest riot in the world.

NADIA AL-BUKAI From Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, this is Behind the Sun. I'm Nadia al-Bukai.

Thirty kilometres away from Damascus, the capital of Syria, Riyad and Diab at Sednaya were about to weather a lengthy period of turbulence and chaos in the prison. The detainees of Sednaya would do things no one in the Syrian regime ever thought were possible.

The Syrian regime's response to these events is just one example of how, historically, the regime has resorted to excessive violence to crush any form of dissent and evaded accountability. The reason why what happened in Sednaya in 2008 is so important is because it led to the complete transformation of Sednaya Prison.

DIAB SERRIH This event turned this prison upside down. Its impact endures until today for the people who are detained there or for those who were detained after 2011.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Before we jump into details about this event, let's recap a bit. Last episode, we heard from Diab and Riyad. We learnt from them about how the regime and its intelligence services used fear and violence to submit the Syrians to Assad's will.

The regime created Sednaya in the eighties to detain anyone who would dare to oppose Assad's rule. In 2008, Sednaya was still achieving its purpose, and Riyad and Diab were still there along with thousands of other detainees. But their problem was that, at that time, the prison director, Colonel Ali Kheir Beik, was making their lives as hellish as possible day by day.

RIYAD AVLAR There was no food. There was no water. There was no electricity. There were just the tortures. They came and tortured prisoners.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Between late 2007 and March 2008, he expanded the degree of torture to new levels. The food got worse, and there were also water and electricity cuts. No medical care and no visitations. Nothing.

DIAB SERRIH The situation got to the point of driving several people to think that life had no purpose. Some people started thinking, "This isn't a life. Nobody can take it."

NADIA AL-BUKAI This iron-fist approach created anger and desperation. And that's not the purpose the regime intended for Sednaya. Sednaya was there to create fear and obedience. And this point is important.

On 27 March 2008, in Sednaya's red building, where all the political prisoners were held, a small tooth was going to be the catalyst for everything to come. A detainee had finally seen the prison dentist after a long struggle with unbearable tooth pain. But the dentist didn't treat him. He just removed the tooth. When the man went back to his cell, he was in agony and turned the lights on to go to the cell restroom.

Once one of the guards noticed, he went to the cell and argued with its detainees, demanding that they name whoever lit the room. The prisoners didn't comply. Shaken by their solidarity and defiance, the guard crossed all possible social redlines and went on cursing them, Islam, Prophet Muhammad, God, and the Qur'an.

DIAB SERRIH At this point, the already very upset prisoners started to rebel. They began loudly banging on the doors in the hopes of breaking them down.

NADIA AL-BUKAI When the guard came back with reinforcements, it didn't stop the disobedience, though. It spread its intensity in the entire cell block.

To contain the situation, a middle-ranking officer promised the prisoners that he would punish the soldier who started the upheaval. The prisoners believed him, and everyone went back to their beds. But their anger remained.

Ali Kheir Beik, the prison director, had a different view of things. When he knew about the argument, he considered their defiance an insult to his authority. So, he resorted to the Syrian dictatorship's playbook.

I'm talking about the standard and often repeated manoeuvres and tricks used by regime officials to control the Syrian people and to crush the slightest sign of dissent among them. These tactics are well-documented in countless news, human rights, and Western intelligence reports.

As for Ali Kheir Beik, he decided to use an all-time favourite move from the playbook: vicious violence and collective punishment. He had always believed in violence. Even the prison guards were scared of him and his punishments. The next morning, he went to the cell block with tens of soldiers, determined to teach the detainees a lesson.

DIAB SERRIH He began to insult the whole group, telling them that they didn't have the right to speak this way to the soldier, that the soldier was better than them, that the soldier's combat boots were worthy and more honourable than them.

He promised to punish them immediately. And the soldiers began opening cell after cell in the block, each cell containing between ten and fifteen people, and extracting prisoners one by one to beat and torture them before sending them to solitary confinement.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The torture was extreme and with no mercy. One of those being punished managed to hit back at the soldiers. When his fellow inmates in the corridor saw the battle start between that prisoner and the guards, they immediately joined the clash.

And the prison director fled the scene along with his lieutenants, leaving most of his guards behind. And there, the prisoners took their revenge. They tied the soldiers, took their keys, and opened all the cells in the block. So, that entire block erupted out of their control.

After taking complete control of their block, they opened the doors of the other cell blocks. The entire prison was in a state of revolt.

DIAB SERRIH When they reached us and opened our door, of course, I had to participate. We felt like, "Enough with this prison." We had to get out. We had to tell the people what was happening to us here. We went to the rooftop of the prison.

Of course, the guards were firing into the air. They weren't shooting directly at us on that day.

And we weren't afraid. We were on the rooftop, and we tried to light a fire, but we didn't have the materials to do it. You have nothing. You have your blanket that covers you. If you burn it, you'd die out of cold. So, there's nothing to burn. We tried to make a big flag. But similarly, there was no way to sew things together to make a flag or anything.

NADIA AL-BUKAI When the guards tried to storm the prison again, they failed. And now, the prison director resorted to the playbook of tricks again: When your forces fail, recruit thugs to do your dirty work. He tried to forcibly retake the political prisoners' blocks with the help of inmates convicted of criminal offences from other sections of the prison. The prison administration told them that the political detainees were terrorists and traitors, enemies of the state and the president, and that putting them into their places would be a good deed to the country, and Syria would never forget its "good people."

They were also told that if they succeeded or managed to control the uprising, their sentences might be reconsidered, reduced substantially, or might even get them pardons.

DIAB SERRIH Of course, they failed, because the state of fury we were in was so extreme that ten people wouldn't be able to stop any of us. We wanted to reach the main gates and get out.

Enough. Whatever happens happens.

Of course, this didn't work, because the prison was so heavily fortified. They started to attack us with tear gas. They put tanks and military personnel transport vehicles at the gates of the prison. All the while, over the megaphones, they called to us, "Don't try to get out. Don't try to get out."

NADIA AL-BUKAI All the while, somewhere in his official quarters, I can imagine Bashar al-Assad practising his speech to impress the visiting and absent Arab leaders. If this news got out and his counterparts knew of the riot in the prison, it would be bad publicity for him. He would be perceived as weak. And to Assad and his regime, they cannot be publicly embarrassed. So, he asked his top lieutenants to end this matter as quietly as possible.

And here came another official trick: Act as if you were listening.

DIAB SERRIH We had taken complete control of the prison, two floor of it: the first and the second. The prison is three floors. The prison administration asked us to form a committee from the wise and rational ones among us. They told us, "Let's talk and see what your demands are, so as to resolve the problem peacefully. You didn't get out, so we won't hurt or punish anyone. We want to resolve this problem and turn the page."

So, the prisoners formed a committee of three people. We had a friend in the committee whose name was Nizar Rastanawi.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Please remember that name. Nizar Rastanawi. We will get back to him later.

DIAB SERRIH The committee went down and spoke with the prison director. Of course, there were so many officers there. All kinds of military and intelligence officers.

