GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Syrian safety officers hung Muhannad Ghabbash from his wrists for hours, beat him bloody, stunned him with electricity and caught a gun in his mouth.
Ghabbash, a legislations scholar from Aleppo, many times confessed his precise offense: organizing peaceful anti-executive protests. however the torture continued for 12 days, until he wrote a fictional confession to planning a bombing.
That, he noted, was just the beginning.
He changed into flown to a filled detention center at Mezze air base in Damascus, the Syrian capital, the place he referred to guards hung him and different detainees from a fence bare, spraying them with water on cold nights. To entertain colleagues over dinner, he and other survivors spoke of, an officer calling himself Hitler forced prisoners to act the roles of canines, donkeys and cats, beating people who did not bark or bray correctly.
In a militia sanatorium, he mentioned, he watched a nurse bash the face of an amputee who begged for painkillers. In yet one more penitentiary, he counted 19 cellmates who died from disease, torture and forget about in a single month.
"i was among the many lucky," observed Ghabbash, 31, who survived 19 months in detention until a choose become bribed to free him.
As Syria's president, Bashar Assad, closes in on victory over an eight-year rebel, a secret, industrial-scale system of arbitrary arrests and torture prisons has been pivotal to his success. while the Syrian military, backed by Russia and Iran, fought armed rebels for territory, the govt waged a ruthless conflict on civilians, throwing lots of of lots into filthy dungeons the place lots had been tortured and killed.
practically 128,000 have under no circumstances emerged, and are presumed to be both useless or still in custody, in keeping with the Syrian community for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group that keeps probably the most rigorous tally. well-nigh 14,000 had been "killed under torture." Many prisoners die from circumstances so dire that a U.N. investigation labeled the method "extermination."
Now, even because the warfare winds down, the realm's consideration fades and nations delivery to normalize members of the family with Syria, the pace of recent arrests, torture and execution is expanding. The numbers peaked within the battle's bloodiest early years, however ultimate year the Syrian community recorded 5,607 new arrests that it classifies as arbitrary — greater than 100 per week and almost 25% greater than the yr before.
Detainees have these days smuggled out warnings that a whole bunch are being sent to an execution site, Saydnaya penitentiary, and newly launched prisoners report that killings there are accelerating.
Kidnappings and killings via the Islamic State captured more consideration within the West, however the Syrian penitentiary system has vacuumed up many more instances the number of individuals detained by using the extremist group in Syria. government detention bills for around ninety% of the disappearances tallied by means of the Syrian community.
The Syrian executive has denied the existence of systematic abuse.
although, newly discovered govt memos exhibit that Syrian officers who document at once to Assad ordered mass detentions and knew of atrocities.
warfare crimes investigators with the nonprofit commission for overseas Justice and Accountability, or CIJA, have found executive memos ordering crackdowns and discussing deaths in detention. The memos have been signed by means of appropriate security officers, including individuals of the crucial crisis management Committee, which reports without delay to Assad.
A military intelligence memo acknowledges deaths from torture and filthy situations. different memos record deaths of detainees, some later identified among photographs of heaps of prisoner corpses smuggled out via a defense force police defector. Two memos authorize "harsh" medicine of selected detainees.
A memo from the pinnacle of defense force intelligence, Rafiq Shehadeh, suggests that officers feared future prosecution: It orders officers to record all deaths to him and take steps to make certain "judicial immunity" for safety officers.
In an interview in his workplace in an Ottoman palace in Damascus in 2016, Assad solid doubt on the truthfulness of survivors and the families of the missing. asked about specific instances, he said, "Are you talking allegations or concrete?" and advised that family had lied once they talked about they saw safety officers haul away spouse and children.
Any abuses, he talked about, were isolated mistakes unavoidable in a struggle. "It came about here, all over the area, anywhere," he has observed. "nonetheless it's not a coverage."
Over seven years, The manhattan instances has interviewed dozens of survivors and spouse and children of dead and missing detainees, reviewed govt documents detailing penitentiary deaths and crackdowns on dissent, and examined a whole bunch of pages of witness testimony in human rights reports and courtroom filings. The survivors' debts suggested right here align with accounts from other prisoners held within the same jails, and are supported by means of the govt memos and via pictures smuggled out of Syrian prisons.
The detention center gadget became fundamental to Assad's battle effort, crushing the civil protest circulation and driving the opposition into an armed conflict it couldn't win.
