Enab Baladi- Christina al-Shammas | Marwan al-Mudhe
The story of enforced detention does not end when a cell door opens or when someone steps back into freedom. It is often the beginning of a harsher, more complex stage, facing memory and an exhausted body without support or care.
Former detainees in the prisons of the Assad regime, and their families, emerged from a brutal experience carrying deep psychological and health scars. At a time when they should have found at least minimal support, many instead found themselves alone in confronting trauma.
Years of detention were not merely a loss of freedom. They were a systematic process of destroying the mind and the body, using torture, humiliation, and isolation, with no humane or medical standards. After release, the picture did not change much. Survivors ran into a “deadly” void and an almost total absence of psychological support or health rehabilitation programs, whether from official bodies or humanitarian organizations.
In this report, Enab Baladi documents testimonies from former detainees and from families of the missing, revealing the scale of ongoing suffering after prison and highlighting the neglect that worsened the impact of the experience and kept the wound open to this day.
Memories of torture and absence of care
Ahmad al-Akram, an engineer in his mid-30s, spent three years in enforced disappearance, most of them in solitary confinement in a cell no larger than two square meters.
He recounts how time turned into a heavy burden. He used to count the days by carving lines into the wall, before losing the ability to count, then losing any sense of night and day.
For Ahmad, physical torture was painful but temporary, while silence, isolation, starvation, and medical neglect were far more devastating. He developed severe pneumonia due to high humidity and a lack of ventilation.
“I was always coughing, and when I knocked on the door asking for help, the guard would shout at me, saying, ‘Die quietly, don’t bother us.’ I did not see a doctor even once. They used my illness as a way to blackmail me psychologically,” Ahmad said.
A year after leaving Saydnaya prison (Rural Damascus, the countryside surrounding Damascus), he still suffers sleep disorders, fear of enclosed spaces, and the loss of part of his memory and mental abilities. He says he is no longer the same person who graduated from the Faculty of Engineering.
Despite the clear psychological and physical effects, Ahmad said no one contacted him to offer psychological support or treatment. He remained alone in the face of compounded trauma, made even harsher by his discovery that his close friend was killed in prison.
Layla, a lawyer who preferred not to publish her full name, described detention as a “systematic process to crush human dignity.”
Layla was arrested on fabricated charges and stripped of her name and identity, reduced to a number inside prison. She was deprived of sleep for more than 72 consecutive hours, with strong lights directed into her eyes, and was threatened with the arrest of her family members.
Layla says she was repeatedly raped, more than 30 times, in addition to severe beatings, especially at the al-Mazza Military Airport prison (Damascus), where she describes the psychological and physical terror as pushing a person to wish for death to escape the torment.
When she was released, Layla lived an internal struggle between fear and guilt. She was surprised to find that her family, led by her father, became her main support and helped her confront the effects of trauma.
Despite that family support, Layla says the absence of any care or intervention by international or humanitarian organizations left her with a deep sense of betrayal. She noted that detainees were tortured in total isolation, as if they were outside the world’s calculations.
“The Red Cross did not visit us, nor did international organizations. We were tortured in isolated rooms as if we were on another planet. I left detention with a frail body, but the bigger problem is the complete loss of trust in humanity,” Layla said.
For Youssef, a young man in his 20s, memory has become an open prison. He was subjected to some of the worst forms of torture, including suspension and electric shocks, and was held in suffocating collective cells where skin diseases spread.
He developed severe scabies. Instead of treatment, he says he was punished by having cold water poured over him in winter.
Today, Youssef lives with sudden panic episodes that return when he sees a military uniform or hears the sound of keys.
He recalls freezing automatically with his hands raised against the wall when he heard a name tied to torture memories. Although he registered his name with several organizations, he received no psychological or vocational support, and remained alone in facing the experience’s aftermath.
“Today we are physically alive, but we live in a bigger prison, our memories that refuse to go quiet,” Youssef said.
A mother writes a letter to her missing son during a ceremony marking International Human Rights Day in Damascus, 10 December 2025 (Enab Baladi, Ahmad Maslamani).
Families of the missing share the suffering
The impact of enforced detention in Assad regime prisons was not limited to those who left their cells alive. It extended to their families, who found themselves facing another kind of torment.
Families of the missing live a compounded shock that combines the loss of loved ones, the absence of justice, and a lack of psychological support that should accompany this long-running tragedy.
In this context, Arwa al-Omari, a former detainee, attended an event held by the Association of Saydnaya Prison Detainees to demand her rights and the rights of her family, whom she lost during years of detention and abuses.
She said her husband has been missing since 2015, and no information about his fate has been available since then. Her son was summarily executed at Saydnaya prison in 2016, according to what later appeared in official records.
Arwa is not seeking anything beyond a clear answer about what happened to her son and husband after years of absence, pain, and uncertainty.
Psychological support initiatives
Mohammed Iyad Turkawi, a psychologist with the Association of Saydnaya Prison Detainees, told Enab Baladi that families of the missing are a group living mixed emotions at this stage. They feel joy at liberation on one hand, and pain on the other, amid the continued absence of any knowledge about their children’s fate. He said this is why the association wanted to highlight them and affirm they remain present in memory, and that their suffering is met with real attention, as people with a distinct cause and experience.
On the families’ demands and what the association can offer, Turkawi said the association acts as a link between families and the government’s transitional justice body, and works continuously to convey their voices and demands to relevant government entities. It also documents families’ experiences, alongside documenting the names of the missing.
He added that the association includes a unit specializing in psychological and physical support, providing specialized services to families of the missing, based on their right to psychological support after what they have endured, as well as physical therapy. These efforts include sessions and workshops aimed at supporting them psychologically and helping them cope with the effects of ongoing suffering.
A “suspended” file
A year after the fall of the former regime, the file of detainees and the forcibly disappeared still suffers an almost total lack of attention, along with a clear absence of serious steps toward accountability or clarifying fates, according to Sawsan Hebali, internal communications coordinator and officer at the Caesar Families Association.
Hebali told Enab Baladi that no part of justice has been achieved so far. The rights of detainees who died under torture, and the rights of their families, have not been restored either. This has left the file suspended without tangible progress, amid a lack of transparency by the entities or institutions that are supposed to work on it.
She said the association addresses this reality through a series of steps, including communicating with the independent institution concerned with missing persons, and participating in joint visits with other associations to the Syrian government to press for revealing the fate of detainees.
The association has also worked to empower families of detainees whose names appeared in the “Caesar Martyrs” file through training and psychological support sessions, in addition to opening an office in Damascus and strengthening networking and communication with international bodies concerned with detainees’ cases.
Regarding detainees who were released but have not been able to return to normal life, Hebali said the association seeks to help them reintegrate into society through psychological support sessions, whatever material support is available, and by documenting and publishing their stories to introduce their suffering and highlight the lasting effects of detention.
She stressed that integrating detention survivors and supporting families of the missing is a cornerstone for community stability and recovery. She said this requires job and education opportunities and securing basic needs in line with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, alongside rehabilitation programs.
On the psychological level, Hebali said support comes through specialized therapy sessions and trauma-focused programs that help those affected move past the harsh experience and continue their lives with greater balance.
Assad regime detainees and families of the missing, An open wound without psychological support Enab Baladi.
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