There was one demand. "We wanted to talk to Bashar al-Assad. We don't want to talk with you or the intelligence. We want to deliver our demands to Bashar al-Assad himself. We want to tell him what's happening to us."

NADIA AL-BUKAI In fact, there was a representative of Bashar al-Assad. His name was Munir Adanov, who would later become the deputy chief of staff of the army and was a close aide to Assad.

Adanov told the committee that Assad was not available at the moment to receive their call. He was welcoming VIPs from around the Arab world for the summit. After that, he scolded Ali Kheir Beik for being responsible for the escalation and ordered him to fulfil all the prisoners' requests.

Their demands were to restart visitations; cease the torture; give them fair trials; the ability to buy clothes, food, and books; and to allow them to do activities. Basically, to make Sednaya less inhumane and more like a normal prison.

DIAB SERRIH And indeed, they implemented all of our demands. Beyond what we could have imagined. They permitted us to bring books. They allowed us to bring food. Everything we wanted, they gave it to us. And more than this, there were some prisoners who did wooden handicrafts, like making prayer beads or picture frames or canes for old people. Imagine, they brought them tools they never would have dreamt of. They even brought them some little sharp tools. Even some kitchen knives.

NADIA AL-BUKAI They gave them more than knives, though. Instead of the old mattresses that prisoners used to sleep on, they gave them military beds, something they would regret later. But I will get to that.

DIAB SERRIH We considered this a victory, but we were cautious that this victory wouldn't last long. The guards didn't fully return. There were some, but a very light presence. They were just bringing food to our doors, and we'd take care of everything else. Even the doors of the cells were not locked on us anymore. Guards were totally out of the equation now. If there was a problem and a guard took a prisoner to solitary confinement, the prisoners would go down and get him back out, saying, "We wouldn't want our comrade to sleep alone."

It happened a few times. It was impossible for the situation to continue like this. It started to feel more like a day-care or a boarding school than a prison. Even boarding schools would have more discipline.

NADIA AL-BUKAI This response was to serve one purpose only: to contain the riot and to avoid any potential embarrassment to Assad during his long-awaited summit. And it did succeed in that. But on the other hand, it was a failure for the regime's men, like the Mukhabarat leaders and Ali Kheir Beik, the now side-lined prison director.
 

For the impatient regime men, it was time for another favourite move: deception.

For one hundred days after the riot, Sednaya detainees were visited by members of parliament, intelligence officers, religious leaders, and high-ranking bureaucrats. During these visits, there were promises that a security committee would come to study the prisoners' files and that there was a possibility of receiving pardons by July.

On the 4th of July, prison officers and guards circled Sednaya, delivering an important message.

DIAB SERRIH They were asking us, "Please, just close the doors. Tomorrow, the security committee will come and check on the prison. Let's avoid embarrassment for us and for you. It might reflect badly on us all if the committee sees you undisciplined. Just close the doors. And tomorrow, you will meet the committee one by one, and you can say whatever you want to them. But now, be disciplined."

NADIA AL-BUKAI The prisoners complied, and everyone in Sednaya went back to their cells and handed the keys to the guards. Tomorrow was a moment of truth.

The committee was a lie.

On the 5th of July 2008, at dawn, in each cell block in Sednaya's red building, where all the political prisoners were, there were hundreds of armed soldiers. The deception manoeuvre succeeded. Now, they got back to their favourite tactic: violence. Again.

DIAB SERRIH It was a horrific sight. Three hundred soldiers opening the door of each cell and just stomping on people. Stomp, stomp, stomping and breaking bones and beating. A horrific, horrific scene. The voices of people being beaten, their bones breaking by having their legs stomped on. Absolutely terrifying. It was crushing. Literally. They were crushing people.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Because the guards were doing this cell by cell, that gave time for the others locked and trapped waiting for their turn. They felt that this was the day they would die.

DIAB SERRIH The detainees' survival instincts kicked in. We felt they were coming to kill us and we refused to surrender. We were like a pack of wolves or wild animals that have to gather in large numbers to fight back.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Suddenly, something strange happened. A voice would flip the situation completely.

DIAB SERRIH We heard somebody saying, "Break the military beds and use the main bars to break the walls. Gather in one room. Don't let them enter as three hundred with you alone or with just ten inmates."

NADIA AL-BUKAI If you are wondering where this voice came from, the answer is the air duct. The ventilation hatches had been their social media and communication channel all the time. Prisoners would sometimes send stuff through them like a towel, a blanket, or even underwear. But that day, only voices mattered the most.

DIAB SERRIH We could hear other voices from the air ducts. Every four cells shared a ventilation system throughout the prison. And remember, it's three floors. So, the voice came from these air ducts. So, who knows who said that first? But people started to copy it, seeing it as a good idea. So, people throughout the prison were repeating, "Open the walls and get out."

You couldn't say this was planned, because if it was planned by the prisoners, it would have been even more successful.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The prisoners instinctively started to hit the walls and break them.

DIAB SERRIH Guards where in cell one and two. I was in cell four. So, the breaking operation was literally unbelievable. Maybe if somebody listened to us, they would say that this person is lying or exaggerating. But truly, we made a hole in the wall within ten minutes. The wall was penetrated. And the same happened in other cells. And through these holes, we started to jump to the next cell and the next until we reached cell ten.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Now, all the prisoners in the cell block are gathered in one cell.

DIAB SERRIH We were one hundred wolves. Come. Let them enter now.

NADIA AL-BUKAI They didn't even wait for the guards to come to them. They broke the last wall and went out to the block corridor. One hundred desperate, fed up, men, with their survival instinct at its peak, facing around triple the amount of regime soldiers in the corridor.

DIAB SERRIH They were stunned. One hundred people attacking them as if one man. And the detainees had metal bars while they had wooden batons and broken tree branches. Here is where the equation was flipped. There was a battle. And as usual, the midranking officers immediately escaped. Actually, they don't always flee like this. But most of the time, they do. They left the soldiers and fled. The soldier without his leader is lost. He doesn't know what to do. There are no orders. So, at this point, the soldiers, too, became detainees.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The operation Riyad and Diab's cell block undertook was repeated throughout the prison. The prisoners were able to take hostages of high-ranking officers and guards and used the phones of these hostages to call their families, to tell them about what was happening.

The mayhem spread further. Some inmates started fires in different places in the prison to alert the world about what was happening. The smoke was visible to the neighbouring villages.

Other people tried to escape the building. And then, the shooting started. The guards randomly shot live ammunition everywhere and at everyone. After about twelve hours, at around five p.m., the shooting stopped. But the extent of the day's aftermath was huge.

DIAB SERRIH The prison burnt. The bakery was burnt. Some of the storages were in total chaos. The soldiers tried desperately to storm our block, and their attempts failed.

So, around five or six p.m., they started to call us from the megaphones to stop the chaos, saying that, if we did, they would stop firing at us. They said that they had orders from their commanders to stop firing, because they'd like to resolve the situation peacefully. So, let's talk.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The news got to the highest levels of Assad's regime, and they ordered all the military branches to go to Sednaya and stop the situation from escalating. Under no circumstances did they want a word of what was happening to escape.