In fresh months, Syria's executive has tacitly acknowledged that a whole lot of individuals have died in detention. under power from Moscow, Damascus has verified the deaths of at least a few hundred americans in custody by way of issuing dying certificates or checklist them as lifeless in family registration files. The Syrian community's founder, Fadel Abdul Ghany, referred to the move sent citizens a transparent message: "We gained, we did this, and no person will punish us."
there's little hope for retaining correct officers accountable each time soon. however there is a starting to be circulate to searching for justice through European courts. French and German prosecutors have arrested three former safety officials and issued foreign arrest warrants for Syria's national safety chief, Ali Mamlouk; its air drive intelligence director, Jamil Hassan; and others for torture and deaths in penal complex of residents or residents of these countries.
Yet Assad and his lieutenants continue to be in vigour, protected from arrest, included via Russia with its defense force may and its veto in the U.N. protection Council. on the identical time, Arab states are restoring members of the family with Damascus and European countries are on the grounds that following go well with. President Donald Trump's planned pullout of lots of the 2,000 U.S. troops in eastern Syria reduces already-minimal U.S. leverage in the conflict, now in its ninth 12 months.
That impunity is not only a home Syrian issue. without security reforms, the 5 million Syrian refugees in the core East and Europe are not going to come back home to chance arbitrary arrest. And in an age of emboldened authoritarianism from the eu far appropriate to Saudi Arabia, Assad has established that maximum violence towards civilian dissent will also be a profitable approach.
"this could now not live in Syria," Mazen Darwish, a Syrian human rights lawyer, talked about in Berlin, where he has assisted prosecutors. "individuals forget what's dictatorship, because we've 70 years of peace after World struggle II. however human rights is not in the DNA of states or politicians."
"Justice isn't a Syrian luxurious," he talked about. "It's the realm's issue."
An increasing gulag
The Syrian detention gadget is a supersized version of the one built by Assad's father, President Hafez Assad. In 1982, he crushed an armed Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama, leveling lots of the metropolis and arresting tens of thousands of individuals: Islamists, leftist dissidents and random Syrians.
Over two many years, around 17,000 detainees disappeared into a equipment with a torture repertoire that borrowed from French colonialists, regional dictators and even Nazis: Its security advisers protected Adolf Eichmann's fugitive aide Alois Brunner.
When Bashar Assad succeeded his father in 2000, he stored the detention equipment in location.
each and every of Syria's four intelligence groups — armed forces, political, air force and state safety — has native branches throughout Syria. Most have their personal jails. CIJA has documented lots of of them.
It turned into the detention and torture of several teens in March 2011, for scrawling graffiti important of Assad, that pushed Syrians to join the uprisings then sweeping Arab nations. Demonstrations protesting their remedy unfold from their hometown, Daraa, leading to extra arrests, which galvanized more protests.
A flood of detainees from all over the place Syria joined the current dissidents at Saydnaya reformatory. the brand new detainees ranged "from the garbageman to the peasant to the engineer to the medical professional, all courses of Syrians," observed Riyad Avlar, a Turkish citizen who became held for 20 years after being arrested in 1996, as a 19-yr-ancient student, for interviewing Syrians about a prison bloodbath.
Torture expanded, he spoke of; the newbies have been sexually assaulted, crushed on the genitals, and forced to beat and even kill one one more.
no person knows precisely what number of Syrians have handed through the system when you consider that; rights businesses estimate lots of of hundreds to a million. Damascus does not unencumber detention center records.
via all accounts, the gadget overflowed. Some political detainees landed in standard prisons. security forces and pro-executive militias created uncounted makeshift dungeons at schools, stadiums, workplaces, militia bases and checkpoints.
The Syrian community's tally of 127,916 americans presently caught within the gadget is likely an undercount. The number, a count of arrests said with the aid of detainees' families and different witnesses, doesn't consist of individuals later released or demonstrated dead.
on account of government secrecy, no person is aware of how many have died in custody, however hundreds of deaths were recorded in memos and photographs.
A former militia police officer, regular only as Caesar to give protection to his security, had the job of photographing corpses. He fled Syria with images of at the least 6,700 corpses, bone-thin and battered, which bowled over the area when they emerged in 2014.
but he additionally photographed memos on his boss' desk reporting deaths to superiors.
like the loss of life certificates issued recently, the memos list the explanation for loss of life as "cardiac arrest." One memo identifies a detainee who additionally looks in a single of Caesar's pictures; his eye is gouged out.
