Files from Aleppo intelligence facility show extent of Assad repression (original) (raw)

ALEPPO, Syria — In some ways, the binders in the basement of Aleppo’s general intelligence branch lay out what happened here in meticulous detail. They list every victim and every alleged crime. But they don’t capture the fear; they don’t mention the torture, or the smell.

There were buildings like this in every Syrian city: pillars of a security state so pervasive that it was not unusual for people to remark that even the walls had ears. Long before prisoners reached the country’s notorious jails, they were surveilled and interrogated in their neighborhoods. The Assad dynasty’s survival depended on it, and for five decades, the system worked.

The ruling family is gone now, having fled a Syrian rebel advance on the capital last week, but the files inside Aleppo’s Branch 322 offer a glimpse of the abuses they commissioned. Paper files dating back to the earliest months of the 2011 uprising against the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, fill in the gaps of how the regime fought back. Branch 322 was one of hundreds that detained and interrogated civilians and military officers, and recruited informants to monitor their neighbors, the documents show.

As the conflict wore on, security forces cooperated across the war’s shifting front lines, interrogating Syrian citizens who had first been arrested by Kurdish-led forces as they tried to smuggle themselves out of government territory, according to a case file from December 2021.

At least half a million people were killed and some 100,000 people disappeared during Syria’s 13-year civil war, and branches like 322 cranked the engine of killing. When Washington Post reporters visited the building Friday, the cells were haunting — putrid, cold and pitch black. Rats scurried over the mounds of gray blankets left by the prisoners who fled when the insurgents arrived. Cell doors bore etchings that marked the days people spent there. One simply read: “I cannot.”

United Nations war crimes investigators said this month that the Assad regime used the entire detention system as a weapon, concluding in the early months of the 2011 uprising that poor coordination between security branches was allowing the fledgling revolution to spread. Instructions from the country’s National Security Bureau were distributed to intelligence branches nationwide, the United Nations said, ordering them to “cleanse” each geographic sector of wanted people, before sending their interrogation notes “to all security branches so that they can be used in identifying and seriously pursuing new targets.”

The documents inside Branch 322 indicate that this policy never stopped. Cover letters on case files include a list of other security branches to which the papers were to be copied and sent. Desks near the entrance were strewn with the identity documents of people who appeared to have been held there — some as collateral to extract confessions from other people, detainee advocates said. At least six of the passports belonged to children younger than 8. Other photos showed smiling young women.

Residents slowed their cars as they passed, pointing excitedly at the picture of Assad that had been ripped from the facility’s gates as the regime fell. Without the sign and black gate outside, Branch 322 could be mistaken for one of the neighborhood’s elegant family homes. But residents had learned to shrink away from it, they said. They quickened their step as they passed, or looked away from vehicles entering or leaving. Islamist rebel fighters guarding the facility now say that one of the neighbors had asked to see the abandoned facility, after spending several days inside it for daring to step out onto an overlooking balcony.

“They arrested the poor and shook down the rich,” said Rafik Hakim, a car dealership owner, who was drinking coffee on the sidewalk with friends. After decades of dictatorship, they were instinctively avoiding political discussion even now, they said, before realizing that they would not be arrested for discussing who Assad’s successor might be. “The regime instilled fear in all of us,” he said. “A small policeman had to grow in the heart of every man in Aleppo.”

Nearby, Mahmoud Ahmed Attar, 47, a local store owner, watched the passersby quietly. When he was released after two weeks in Branch 322 back in 2019, his jailers had told him to never speak of what they did, and he hadn’t.

He was ready now.

“My friends would ask me, and I’d say nothing happened,” he said. “But I never forgot.” Security forces burst into Attar’s ice cream shop in late 2019 without warning, he said, and forced him blindfolded into their van. He spent two weeks alone in a tiny cell, listening to the screams of a man he later understood to be the owner of a neighboring business. Officers were dripping battery acid on his head, the man later told him. The only light Attar saw in those weeks was from a flickering bulb in the corridor where interrogators tortured people, he said.

Inside the facility, handcuffs were still dangling from a pipe interrogators would hang people from, a tactic used to break the bones in detainees’ shoulders and wrists. The regime had its own lexicon of torture, and this was known as “shabeh.” Attar was tormented by “dulab,” in which interrogators forced detainees to bend at the waist and stick their body through a car tire so they were defenseless from the beatings that followed, he said.

Syria’s four main intelligence agencies operated regional, city and local branches and used emergency law to detain residents without warrants. Attar finally learned the charges against him after he was transferred to the capital, Damascus: His was a case of 33 people, accused of links to a car bombing three years earlier. His female accuser later said that she was tortured before she shared his name, as the officers had demanded. She finally accused him of storing foreign currency — already an illegal act in Assad’s Syria — that was meant for “terrorists.”

“The officers built this case just to show their superiors that they were working,” he said.

The entire group was released without charge two weeks later, Attar said. He is hard to recognize in a photograph from that day — head shaved, eyes disoriented, as if unused to the daylight. An officer apologized to him as he left. “He said: ‘You know it was our duty. We have to investigate all reports.’”

Attar never spoke to his neighbor about what they had been through. He told his friends to drop the subject when they asked. “I couldn’t touch it, I couldn’t look at it,” he said. He did his best to avoid the road past the branch.

Attar had spoken impassively as he described his ordeal, but when asked how it felt to see the branch now, he began to cry.

“When the rebels arrived here, I went there at 4 p.m., and I just stood there,” he said. “I looked at it. I knelt on the ground, and I prayed there.”

The fear was gone, he said. He looked at the black gates and felt nothing.

Ali Rahabi in Aleppo contributed to this report.