An iron curtain was imposed on the area. They cut the electricity off in the prison and brought jamming devices, leaving the mobile phones in the hands of the prisoners useless.

Inside the prison, some of the radical Islamist factions used this chaos to create their own courts in parts of the prison. They started to enforce their own version of justice, a vindictive and violent one.

DIAB SERRIH In the prison, there were some Islamists who had a different vision. Some were with al-Qaeda. Some had been volunteer fighters / mujahideen in Iraq. And there was tension between these two radical branches.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Their victims weren't only the guards.

DIAB SERRIH Nizar.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Do you remember Nizar Rastanawi who I mentioned earlier, the one who was part of the first prisoners' delegation to negotiate with Assad's representative?

Nizar was a civil engineer and a prominent human rights activist in Hama city, in central Syria. He was sentenced to four years in prison by the State Security Court after a member of Mukhabarat testified that he overheard a private conversation Nizar was having with another person, "spreading false news" and "insulting the president of the republic."

The term was supposed to be only three years, but Fayez al-Nouri, the same judge who sentenced Riyad and Diab, added an extra year to the sentence. al-Nouri didn't like that Nizar had refused to stand up while hearing the verdict.

At the time of the riot, Nizar was months away from being released from Sednaya.

DIAB SERRIH Nizar was approached by a man I didn't recognise. The man beat him up and insulted him. And then, two other masked people came and took him away. Those people who took him away were very big, athletic men. So, they took him and were beating him along the way. These two people were clearly other prisoners, not guards. Guards wear military uniforms. So, I followed them and tried to rescue him.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Nizar was a known person to most of the prison as a secular and outspoken intellectual. The radical Islamists didn't like him, because of his beliefs.

DIAB SERRIH I tried to demand. "Leave him alone. Why are you taking him?"

At this point, the battle became between me and other prisoners. One of them beat me up, and two other people came and beat me up, too, and threatened me. They had the metal bars with them. They didn't really speak, but it was clear that they wanted me to shut up.

There were another two people who tried to come to help me, to help me rescue him from them. But we couldn't. They attacked us again. They were a big group, around seven or eight people, and we were just three.

NADIA AL-BUKAI They took Nizar downstairs, and Diab followed them to see where they were taking him.

DIAB SERRIH It was a closed block, not an open one. There was a pair of prisoners sort of guarding the block, and they told me, "If you want to follow him, we don't know what will happen to you inside. Go back."

I retreated. But I was still cautious, waiting for the situation to calm down and until these guys might leave, so I could go in and see what happened.

Around two p.m., the place was open again and nobody was there. The prisoners who were guarding the cell block were no longer there. I went inside and I found him lying dead on the floor. He was there with five other prisoners. All had been killed. The other five were believed to be informers among the prisoners.

RIYAD AVLAR The Islamic groups came and they attack me, too, as they tried to kill me, 'cause of my belief somehow different from them

NADIA AL-BUKAI But Riyad wasn't alone. His friends saved him from imminent death.

DIAB SERRIH There was a group of inmates who went down to defend Riyad and stand by him. Some of these people were Salafis as well, honestly, and they told the factions who came to attack Riyad, "If you came to hurt him, you'll have to get through us first." They told them, "The person you are trying to hurt helped us a lot and did us a lot of favours in Adra Prison before he came to Sednaya."

In a way, there were many people who liked and respected us. There were people who knew that we would never hurt them, however bad our disagreements became.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Luckily, Riyad survived. But Nizar and others didn't.

I try to imagine what kind of hate they had for Nizar, what enticed them to do that to him. I went through everything written about him everywhere, trying to understand. And I couldn't find anything.

And I also can't help but think, if the judge, Fayez al-Nouri, hadn't added an additional year to Nizar's sentence, he would have been alive. If the regime hadn't put Nizar in detention in the first place, because of a private conversation, he would have been alive.

RIYAD AVLAR He was a good man and always talking in a low voice and asking for rights. He was a human right defender. And after hours, we heard that they killed him. Why they killed him, I don't know. He was like water: clear. I liked Nizar. They killed him for nothing.

DIAB SERRIH Nizar's killing created a crisis inside the prison, even among the radical Islamists themselves. There were many among the radical Islamists who were against his killing.

NADIA AL-BUKAI In Sednaya Prison, on that day, July 5th, 2008, thirty people were killed. Until this moment, it is said that only perhaps two of the dead bodies were returned by the regime to their families. Nizar was not one of them.

In the early hours of July 6th, 2008, General Talaat Mahfouz picked up his phone. The caller was President Bashar al-Assad himself. Mahfouz was then a military police branch director and, before that, he was the director of Tadmor Prison, the terrible prison I had mentioned at the start of this podcast. The same place that Riyad, as a young man, had described in a letter, leading to his detention for years.

As a loyal son of the regime, Mahfouz knew all the regime's ways, and his choice tactic: division.

DIAB SERRIH The detainees were now in complete control of the prison. They even had their own detainees, around twelve hundred soldiers. And now, the negotiations began between the regime and the committee.

A new committee was formed. The prisoners' committee tried to resolve the situation with no more violence. Enough. We wanted to resolve the situation peacefully and to not return to the same demeaning conditions: verbal abuse, the beating, the torture. Et cetera. A roadmap agreement to resolve the crisis was reached.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The agreement was that the prisoners would give the detained soldiers back. And, in exchange, the regime would reopen the electrical and water supply lines, bring food, and evacuate the wounded. But it didn't hold up, because some detainees didn't trust the regime.

The families of the detainees went directly to Tishreen Military Hospital, in Damascus. When they saw the ambulances and learnt they were carrying injured people from Sednaya, they protested in front of the hospital for a week, demanding to visit the wounded, to check on their loved ones. They couldn't go near the prison due to the entrenchment of all the military forces around it.

The regime responded to the protests by closing the hospital to public access for two weeks.

DIAB SERRIH Some of the detainees who were sent for treatment during the riot were killed at the hospital. There were people who went to the hospital and never came back. That issue raised a great many questions among the prisoners.

"Where are the people who went to the hospital? We want to see the people who were sent to the hospital."

NADIA AL-BUKAI To stop the questions, the prison administration took two people from the prisoners' committee to Tishreen Military Hospital to see the detainees who had been hospitalised.

DIAB SERRIH When these two men from the committee went there, the hospitalised detainees told them, "Don't go back without us, please."

So, they brought the hospitalised detainees back with them. The people who had been hospitalised told us unbelievable, horrifying stories. The torture that they were subjected to in Tishreen Military Hospital was even worse than the torture they faced in Sednaya Prison. They used to piss on their wounds, mocking them. One of the hospitalised prisoners was approached by a doctor or a nurse while he was blindfolded and told that they wanted to put disinfectant on his wounds. Another came and said, "I will put the disinfectant for him," and he pissed on his wound instead, telling him, "This is the best disinfectant. This is the best treatment for these people." And this is just a mild example.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Back to Sednaya again, the hospital crisis increased divisions between the detainees.