The prisons appear to have been hit with an uncanny epidemic of heart sickness, spoke of Darwish, the human rights lawyer. "Of direction, after they die, their heart stops," he spoke of.
A tour of torture
Ghabbash, the protest organizer from Aleppo, survived torture at at least 12 facilities, making him, he says, "a tour e-book" to the equipment. His odyssey started in 2011, when he was 22. The oldest son of a govt constructing contractor, he was inspired with the aid of peaceable protests in the Damascus suburb of Darayya to organize demonstrations in Aleppo.
He become arrested in June 2011, and launched after pledging to cease protesting.
"I didn't stop," he recalled with a smile.
In August, he become arrested again — the identical week that, a memo from CIJA suggests, Assad's precise officers ordered a tougher crackdown, criticizing provincial authorities' "laxness" and calling for extra arrests of "those that are inciting people to reveal."
Ghabbash became hung up, overwhelmed and whipped in a string of armed forces and usual intelligence facilities, he noted. His captors eventually let him go with a stern recommendation given to many an identical youths: leave the nation.
whilst they launched Saydnaya detention center's most radical long-time period prisoners, Islamists who would later lead riot organizations, they aimed to eliminate civilian opposition. both moves, critics say, seem to have been part of a strategy to shift the uprising to the battlefield, the place Assad and his allies loved a militia knowledge.
With like-minded civilians fleeing or jailed, and protection forces firing on protesters, Ghabbash struggled to dissuade allies from taking up arms and playing into the executive's arms.
quickly he was arrested a 3rd time, through air drive intelligence in Aleppo. What struck him most become interrogators' surreal insistence on some trappings of judicial process. They accused him of an apparently fictional bombing on a date earlier than any rebel bombs hit Aleppo. despite having the energy to can charge him as they liked, they insisted that he confess.
on occasion he was stuffed right into a tire for the beatings. He would circulate out, awaken naked in a freezing hallway after which the beatings would delivery again. One officer put a gun into his mouth; another insisted that a girl screaming out of sight was his mother.
His account intently fits those of others held in the facility, and a few described worse. One survivor, who requested to be recognized simplest as Khalil okay. to give protection to family nevertheless in Syria, watched a young person take 21 days to die after interrogators doused him with gas and set him alight.
"Between me and my judgment of right and wrong, I don't want to confess something I haven't done," Ghabbash recalled. "5 americans asking questions without delay. You're bloodless, you're thirsty, lips full of blood, you could't center of attention. everyone is screaming, hitting."
He saved toenails they pulled out, and strips of epidermis that peeled from his beaten soles. He put them in his pocket, dreaming of showing a judge. but then sooner or later they took his pants.
On the twelfth day he wrote a confession.
"Make it convincing," a Capt. Maher advised him. "there is someone who drove you. think about how he appears. Tall, short, fats?"
Ghabbash settled on a silver automobile and "a tall man, with glasses and lightweight hair."
"I began to think my ability in writing," he referred to.
Surreal punishment
In March 2012, Ghabbash changed into flown to Mezze defense force air base, named for a well-off Damascus regional neighborhood.
by way of then, he and numerous survivors talked about, there was an industrial-scale transportation gadget among prisons. Detainees had been tortured on every leg of their journeys, in helicopters, buses, cargo planes. Some recalled riding for hours in vans constantly used for animal carcasses, placing by using one arm, chained to meat hooks. Ghabbash's new cell turned into commonplace: 12 feet long, 9 toes vast, always packed so tightly that prisoners had to sleep in shifts.
backyard the cellphone, a person become blindfolded and handcuffed in the corridor. It was Darwish, the human rights lawyer. He had been singled out for lecturing a decide on Syrian laws guaranteeing fair trials.
He later ticked off his punishment: "bare, no water, no sleep, pressured to drink my pee."
penal complex torture grew more brutal and baroque as rebels outdoor made advances and government warplanes bombed restive neighborhoods. Survivors describe sadistic medication, rape, summary executions or detainees left to die of untreated wounds and illnesses.
Ghabbash soon obtained his personal special punishment. He turned into interrogated through a person calling himself Suhail Hassan — possibly Suhail Hassan Zamam, who headed air force prisons, according to a leaked executive database — who asked how Ghabbash would remedy the battle.
