With overthrow of Assad regime, Syrian Canadian recalls 20 years of ‘torment’ inside its prisons

WARNING: This story includes graphic descriptions of torture.

Nabil Hawara painfully remembers the endless cycle of torture that he endured in one of Syria’s most notorious prisons.

For 20 years, from 1975 to 1995, he says he lived in constant fear of death and torment — from being beaten with iron bars and whips each day to guards urinating in food bowls or jumping on his back, ultimately rupturing a lung.

Hawara, who didn’t know if he would ever make it out alive from the four walls of his cell in Tadmur Military Prison in Palmyra, in the deserts of eastern Syria, ultimately fled the country for Canada as a refugee.

The prison, which held mass executions and what Hawara calls an around-the-clock “torture program,” was mere metres away from a high school and a playground — and children were too afraid to say anything or even look at the facility. ISIS, militants fighting to establish an Islamist state, blew up the prison in May 2015 when it was empty, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, although there are varying reports on how much damage was caused.

Unlike many of the Syrian regime’s other prisons and detention facilities, Tadmur’s walled-off military complex was built into the ancient city, where it was in plain sight, visible to everyone.

When detainees were being tortured at the hands of prison guards, they would hear the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, from the mosque nearby, or at times children walking by or playing, Hawara said.

“Every day was a journey of torment. We didn’t know if we would survive to see the next day,” Hawara, now 70, told CBC News in an interview.

In 2015, a Syrian opposition activist from Palmyra told The Associated Press that people would pass by the prison, but no one dared look inside.

Syria’s vast network of prisons and detention facilities continues to unravel following the fall of the deposed Assad regime on Dec. 8, nearly 14 years after Syrians took to the streets in peaceful protests against a government that met them with violence.

Prisoners who had been arbitrarily detained were released after years or even decades, but hundreds of thousands remain missing, bringing to light how former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his father, who began the family’s half-century rule, governed the country with an iron fist — through forcibly disappearing, torturing and executing anyone accused of opposing the government or even offering humanitarian aid to Syrians.

5 minutes becomes 20 years

After the Syrian revolution erupted in 2011, Hawara, fearing persecution, applied for asylum in Canada in 2013, eventually settling in Montreal with his wife and three children — a twin son and daughter, 27, and a 25-year-old son. They are now Canadian citizens.

He remembers the night he was detained like it was yesterday. On July 7, 1975, Hawara was studying for an exam as a second-year mechanical engineering student at the University of Damascus. That night, military secret police came to his family’s home in Damascus, the Syrian capital, detained him and searched the premises.

“They told me they just needed to speak to me for five minutes and I could go back,” said Hawara, who was detained at the age of 20 and released at 40. “I thought to myself, ‘They must have made a mistake in names. In the morning they will release me so I can go do my exam.'”

He said he was accused of being involved in the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that wanted to topple the regime, but noted that officers later told him they were aware he had no part in the group and even declined an invitation to join by another university student.

After that night, Hawara went on to be transferred to three different prisons, briefly being released for a month after three years behind bars, before he was detained again — spending 15 of the 20 years he was imprisoned in Tadmur.

For 15 years, his family was unaware if he was dead or alive and had no information on his whereabouts. Family members also died while he was detained.

Hawara said he recalls the first day he entered Tadmur in 1980 and being introduced to what were dubbed “welcome parties” — where inmates were brought into the prison courtyard together and underwent severe torture before being taken to their dormitories or group cells. The cells held anywhere from 75 to 200 inmates, who all shared one bathroom and slept either sitting or lying head to toe because of the cramped space.

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Each morning and evening, prison guards would take the inmates, blindfolded and with their hands tied, and chase them around the courtyard and beat them one by one, he said.

“Until the day I was released, torture did not stop once, not even for a day,” Hawara said. “Torture was constant, and death was daily.”

Prison designed to inflict ‘maximum suffering’: report

A 2001 Amnesty International report, titled Syria: Torture, Despair and Dehumanization in Tadmur Military Prison, documented routine abuses against prisoners, including the use of iron bars, whips and cables.

The report said the major prison complex appears to have been designed to “inflict the maximum suffering, humiliation and fear on prisoners and to keep them under the strictest control by breaking their spirit.”

