AP PHOTOS: Scrawled on walls of Assad's prisons, graffiti express fears, loves of tormented Syrians
AP PHOTOS: Scrawled on walls of Assad's prisons, graffiti express fears, loves of tormented Syrians
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Languishing in a dungeon cell of Syria’s then-ruler Bashar Assad, surrounded by death and torture, an unknown prisoner scrawled a verse of Arabic poetry on his cell wall -– an expression of pain and love. “My country, even if it oppresses me, is dear. My people, even if uncharitable to me, are generous,” he wrote. It’s a well-known verse, composed 800 years ago by a poet defying a tyrannical caliph.
As you walk through the cold, dark cells of Assad’s prisons, the graffiti on the walls whisper and cry around you. They plead to God and yearn for loved ones. Often mysterious, they are haunting fragments of thoughts and fears from the minds of anonymous men enduring unimaginable torment.
“Trust no one, not even your brother,” someone darkly warns on a cell wall in Damascus’ notorious Palestine Branch detention facility. “Oh Lord, bring relief,” groans another. Since 2011, tens of thousands of Syrians vanished inside the network of prisons and detention facilities run by Assad’s security forces as they tried to crush his opposition. Inmates went for years without contact with the outside world, living in overcrowded, windowless cells where their cellmates died around them. Torture and beatings were inflicted daily. Mass executions were frequent.
Most inmates would have fully expected to die. They scratched their writings and drawings into the walls with no reason to believe anyone would ever see them except future prisoners. One wrote a single word in Arabic, “ashtaqtilak” -- “I miss you” -– a love letter that could never be sent to a beloved whose name only the writer need know.