RIYAD AVLAR We, I mean, people like me and like Diab, we were between the bullet of the army and the Salafist groups.

DIAB SERRIH It became a state of siege, July to December. Five months in a state of the most brutal type of siege. Sometimes, we drank rainwater during the fall. We'd break the gutters to drink the water from them. Too many detainees got sick and too many detainees were on the brink of losing their minds.

NADIA AL-BUKAI On the 6th of December 2008, the regime had tried to storm the prison and failed. However, Talaat Mahfouz came up with another idea: If you can't get inside the prison, flush the prisoners out. He positioned snipers on cranes and fire engines around the prison, with orders to fire at will whenever they saw a prisoner.

RIYAD AVLAR The army broke outside the wall to see inside the building itself and began to shooting the prisoners from the outside. But we came inside the cells safely, because when you show even a bit of your body, they will shot you immediately.

There was fear. We always waiting a bullet come and kill us, one of us. And, in fact, yes, they killed. I saw.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The shooting was so random. Anyone inside the building that appeared on the snipers' telescope was shot immediately. Whoever got wounded had to be left to die in agony, because there was no kind of medical treatment available.

DIAB SERRIH The pressure was so high. And then, the massacre started. Between the 6th of December and the 26th of December, they killed a hundred prisoners.

We reached the level of thinking, "So, Talaat Mahfouz really succeeded with this."

The prison could have remained steadfast, but the foundations for steadfastness were not there. The foundations were too weak. You couldn't remain steadfast with one spoon of rice per day from the remaining supplies of food.

Many people were not involved with any of the bloodshed. I am a person who was not involved in any of it. I wanted to get out. I wanted to finish with this crisis.

So, the regime indeed succeeded with this policy of breaking our unity and our power. And people gave up, basically.

NADIA AL-BUKAI It was Talaat Mahfouz's moment of victory. He had proved himself to Assad's representative and brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, the head of military intelligence. Shawkat had used to go there to check on the operation and interrogate prisoners. Mahfouz stood proudly while his men spoke over the megaphone, telling the detainees about their surrender terms. "Take your belongings and exit the prison."

All the prisoners complied except for thirty-five people who refused to leave. Everyone started packing their clothes and went out, but Riyad didn't want his clothes.

RIYAD AVLAR I told Diab, "Okay, I will left my clothes and just give me the books. I will take the books with me outside." Two big bags of books.

And then, I came outside, and guard began to search me. He just saw books. He said, "What is this?"

I said, "Books."

"About what?"

"Books."

He said it is forbidden to take books with you.

I said, "Oh, why? I left my clothes inside the prison and I carried the books with me. Why you are forbidding these books?"

He said, "Okay."

NADIA AL-BUKAI Over the course of these events, between March and December 2008, the regime tried repeatedly to put an end to the riots. It also tried to conceal all traces of what happened by circulating Sednaya inmates between prisons. The regime kept shuffling the prisoners for weeks after their surrender, so that it would be hard for anyone to figure out the numbers of the casualties, and the prisoners' count.

RIYAD AVLAR Yeah. I was, in this time, in the – in the white building. And they brought Diab again from the Adra Prison to Sednaya.

DIAB SERRIH When they returned us, there were still thirty-five people who had refused to get out and surrender. So, on January 9, 2009, the regime stormed the prison and killed them all.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The regime worked on Sednaya's renewal twenty-four-seven. Repairs, demolition, and rebuilding. There was no such thing as sleep. The objective was to reshape Sednaya forever.

After three months, they completed their work. They created the dark abyss that is Sednaya today.

DIAB SERRIH It was a terrifying sight. The walls had become metal, and it's as if you are being imprisoned in a tin of sardines. This is the most accurate description of the cells of Sednaya at that point. The design was so unique. Even the air ducts had been closed off. It's death. It's death.

And some people really immediately got sick. Some people got tuberculosis. Some people got hepatitis. We weren't seeing the sun. We were totally locked down all the time. And after a while, from time to time, they would allow external visits.

NADIA AL-BUKAI They made the visits so short and so random that no one could track the real tally of what had happened during the first and second riot. Talaat Mahfouz vowed that what happened before shall not happen again.

Until now, no one knows the true number of people killed in the riots. No one was held accountable for what happened in Sednaya between March 2008 and January 2009.

DIAB SERRIH We were sure, if we made it out alive from this prison, may God watch over the people who came after us in what they were about to go through.

So, I was grateful for the presence of Riyad and other friends. I mean, who knows who would make it out alive, frankly? There was a general feeling that we all could die anytime those days. And it was a big possibility. I think we all felt the same way. So, for instance, it was a good thing that there was Riyad to inform my family if anything happened to me, to comfort them and speak with them, and the same thing for me.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Assad used the playbook and got away with what he did to the prisoners in Sednaya in 2008. His regime did not tolerate the prisoners' demands for humane treatment. And when the dust settled, the regime blamed them for everything.

Assad controlled the narrative as he worked to improve his relations with the West. In fact, three US Senators, including John Kerry, met with Assad one month after the brutal end of the riot, in February 2009.

Assad, had blocked all forms of independent reporting on the events, stonewalled his men from accountability, and exported a story that he was "a power broker in the region who's fighting extremism," "a pillar of safety and stability in the region, who's fighting terrorism."

Today, some countries are restoring ties with Assad and even consider him as part of the solution. But looking at what continues to happen in my home country, this could not be further from truth. Assad is not a pillar of safety and stability. No one I know feels safe.

Next week on Behind the Sun, we will continue with Diab and Riyad's story and find out how Assad used Sednaya again to try to crush the revolution in 2011. You will meet Ghufran and hear about her journey searching for her missing brothers.

Behind the Sun is a co-production of Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, in collaboration with ADMSP and the Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre, as part of its On the Margins No More project. It's written and produced by Muhammad Farouk.

Thank you to Ranim, Ola, Sara, and Ruairi from The Syria Campaign and to Rahaf from ADMSP for helping put this series together.

Additional production support from Molly Freeman and Tom Biddle. Sandra Ferrari is the executive producer. Theme music is by Milo Evans. My name is Nadia al-Bukai.

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S1 E1 - Unsafe Heaven

NADIA AL-BUKAI Just before we begin, I wanted to let you know that this podcast contains some description of physical and psychological violence. Please use discretion.

Since 2015, when I arrived in Europe, I have grown more attached to the sun. I always think of the winter sun where I am in Europe as a guest of honour in the sky. It appears only in short cameos throughout the weeks. And when it does, you don't get the full feeling of it. A friend of mine once called it the fridge bulb, because felt that the sun was only there to light the cold days, but it doesn't really keep you warm.

In Syria, where I'm from, I remember winters being sunny and warm. I miss them. It's not only the sun itself that is different in Europe. The difference is also in how other things feel. Intangible things like air. I don't know how to explain it, but in Syria, air smelled like Assad, my country's ruler. In every breath I took, his presence was powerful in my chest. In the back of my mind, I imagined him counting the number of oxygen atoms I breathe and only allowing me what's necessary to stay alive. The rest of the oxygen was his. He kept it to remind me of how much he owns everything in Syria. But in Europe, all the oxygen in the air is mine. You can say air is air and the sun is the same everywhere, but they are not. At least not to me.