Human Rights Watch also found evidence of widespread torture, starvation, beatings and disease in the government’s detention facilities.

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For food, each prisoner received pita bread, several olives and a teaspoon of marmalade a day, and would usually have to split one egg among five people, Hawara said. At times, he said, prisoners peering through a small crack between the door and the wall would see guards urinate in the food outside of the cell before it was given to inmates, who would then refuse to eat it.

After eating, the prisoners would be taken out by guards for “breathing,” he said. The inmates had to face the ground any time they were outside of their cell or with an officer.

“We are always kneeling down, with our eyes closed,” Hawara said, adding that the guards’ goal was to break the inmates down physically and psychologically.

That’s when the torture would resume once again, he said, and inmates would be chased by guards, who would pull and beat them.

Mass executions every month

Guards would also sometimes hit prisoners with a stick that had a wooden ball at the end covered in nails. “They would scream, ‘Watermelon is red,’ before hitting us in the head with them, making us bleed,” Hawara said.

Other days, guards would use belts made from tires with metal inside to beat detainees.

“It’s very rough, and inside there’s metal,” he said. “So they would hit you and your body would turn blue. And when they would pull the tracks, the flesh would open up and bleed out.”

At night, using the toilet was not allowed, Hawara said, but inmates would sometimes manage to sneak in and use it without notice — only adding to the suffering they would experience.

Hawara said inmates who didn’t die by execution would die of torture, diseases, no access to appropriate medication or lack of food.

“Every single day, we’re prone to breaking a part of our body or to death or to tuberculosis or to a lack of medicine,” he said. “If we manage to avoid the physical torture, we would experience torture from the sounds [of others] or from threats.”

The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), an independent monitoring group based in Britain, said that as of August this year, 15,102 people had been tortured to death by the Assad regime after the onset of the Syrian revolution, between March 2011 and July 2024.

Mass executions of about 100 to 150 people took place monthly, Hawara said. He could hear the sound of bulldozers outside of the prison at night, hours before the names of those who would be executed that day were announced — either by gunshot or hanging.

Hawara said that while others from different religions or sects were also detained, Sunni Muslims like himself, who comprise a majority of Syria’s population, were a majority in Tadmur prison.

The rebels who overthrew the Syrian regime earlier this month are Sunnis, while the Assad family are Alawite, a minority sect that made up most of the regime’s military and political elite.

‘Either you execute me or you release me’

In 1995, after spending half his life at that point locked up and tortured, Hawara said he faced a committee of prison officials who asked him whether he should be released.

“Either you execute me or you release me, I’m not going back to prison,” he recalled saying, kneeling down with his eyes shut. Several months later, he was released and allowed to return to his family.

When he was first imprisoned, 50 other men were detained along with him. When he was released, he was one of just five who emerged alive.

Although Hawara was set free after spending 20 years in prison, he describes being psychologically imprisoned in the years that followed — fearing he would be taken back by military police, or worse, that his family would face the same fate.

In addition to being under surveillance by intelligence officers and having to report back to regime authorities every month, he had no right to work, to marry or to have children for several years after.

“People were afraid of me, and no one would want to talk to me out of fear,” he said.

To this day, Hawara said he still feels the effects of the torture he endured in prison, with deteriorating health issues and torture marks on his back. He said he’s unable to sleep on his back or stomach and has lung issues due to cracks in his back and chest, after he was ordered to lie on the ground as a soldier stood on top of him, jumping on his back in military boots.

Almost every Syrian (including this reporter) has either direct experience or knows of a friend or relative who spent time in prison under the Assad regime.

Between March 2011 and August 2024, at least 113,218 people were forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime, and more than 157,000 have been arbitrarily detained, according to SNHR data. Data on decades before the Syrian revolution, or under Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, is not available.

After his release, Hawara eventually enrolled in a private school, where he was able to finish his mechanical engineering degree.

Following the ouster of Assad two weeks ago, Hawara said he now feels there is hope for Syria, adding that security, dignity and freedom are three of the most important elements of justice after decades of oppression endured by Syrians.

“The Syrian people who came out, every single one of them has experienced having a father or a mother or siblings or a whole family imprisoned,” he said. “This is a population that has been oppressed.”