NP: Syria, part 2

[jody2.718]

How did you decide to turn all this reporting from over seven years, as the piece says, into one giant story?

Over the years, the pivotal importance of the detention system and rampant torture and even the fear of the detention—the pivotal role that that whole complex played in the trajectory and outcome of the war—became more and more clear. We had spent years covering the things that were happening more out in the open—I’m talking about the barrel bombs, the artillery attacks on neighborhoods, the war planes bombing neighborhoods, the attacks on medical facilities. All those things were, when they started to happen, in a way more newsy than the prisons, because the prisons had existed for decades before the civil war even began, before the political protests even began. These prisons are a reason why there was an uprising, and they were also the pivotal tool for suppressing that uprising.

I just continued to believe, the more it took shape in my mind, that this had actually been a pivotal factor in the outcome of the conflict, and the more we talked to hundreds of Syrians in the course of our work, we understood that almost every Syrian seemed to have somebody who was lost inside this system. So the scale, as well as the intensity of it.

Assad’s regime has always been a dictatorship, as was the regime of his father. How rampant was torture before the civil war began, in 2011? You write that Assad kept his father’s system of detention in place. But did it grow just in that there were more and more people thrown into prisons, or did the way the prisons operate change as well over these years?

It’s more the former than the latter. We have the account of a guy who had been in prison for almost twenty years when the uprising started, so he commented on how it changed. There was a much bigger flood of people coming to the prisons, and they were no longer just the long-term, hardcore dissidents that he described as almost élite political prisoners, like a club. All of a sudden, the prisons started getting completely packed with every kind of Syrian, he said, from the professor to the doctor to the garbage man. Because there was this much bigger scale of roundups going on.

And he said, at the same time, the torture became worse. Torture became more intense and chaotic and sadistic. And that account is echoed by others who were in the prisons at that period.

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