As a Syrian refugee, safety was the reason why my family had to leave Syria in 2015, before that, my father was arrested and detained twice, because the Assad regime saw his peaceful activism as an existential threat. But, now, I hear people saying that Syria is safe, that the war is over, that Assad regime has "substantially improved safety" in the capital, Damascus.

These aren't my words. It's the Danish government's description, the same government in clear violation of human rights conventions and wants to send back hundreds of Syrian refugees from Damascus to meet their unknown fate there.

Syria is safe, they say. Maybe they don't fully realise what has been and is still happening in Syria. They don't know about the real and ongoing horrors that more than one hundred thousand detainees continue to face in detention Syria just because they dare to express their opinions or criticise the authorities from torture to enforced disappearance and killings.

The story I am going to tell you in this podcast is not just about these atrocities. It is a story of love, friendship, and surviving against the odds. To fight for all those left behind.

But, right now, what I think about most is that misconception about the meaning of safety in Syria. Is Syria safe?

RIYAD AVLAR of course not. Syrians couldn't go back to their country.

NADIA AL-BUKAI From Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, this is Behind the Sun. I'm Nadia al-Bukai.

The voice you heard earlier is Riyad. He doesn't speak English well in his opinion, but he wanted to speak in English for you, because he believes that it's best for him to try doing his own translation.

RIYAD AVLAR My name is Riyad. Riyad Avlar. In fact, it is, in Turkish, like this: Avlar.

NADIA AL-BUKAI As he just said, Riyad is Turkish. I met him for the first time under strange very strange circumstances. The first time we were in touch, I was thirteen years old and he was in prison. He was my father's cellmate. And I was trying to connect him with his family in Turkey. He had been in detention in Syria for eighteen years at that point. And he didn't call them once. Of course, not because he didn't want to, but because he was denied this very basic right.

In his first six and a half years of detention, he was forcibly disappeared, and his family had no idea where he was or if he was dead or alive. Riyad had such an unusual and extremely difficult journey, and I would like you to hear his story.

RIYAD AVLAR You were a child in this time, I know. And I couldn't believe myself. This is a child who helped me.

NADIA AL-BUKAI When I met Riyad over the phone, he didn't have any family members living in Syria. He was in prison, as I said earlier. And there, if you were lucky enough to get a chance to call someone, you can't make international or internet calls. So, the arrangement that happened, in 2014, was that Riyad would call me on my phone and I would call his family and then connect their calls.

RIYAD AVLAR You changed my life. You give me hope. You give me a smile. And how I say thank you and thank you and thank you, I know it will not be enough for you, Nadia. You have to know this, my girl.

NADIA AL-BUKAI I did what I had to do.

RIYAD AVLAR You and your family. Your father, too. You know, that my mother, for the first time, after seventeen years, she saw my face through your father pictures, when he drawed my face. And I couldn't or I will not—not just I couldn't—I will not forget all my life that one family came and changed my life.

NADIA AL-BUKAI My father is also an artist, and he drew Riyad's face, so that his mother could see what he looks like after all those years. One of the reasons why Riyad is the right candidate to help me explain the meaning of "safety" in Syria is because Riyad is a survivor of enforced disappearance in my country.

After he was kidnapped by the Syrian regime in the nineties, he was held in secret detention for twenty-one years, completely cut off from the outside world and his loved ones. He was held behind the sun.

In Syria and other countries in the Middle East, "behind the sun" is a term that strikes fear in the hearts and minds of many. People say it when they speak about someone who has disappeared, usually under suspicious or forced circumstances, or to avoid explicitly mentioning the notorious intelligence services known as Mukhabarat or its officers. If you do something like that, you will probably end up behind the sun yourself. And the regime henchmen also say this phrase to emphasise their ability to hide people without a trace. Behind the sun is dark, cold, cruel, and far from safety. People die behind the sun.

When Riyad finally escaped this abyss, he vowed to shed some light on these dark places. He co-founded ADMSP right after he was freed from Syria in 2017. ADMSP stands for the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison. Riyad's behind the sun location was Sednaya Military Prison. Not many outside of Syria know of it.

RIYAD AVLAR When we are talking about the Sednaya Prison, I know, when we say the prisons, many people thinking that the prison is like Democrats' countries prisons, but it isn't like this.

NADIA AL-BUKAI In fact, Sednaya is not a prison at all. It is not a normal detention centre where you have rights, get visits, or get a lawyer. You may not get sufficient daily food rations or see the sun and breathe fresh air regularly. Not at all. These things do not exist there. In fact, if you Googled Sednaya now, you would find it widely known as the human slaughterhouse. That's how Amnesty International named it and that's how all the Syrian know it.

DIAB SERRIH The best description of it is a death camp. The Syrian regime detains people and sends them to their deaths in Sednaya. Just death. There is no other destiny except for a very few people, and those are the very fortunate ones who would survive this place.

NADIA AL-BUKAI This is Diab. He is a Syrian activist, Riyad's best friend, a former cellmate in Sednaya, and one of the founders of ADMSP. He doesn't speak English, That's why you will hear an English voice over his words.

Before Sednaya turned in the synonym of "torture" and "killing" like it is now, it was just another addition to Assad's father, Hafez, collection of prisons. It was opened in 1987 as military detention camp. To get as many detainees as possible, it was built on a very wide stretch of land, more than one million square metres or around three hundred fifty acres. And when it comes to making people disappear, Hafez al-Assad needed privacy. So, it was built on a tall hill, surrounded by wide, empty land, hidden away more than thirty kilometres northeast of the centre of the capital.

When they opened it, among the first prisoners were communists, Muslim Brotherhood members, and Palestinian detainees from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction. Most of the other detainees were people who opposed the regime politically or anybody who had a differing opinion to those of the state or the regime.

DIAB SERRIH In the past there were human rights violations. Anybody who vocally opposed the government would be sent to prison and tortured. But since 2011, the situation is no longer just human rights violations. It has become crimes against the humanity. It has become war crimes. It is different. It became systematic. Human rights violations became systematic. Torture became systematic and at a mass scale.

In Syria now, it's not a single individual incident here and there or limited to some prisons. No. No. Now, at every detention centre in Syria, you are exposed to torture and exposed to forcible disappearance. So, this is what has changed. Whereas before, there used to be human rights violations, now, the situation is a mass crime against humanity.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Now, as the world's attention appears to be fading, countries seem to be normalising relations with Assad. And what might that mean for him? An escape from justice.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, nearly one hundred twenty-eight thousand have never emerged and are presumed to be either dead or still in custody in Syria. Since March 2011, over forty thousand were killed under torture. Many prisoners die from conditions so dire that a United Nations investigation labelled the process "extermination." The pace of new arrests, torture, and execution is increasing, Diab says.

DIAB SERRIH After ten years of revolution or war or whatever you want to call it, I mean, there is no safety. There are still the security forces and intelligence branches. There are prisons and detention centres. There is forcible disappearance. So, of course, it's not safe for anybody to live there or for anybody who escaped Syria, because of the war or the security forces or intelligence branches, to return to Syria. Because until now, nothing has changed. The policy of detention and forcible disappearance is still continuing.

