A few feet away, Ibrahim Younis re-entered cell number nine and sat there for 10 minutes, musing on his promises to former prisoners during his time employed and later imprisoned in the Palestine branch that he would one day help free those unfairly detained.
Chtawi, Younis and his cousin Mahmoud Younis are among a band of fighters from the Islamist militant group Ahrar al-Sham – one of the groups that overran the detention sites that were a hallmark of Assad’s regime – standing guard outside the infamous facility in whose freezing cells they were once imprisoned and abused.
‘Finally this is justice’: the Assad torture survivors who guard their former jail Men imprisoned and abused at the notorious Palestine branch detention centre return to the facility as free men.
The first thing the three militants did on entering Syria’s notorious Palestine branch prison as free men was to search for their former solitary confinement cells.
But his co-workers caught him, and by 2012 Younis and his cousin Mahmoud had been dragged into the Palestine branch and locked away in cells directly underneath his former office.