"actual elections," he recalled replying. "The people simply desired some reforms, but you used force. The problem is either we need to be with you or you kill us."
That gained him a month of extra torture, the most bizarre in his ordeal.
A take care of who called himself Hitler would prepare sadistic dinner leisure for his colleagues. He brought arak and water pipes, Ghabbash spoke of, "to put together the ambience." He made some prisoners kneel, becoming tables or chairs. Others performed animals. "Hitler" bolstered stage directions with beatings.
"The dog has to bark, the cat meow, the hen crow," Ghabbash noted. "Hitler tries to tame them. When he pets one dog, the other dog should act jealous."
The viewers also included prisoners, in regional cells or putting blindfolded on neighborhood chain-hyperlink fences, who verified the account. Some guards made these striking beg, "grasp, I'm thirsty," then sprayed them with hoses, Ghabbash talked about.
After weeks or months, many prisoners bought so-called trials lasting minutes with no defense attorneys. Ghabbash's changed into general. At a militia "field court" in 2012, he heard a judge rattle off his conviction, "terrorism that destroyed public property," and his sentence: dying.
"The whole trial turned into 1 1/2 minutes," he stated.
He expected to move to Saydnaya prison, which by then changed into a mass execution middle. thousands have been hanged there after summary trials, in keeping with an Amnesty international file.
"good, it's comprehensive," he recalled considering. but it was no longer. He would suffer an extra yr of day by day beatings.
His remaining stint was in a makeshift jail deep underground near Damascus, a defense force bunker of the elite 4th Division, a fief of Assad's brother Maher. Survivors recall officers with the unit's insignia journeying and seeing the conditions. but air drive intelligence ran operations there after Mezze detention center overflowed, in line with survivors and CIJA's info.
there have been no extra interrogations.
"Torture just for torture," observed Darwish, who was also transferred there. "For revenge, for killing, for breaking the americans."
Survivors tell these studies with black humor, if simplest because others suffered worse.
"good enough, i used to be overwhelmed, I played a dog," Ghabbash talked about. "but some americans were killed or raped."
Rape and assault
girls and women had been raped and sexually assaulted in as a minimum 20 intelligence branches, and guys and boys in 15 of those, a U.N. human rights fee reported last year.
Sexual assault is a double-barreled weapon in ordinary Muslim communities, the place survivors are sometimes stigmatized. household have killed feminine ex-detainees in honor killings, now and again only on the belief they have got been raped, rights stories and survivors say.
Mariam Khleif, a 32-year-historical mom of five from Hama, was many times raped all the way through her detention. Khleif referred to she had aided injured protesters and delivered clinical supplies to rebels, acts that the govt labeled terrorism.
In September 2012, she said, safety officers dragged her from her residence. At state security's branch 320 in Hama, she pointed out, the investigation chief added himself as Col. Suleiman. CIJA's archives reveal that Khleif become detained and that a Col. Suleiman Juma headed the Hama department.
"He became eating pistachios," she recalled later in her sparse house in Reyhanli, Turkey. "He spat the shells at us. He left no soiled word unused."
A three-foot-rectangular basement telephone held her and six different girls. Guards hung her from walls and beat her, knocking out teeth. She noticed them drag a prisoner complaining of hunger to a toilet and stuff his mouth with excrement, a technique recalled by other survivors.
"at nighttime," she pointed out, "they might take the pleasing ladies to Col. Suleiman to rape. I be aware Col. Suleiman and his eco-friendly eyes."
Khleif identified the colonel in images of a security officer's funeral. Then she broke down.
The colonel and pals — men in tracksuits — assaulted the girls on a bed in a room adjoining his office, embellished with Assad's picture, she mentioned. They splashed arak on the victims, a further insult to Muslims who abstained from alcohol.
The ladies's cell had no bathroom. Blood from violent rapes stained the floor. One cellmate miscarried. by the time Khleif's cousin made a deal to free up her a month later, Khleif said, she had misplaced a 3rd of her weight. She later fled to insurrection territory as a medic.
an additional female survivor separately advised CIJA's investigators that she had been raped with the aid of the colonel the equal month in the same penitentiary. The details carefully tracked Khleif's account.