NADIA AL-BUKAI If I asked anyone in the world, "What do you think an Air Force Intelligence Service does?", they might say something about monitoring air space or countering threats related to air force or air defence systems. But just like how the meaning of safety in Syria doesn't match what it represents outside, so does Air Force Intelligence or Air Force Mukhabarat a.k.a al-Zawiyah. They are the all-watching eyes and the all-hearing ears of the regime that monitor whatever happens in Syria. That's what most Syrians would say if you asked them about al-Mukhabarat al-Zawiyah.

When Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, the one you heard speaking to crowds, took control of the country in a coup in 1970, he did it using al-Zawiyah, his own intelligence service, the one he created while commanding the Air Force in the sixties. To solidify his rule, Hafez al-Assad created a minority elite. The top leadership are drawn largely from his extended family and the Alawite community.

During the insurgency that rocked the regime and was led by the Muslim Brotherhood between 1978 and 1982, the role and power of his intelligence agencies expanded dramatically. During this period, they gained increased resources and personnel and demonstrated brutal ruthlessness to cow any potential opponent.

RIYAD AVLAR Rifaat al-Assad himself, at that time, he was an officer and he went to this detention centre and killed, in moments, hundreds of prisoners for nothing.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Rifaat al-Assad is Hafez' brother in case you didn't recognize the name. He commanded a feared military group at that time called the Defence Companies. To understand the context of what is happening now in Sednaya, in Syria, and how the intelligence is running the country, we must go back to the times when things changed.

Four years before Bashar al-Assad, the current leader of Syria, became the president, in 1996, Riyad, then a nineteen-year-old student in Syria, was abducted while he was in public transit. The Mukhabarat arrested him after he had sent a letter telling his friends about the stories he heard about the Tadmor Prison massacre in 1980, and Rifaat al-Assad, the president's brother, was involved in it.

RIYAD AVLAR I wrote and I tried to send this letter to my friend in Turkey to tell them what reality this is. But the Syrian intelligence search and find everything. I was a young boy, and these actions took twenty-one years from my life for nothing.

NADIA AL-BUKAI From the moment of his arrest, Riyad disappeared. Nobody knew where he went. His family and friends didn't know if he was dead or alive. At that time, the Syrian and the Turkish governments were in a cold war, and Damascus was harbouring the Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, one of the founders of the Kurdistan Workers' Party militia (PKK) that was an integral part of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict.

RIYAD AVLAR When they captured me, of course, they show me these letters, and they said, "Okay. You see, you wrote something against us."

I said, "Okay. I wrote, but it was just a childish thing."

NADIA AL-BUKAI They made him sign and stamp his fingerprints on a confessional letter in Arabic, a language Riyad wasn't completely fluent in at that time. In the letter, he was falsely accused of spying on Syria and committing acts of espionage to destabilise the country. Remember, he was just nineteen at that time.

RIYAD AVLAR After fifteen years, I learnt they accused me—. I don't know what they call it in English, but to make matters or problems between two countries. They mean, Turkey – Turkey and Syria. And to brought armies against Syria. Oh, what I am? A Superman.

NADIA AL-BUKAI It's not a surprise that Riyad finds it laughable that the regime thought a young man like him was responsible for such elaborate plots against the state. Perhaps, his laughter is an attempt to protect himself from these dark memories.

But the Mukhabarat doesn't kid around. When he was detained, Riyad was with his wife. And after his arrest, he thought that they released her, because she didn't do anything. But that wasn't the case. After one year in the intelligence branches, an officer came to him and told him that his wife was in their custody and they wanted him to talk to her.

RIYAD AVLAR It was a real shock. I frozen.

I said, "She's here?"

He said, "Yes."

I said, "Why? What she did? Why you are captured her 'til now?"

He said, "I don't know. I'm just an officer."

'Cause just she was my wife. This is the reason. There was no reason. No reason at all. She didn't do anything.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Riyad's wife became tired of her situation. They were married young and they were certainly much too young for this. And when Mukhabarat men asked him to see her, she was fourteen days into a hunger strike. They wanted him to convince her to end it.

RIYAD AVLAR I said, "Okay. Where is her?"

He said, "In the car. And you have to talk with her to eat or she's going to die. And nobody will hear about her. Nobody will hear about you."

I went to car and I saw her. She was there in the car. And I tried to be strong in front of her, but inside me, I was crying. I took her on my hands. She was very, very weak, because, fourteen days, she wasn't eat anything. I took her and I began talking with her. I asked her, "Why did you do that? Why did you do that?"

She said, "Because I want to die."

I said, "Why?"

She said, "Because they are cruel. We didn't do anything. Why they took – took us here? For what?"

I said, "I don't know. But I know one thing. Just one thing. We have to – we have to fighting to go out from this hell. And I promise you I will do everything to take you outside from this place."

It was a very bad moment in my life. Yeah. And, of course, after that, she eat.

NADIA AL-BUKAI They didn't release her after what had happened, but Riyad did see her again.

RIYAD AVLAR After two years, they took me to a political section in another prison. They brought all the political women to that place, and she was one of them. And we began to wrote to each other letters and throw these letters to other from the windows. And every day, we wrote some things about love, about our life.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Moments like these are what keep people from falling apart. Not many were this lucky, but this certainly helped Riyad and his wife for a while. After six years and six months from their detention and disappearance, Riyad and his wife met again and saw a courtroom for the first time, the state security court.

RIYAD AVLAR There wasn't any court, in fact.

The judge said, "We sentence you to die."

So, I said, "What I did to die?"

And he – he stopped there. And after a while, he began to reading again. And he said, "Okay. We sentence you again to forever."

I said, "Forever what? What do you mean?"

He said, "You will stay in the detention centre forever.

"All my life?"

"Yes."

I said, "What I did?"

He said, "Shut up, man. Go out."

NADIA AL-BUKAI If you wonder how an official judge could be so flippant during sentencing, I'll explain a bit later. But for now, you should remember the judge's name: Fayez al-Nouri.

Fayez al-Nouri also sentenced Riyad's wife to six and half years, which is the exact same period she had already spent in detention. That said, she had already served her and was free to go.

RIYAD AVLAR She refused to go out. She said, "I won't go out without Riyad. I want him." And she began to scream. And she began to cry, cry, cry. And afterwards, they accept to – to let her to come and see me just for half hour.

And I tried to – to make her calm. I said, "Okay. Go. And when you go, you will working for me outside. You will told my family. You will told my friends – my friends to come and help me. Go. Please."

Yes. And at that moment, I believed that I will not see her again. I know she will go and I will not see her again at all. Yeah.

NADIA AL-BUKAI For two years after her release, Riyad's wife tried to work on getting him freed. She told everyone about him, about where they were, and about the alleged accusations. That was when his family first knew that he was alive.

But nothing happened. The Mukhabarat stayed as it is, and Riyad stayed where he was. Riyad never saw her again. He learnt after his release, fifteen years after the trial, that she got married again and had children. Riyad has not married again.

Between Riyad's enforced disappearance and his trial, something happened in 2000. Hafez al-Assad died and his son, Bashar, inherited the presidency without fair elections. A few months after Riyad's secret trial, Diab, a young Syrian, started engaging in online activism. He was a prominent member in an online forum. Something like Reddit. It was called Akhawia, which means "fraternity" in English. In this forum, Diab and his friends to speak freely about politics and other things.

In 2003, the internet in Syria was relatively new. So, people didn't know what level of censorship to expect and they also believed the rhetoric young Assad was spreading at that time. That he's modernising Syria and moving away from his father's role towards a more open and democratic Syria. But his Mukhabarat, the same intelligence services he proudly inherited from his father, grew tired of the forum and they certainly wouldn't tolerate what happened when the forum participants took online political discourse to the streets in 2005.

DIAB SERRIH We tried to establish a congregation of young people and we wrote a paper with our demands of the state. Basically, what we were saying on the internet, we put it on paper. And some young people adopted this manifesto. And we established an association we called Youth for Syria. Shams.

NADIA AL-BUKAI "Shams" means the sun, by the way. They were members of the sun movement calling for freedom and justice for Syrians. Of course, the regime was growing tired of political activity in general, not just Shams, and started detaining well-known dissidents.

The intelligence began to follow Shams' members and they exceeded in detaining one of the movement's leaders. When Diab heard, he fled from his home in Damascus. The thing is, if the Mukhabarat can't get to you, they will try to get to your family. The Mukhabarat arrested Diab's father and demanded that he should turn himself in by meeting them in the street.

DIAB SERRIH I arrived at the meeting place. After that, I found my dad with them in a car. I entered the car from the back door. There was a clearly high-ranking officer in the car. He was telling my dad not to fear. There is just a simple procedure, just a brief Q&A.

"We are just keeping him for a little bit. Maybe just taking him for as long as it takes to drink a cup of coffee. We'll send him right back to you after. There is nothing to worry about. We will return him to you."

Of course, my dad clearly did not believe it.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The intelligence officers didn't care about Diab's father, so they stopped playing nice.

DIAB SERRIH At the end, they got rid of my dad in a very humiliating way. When he refused to leave, they forced him out of the car. He kept looking at me and his eyes began tearing up at that moment. I felt like he was leaving a piece of his heart in the car. He was leaving his son. He kept looking at the car as it was leaving. I felt like he had lost something. He kept looking at the car as it was moving away like a piece of his heart was going away with it.

NADIA AL-BUKAI They blindfolded Diab and moved him to an intelligence branch where he would be detained and interrogated for a while. And just like the case in every Mukhabarat branch until now, they took him underground and started torturing him for thirty minutes. And then, came an interrogator.

The interrogation was a mix of torture and lectures.

DIAB SERRIH "The president is bringing technology to this country. He is the president of the Syrian Information and Technology Association. And he brought computers to this country," the interrogator was telling me. "This computer you see before you, we never would have dreamt of having it were it not for Mr. President."

"The president brought these computers. And you are using it for this alongside the baton and the whip and your other torture tools? Is this your modernisation? To have a computer and, at the same time, to have your whip, your baton, your tools to torture people with?"

NADIA AL-BUKAI The interrogation period took around forty-five days. During this time, he didn't gain anything from staying silent or refusing to say what they wanted to hear. In Syria's justice system, when the intelligence says something about you, you must admit it and everyone else should agree as well.

DIAB SERRIH As soon as you admit everything they want you to admit, that's the end. They stop the torture and send you to court. And we have to put "court" between quotation marks here.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Do you remember Fayez al-Nouri, the judge who sentenced Riyad and his wife? In 2007, Diab stood in the same courtroom with the same judge. Fayez al-Nouri perfectly encapsulated justice in Assad's Syria. This judge had been heading the State Security Court since the 1980s. In the nineties, there was a failed assassination attempt that left him deaf and visually impaired.

DIAB SERRIH And this is the man presiding over your case. This man will judge you.

NADIA AL-BUKAI In the trial, the judge is just a messenger that reads your sentence. And this particular messenger was a bad one.

DIAB SERRIH This man read my name, but then read the name of my friend's father instead of mine and read the name of another friend's mother instead of mine and read the birthdate of yet another person. I didn't understand the accusation when he pronounced them. I literally couldn't follow his words, 'cause he does not speak well. All I could understand was that we were sentenced and that we were being sent back.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The regime also denied Diab any legal assistance from human rights NGOs. And at that time, there weren't any lawyers who would voluntarily take Diab's case. Even now, it will be very dangerous for a lawyer to defend a political prisoner or someone accused of treason against the state. It can cost them their own freedom. So, the court appointed the defence. But because each one of the lawyers feared continuing with Diab, in his five court appearances, Diab had five different attorneys. When he was sentenced to five years in prison, Diab tried to tell the judge that he was coerced and tortured by the intelligence to confess.

DIAB SERRIH The judge replied, "You're a liar. The intelligence doesn't do anything like that. If you were starved, how are you still alive?"

So, the so-called judge was worse than the intelligence agents. He wouldn't beat you, but the only thing he would do is curse and insult you. Imagine, the judge is just telling you, "Shut up. Shut up." And disparaging you all the time with his way of talking, saying things like, "You are traitors." The judge would give you the feeling that you should feel lucky that he's not sentencing you to death.

NADIA AL-BUKAI I want to pause here for a moment. At that time, in 2007, Sednaya still functioned like the old version, a notorious prison run by the military with a bad record of human rights violations. That would soon change.

After his tried, Diab was heading towards the infamous Sednaya. One of the traditions that are common with all Assad detentions until now is a torture event known as "welcome parties."

DIAB SERRIH In the intelligence branches, for example, you keep getting beaten and tortured until you confess what they want you to confess. When I confessed—"Fine. I'm a traitor" —the beating stopped. But in Sednaya, you are being beaten for nothing. They are beating you to break you from inside, psychologically and spiritually, to snatch your humanity away from you, to transform you into an animal. And then, like a sheep, you enter your barn, namely solitary confinement. You keep being beaten. And, sometimes, they bring you some food. And you could die at any moment.

NADIA AL-BUKAI So, Diab decided to avoid giving any reason for the guards to torture him. He accepted his fate and tried to cope with his situation. At that time in Sednaya, inmates were allowed to read books and newspapers. But these publications had to go through Mukhabarat first for approval, which means it was just part of the state propaganda. At the end of the day, Assad didn't want dissidents to be able to think freely or have access to knowledge in Sednaya. Their free thinking is what got them inside in the first place.

By contrast, for Diab, books were the things that kept him sane. And whenever there was raised an opportunity to get his hands on a banned book, he would grab it immediately. After some time in Sednaya, Diab would meet someone who would change his life forever.

DIAB SERRIH We knew that there would be newcomers. So, we all wanted to see who they were. If there was somebody who fit my personality, somebody without problems, not radically religious, or had any other personal problems. So, we would have suitable company in our cell. So, I met someone and helped him carry his bag. And I immediately asked him, "What do you have in your bag? It's too heavy."