Even girls who have been now not raped pronounced groping, sexual insults, threats of rape to extract confessions, and cavity "searches."
in one Damascus facility, a number of survivors referred to one by one, the chief investigator reserved for himself the job of digitally penetrating them. They referred to as him Sharshabeel, the Arabic identify for the evil wizard in "The Smurfs." One, who covers her head, said he stroked her hair and naked body all over interrogation, particulars she stored from her family.
Khleif's household rejected her over what they regarded her loss of honor and her politics, she referred to. Her professional-executive brother texted dying threats; her husband divorced her.
For some conservative guys, the battle changed attitudes. a couple of survivors and male relatives say their families now honor sexual assault survivors as struggle wounded. Khleif hid nothing from her new husband, a former riot.
"you are a medal on my chest, you are the crown on my head," she recalled him telling her. "He cooked for me, massaged my face with oil. He made me my ancient self."
an infection, rotten food
Torture aside, unhealthy detention conditions are so intense and systemic that a U.N. document pointed out they amounted to extermination, a criminal offense in opposition t humanity.
Many cells lack bathrooms, former prisoners stated. Prisoners get seconds per day in latrines, they noted; with rampant diarrhea and urinary infections, they relieve themselves in crowded cells. Most meals are just a few bites of rotten, soiled meals. Some prisoners die from sheer psychological crumple. Most medication is withheld, injuries left untreated.
Mounir Fakir is 39, but after his ordeal in Mezze, Saydnaya and in other places, he appears at least a decade older. A veteran dissident, he mentioned he changed into arrested on his way to a gathering of the nonviolent opposition. before-and-after photographs display the toll: A hefty man, he turned into launched so emaciated that his wife did not recognize him.
In Saydnaya, bloodless turned into the punishment for talking or "snoozing devoid of permission," Fakir recalled over tea in an Istanbul cafe. once for greater than a month, all of his cellmates' blankets and garments have been confiscated; they slept bare in freezing temperatures. sometimes, he referred to, they had been denied water. They tried to clean themselves via scrubbing their skin with sand that ants unearthed from flooring cracks.
The day we met, Fakir become marking the anniversary of the loss of life of a cellmate felled by means of an untreated enamel an infection, his jaw swollen practically to the size of "one other head."
Yet "medicine" can also be lethal. Torture and homicide take region in hospitals where, on different wings, dignitaries talk over with wounded officers, in accordance with Fakir, other survivors and defectors.
Fakir changed into taken twice to defense force hospital 601, a colonial-period building with excessive ceilings and views of Damascus. Up to six prisoners had been chained bare to each mattress.
"every so often one dies and it becomes much less," he noted. "now and again we want him to die, to take his clothing."
once, he pointed out, he watched body of workers withhold insulin from a diabetic — a 20-yr-old waiter — unless he died.
Many nights, a man who doubled as a nurse and a guard and referred to as himself Azrael — the angel of death — would take a patient in the back of a frosted-glass door.
"We'd see the shadow of someone hitting, we'd hear the scream, then silence — suffocating silence," Fakir said. "in the morning we'd see the body in the hallway to the bathroom. you would see our bodies piled. We stepped on our comrades' bodies, barefoot."
Ghabbash remembers "Azrael," too. He turned into taken to the same clinic with an infection that left a deep scar on his leg. in the evening, he heard an amputee groan for painkillers, and a man answer, "I'll make you comfortable."
Pretending to sleep, Ghabbash squinted because the man raised a metal-tipped baton, declared, "i'm Azrael," and smashed the affected person's face to a bloody pulp. Ghabbash noted he changed into compelled to elevate the corpse to a hallway bathing room. Two our bodies were already internal.
Fakir observed fellow prisoners had told him of carrying our bodies first to the rest room, then to a sanatorium parking area, a site the place Caesar photographed corpses.
"americans didn't agree with me," he stated. "Then Caesar's photos came out."
A survivor of yet another detention center, Omar Alshogre, mentioned he had been ordered to write down numbers on corpses' foreheads, as considered in Caesar's photographs. however as corpses piled up and decomposed, he spoke of, he needed to write on paper and shovel out bodies in items.
government memos bought by CIJA display that the head of defense force intelligence, a member of the countrywide protection Bureau that stories to Assad, knew of rising penal complex deaths.
One memo, from December 2012, stated raises in detainees' deaths and corpses piling up and decomposing in hospitals. It ordered officers to inform the company's head of how they'd died and what that they had confessed — preferably phrased to give protection to officers from liability below "any judicial authority in the future."
a different memo a 12 months later confirmed that deaths have been nevertheless rising. "it's integral to take care of cleanliness and hygiene and detainees' health," it says, to "hold lives and cut back deaths which have significantly risen currently."