NADIA AL-BUKAI That person was Riyad. Since his trial and separation from his wife in 2003, the authorities moved him between detention centres. And during that time, nobody from his family were able to locate where he was. His arrival to Sednaya and meeting with Diab would also influence his life in a great way.

RIYAD AVLAR I hide, at that time, books from all the detainees. I hide them. I keep them. When he saw me, I had many books with me. And as a cat smelling milk, he could smell the books and – and we immediately became friends.

DIAB SERRIH That is where it started. I began to borrow books from him. I was constantly asking him for suggestions since I wanted to read and we were not otherwise allowed to read anything other than what's authorised by the state. But with Riyad, I found some nice books. Short stories, novels. Anyway, the relationship began to strengthen from there.

RIYAD AVLAR He told me, "Where are you from?"

I said, "I am from Turkey."

"Wow," he said. "Turkey?"

I said, "Yes. I'm from Turkey."

He said, "You are Turkish?"

"Yes," I said. "I'm Turkish, man."

It was a strange feeling.

"Oh." But he said, "Oh, the Syrian intelligence not just captured the Syrians. They also captured the other nationality."

NADIA AL-BUKAI The bond between Riyad and Diab grew stronger and stronger over the years. They were two likeminded men standing back-to-back against life in Sednaya. They call their relationship something beyond brotherhood.

DIAB SERRIH We were eating together. Our beds were beside each other. It's to the point that you know everything about each other. For example, I used to cook a little bit and Riyad would do the dishes. I knew, for instance, that Riyad didn't like spicy or salty food and he would drink his tea without sugar. So, when I would cook for us, I would cook to his specifications. I wouldn't make the food spicy or salty. It became like an old married couple, like a couple who had been married for forty years and know everything about each other. And each have their complaints about each other. But at the end of the day, they couldn't live without each other nor would they ever divorce each other.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Still, there was one thing that Riyad couldn't get over. For years, Riyad's family knew nothing about where he was or what happened to him. They only knew what his ex-wife told them when she got out.

RIYAD AVLAR Fifteen years, my family searched about me, and one of my family members went to Syria to ask about me. Three times, he went to Syrian intelligence centres, and they told him that I wasn't there. But I was there. And my brother was really near to me, maybe metres. But they told, "We don't have this name."

NADIA AL-BUKAI Diab didn't accept this situation for his best friend. He decided to write Riyad's address on a delicate piece of paper he extracted from cigarette tin foil and gave it to his mother on the next visit. He folded and concealed the message under his little fingernail to avoid detection during the body cavity search. Diab had let the nail grow for more than a month before executing his plan.

During a quick visit of about thirty seconds, he was allowed to hug his mother through a window. Diab kissed her hands and, while doing so, he passed the tiny paper into her grip and tightened his hands around her fingers.

DIAB SERRIH She didn't believe that there could be someone whose family knew nothing about him. And by the way, she just told me about this last year. She told me, "When I read the paper, I wanted to get out the same night. I was thinking, 'How could there be a mother who has known nothing about her son for fourteen years?' How could I sleep knowing that there is a mother wondering about her son for fourteen years?"

And, truly, she left for Turkey in two days.

RIYAD AVLAR After fifteen years for the first time, Diab's mother came from Damascus to Turkey and she began to search about my family, family's address, and she find my mother at the time. And for the first time, Diab mother's told my mother that I am alive. And my family, now, they can go and see me.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Today, despite living in different countries, Riyad and Diab are best friends and co-workers at ADMSP. Their dark ordeal with the Syrian intelligence darkness created a strong bond that stood the test of time.

DIAB SERRIH Nowadays, my kids tell me that Riyad is my brother. "Riyad is your brother, baba. Baba, you have a brother. His name is Riyad."

And I tell them, "Yes. Riyad is my brother, even though he's not my brother by blood."

For educational reasons, I was trying to explain the difference between a brother and a friend. But even my kids loved him that much. And now, this is our lives.

NADIA AL-BUKAI Riyad and Diab are now replicating what they did to each other to help the families of other detainees locate their missing loved ones. Their organisation, ADMSP today plays a pivotal role in informing the families of the detainees about the fate of their children. They do their best to locate the people who remain missing in Assad's network of prisons, in so-called safe and stable Syria.

But Riyad and Diab's story with Sednaya hasn't ended yet. In the next five episodes of this podcast, we will explore the transformation of Sednaya. We will understand how the regime has used Sednaya to control the population and supress the 2011 revolution. We will hear about the families searching for the loved ones and we will hear from a witness, in detail, about what happened in Sednaya.

Next week on Behind the Sun, we go through the events that transformed Sednaya from an ordinary prison to a human slaughterhouse.

Behind the Sun is a co-production of Message Heard and The Syria Campaign, in collaboration with ADMSP and the Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre, as part of its On the Margins No More project. It's written and produced by Muhammad Farouk.

Thank you to Ranim, Ola, Sarah, and Ruairi from The Syria Campaign and to Rahaf from ADMSP for helping put this series together.

Additional thank to Mahmoud Nowara for the voiceover and Jakub Otajovič for the support they presented for the project.

Editing, mixing, and sound design was done by Jarek Zaba. Additional production support from Molly Freeman and Tom Biddle. Sandra Ferrari is the executive producer. The theme music is by Milo Evans. My name is Nadia al-Bukai.

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S1 E0 - Trailer

Behind The Sun

Season 1 Trailer

NADIA AL-BUKAI In Syria and other countries in the Middle East, "behind the sun" is a term that strikes fear in the hearts and minds of many. People say it when they speak about someone who has disappeared, usually under suspicious or forced circumstances. Often, regime henchmen say this phrase to emphasise their ability to hide people without a trace. They have been known to tell whoever they were arresting, "We are gonna take you behind the sun, and the blue flies will never know where you are."

To disappear behind the sun means to live in the darkness and to be banished from life without actually dying. And those outside are left confused and uncertain about the fates of their loved ones.

GHUFRAN In Syria, you don't know if your detainee is still alive or dead.

NADIA AL-BUKAI My name is Nadia al-Bukai. My family and I left Syria six years ago out of fear of my father's own persecution. In this new podcast series called Behind the Sun, produced by Message Heard, we're going to tell you a story not many outside of Syria know.

In this six-part journey, you'll be hearing from people who were and still are part of the very real and ongoing horrors in Syria.

NOOR Of course, the fear actually paralyse. Paralyse your body, your thoughts, your everything.

NADIA AL-BUKAI But outside of that, these are also stories of friendships forged in the darkest of circumstances, stories of those who survived against the odds. And more, this is the story of two men fighting for everyone left behind.

DIAB SERRIH Nowadays, my kids tell me that Riyad is my brother.

NADIA AL-BUKAI The first and second episodes of "Behind the Sun" will be released April 19th, and a new episode each Tuesday after that.

This podcast was co-produced by The Syria Campaign, in collaboration with the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison and The Syria Justice and Accountability Centre.

Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts.

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