The memo complained of a scarcity of interrogators. close the conclusion of an extended record of "error," together with late bureaucracy, it brought "beating and torture of detainees."
"It seems like they're telling americans to behave properly," talked about Nerma Jelajic, CIJA's spokeswoman, "but we recognize the context."
CIJA's documents reveal that officers were punished for offenses like "not following orders," she pointed out.
not one mentions any one disciplined for torture.
Names written in blood
Detainees and defectors have risked their lives to tell their families, and the area, of their plight.
within the 4th Division dungeon, several detainees determined to smuggle out the names of every prisoner they may identify.
"even though we're three reports underground, nevertheless we are able to proceed our work," recalled one, Mansour Omari, who stated he changed into imprisoned for human rights work.
a different detainee, Nabil Shurbaji — a journalist who, with the aid of coincidence, was the primary to inspire Ghabbash to activism in 2011 and later shared his mobilephone in Mezze — tried to write down on material scraps with tomato paste. Too faint. Shurbaji at last used the detainees' own blood, from their malnourished gums, combined with rust. A detained tailor sewed the scraps into Omari's shirt. He made it out.
The message in blood reached Western capitals; the shirt scraps had been displayed on the Holocaust Museum in Washington. however Shurbaji turned into still interior.
"Fatigue unfold on the pores of my face," he wrote his fiancee all the way through a quick respite in a prison that allowed letters. "I are attempting to snigger however combined with heartbreak, so I cling on to endurance and to you."
Two years later, a released detainee reported that Shurbaji had been overwhelmed to loss of life.
'Don't neglect Us'
In Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Germany, France, Sweden and beyond, families and survivors push on.
After he become freed in 2013, Ghabbash landed in Gaziantep, Turkey, the place he runs girls's rights and aid courses for refugees in the ultimate patch of insurrection-held Syria.
Khleif works at a refugee college and to empower other female survivors. Fakir, whose wife's cooking has replenished his chubby cheeks, has joined a form of alumni affiliation for Saydnaya reformatory survivors who support one one other document their experiences, navigate trauma and find work.
Darwish struggles with insomnia and claustrophobia but continues his work for accountability. He recently testified about Mezze reformatory in a French courtroom hearing within the case of a Syrian-French father and son who died there — a college pupil and a instructor at a French college in Damascus. That helped French prosecutors relaxed arrest warrants for Mamlouk, the properly security legit, Hassan, the air force intelligence chief, and the head of Mezze penitentiary. Now, Mamlouk may be arrested if he travels to Europe.
The threat of prosecution, Darwish talked about, is the only device left to retailer detainees.
"It gives you energy, nonetheless it's a heavy accountability," he talked about. "This may save a soul. Some are my friends. When i was released they spoke of, 'Please don't neglect us.'"
closing year, the U.N. universal meeting voted to create and finance a brand new physique, the overseas impartial and neutral Mechanism, to centralize education of struggle-crimes cases. however the physique doesn't have the muscle to enforce, can charge or arrest.
Syria's warfare remains and not using a political answer. With peace talks stalled, Russia is urging the West to normalize and finance reconstruction anyway, deferring reforms.
A Syrian briefed at high tiers on the govt's battle effort, not recognized for his protection, noted recently that there became no opportunity of reforms to make safety organizations recognize human rights. At most, he mentioned, Russia could make the detention apparatus greater effective.
The millions of household of missing detainees drift in a social and psychological limbo. with out loss of life certificates, presumed widows can't remarry. babies can not inherit.
Fadwa Mahmoud, who now lives in Berlin, has no conception whether her husband, Abdelaziz al-Khair, is alive.
Six years ago, al-Khair, a prominent dissident, flew to Damascus from abroad, with security ensures, for talks between the executive and the nonviolent opposition. Mahmoud's son went to pick him up. They under no circumstances made it out of the airport, which is controlled with the aid of air force intelligence. They haven't been heard from considering that.
"We don't have the right to get depressed," Mahmoud said, crocheting a blanket in her living room. "We need to preserve going."
in the corner stood a pile of blankets: lavender, yellow, baby blue. It is still becoming. She imagines her husband cold in penal complex. She is making them for him.
This story was firstly posted at nytimes.com. read it here.
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