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We descended into the darkness, crunching over broken glass, down three steep flights of stairs.
With my flashlight I could make out some offices, and at the end of the hallway a set of large metal gates.
We followed a rebel soldier beneath a complex built by Syria’s internal security forces in the heart of the city of Homs.
He took us to the cells where an unknown number of prisoners were held, tortured, transferred to other prisons or simply murdered where they lay.
As I followed rebel soldier Abu Firas, he told me that he had abandoned the Syrian army because of the torture he witnessed in cells like this.
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In the pitch dark we walked through the cell block: an eerie, narrow passage, past open cell doors, some of which were still padlocked.
I peered inside, the cells were no more than six feet long and four feet wide.
They looked like large coffins, which to many they would become.
In some cases, people were held here for years. As we passed the cells we saw the remains of meager amounts of food; a piece of bread and some kind of thin soup.
“They killed them here.”
Abu Firas told me that prisoners were fed, but only to keep them alive.
“They didn’t feed them because they cared about them, but to get information,” he said.
“So they keep them alive so they can be interrogated?” I asked him for confirmation.
“Yes, and when they finished the investigation, they either moved them somewhere else or killed them here.”
The regime killed the people here as soon as they got everything they wanted to know. Maybe they didn’t get anything out of the prisoners, they were still killed.
Arbitrary detention continued in Homs and no one was safe. I was called to look at a woman’s name, ‘Fatima’, scratched on the door of a cell.
Not only men were held here, women and children were also held here.
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“They were protesters, maybe they were randomly walking down a street and there was a protest,” Abu Firas explained.
People were taken off the streets for whatever reason.
Many brought to this place were charged with terrorism – a broad charge that anyone could face for hating the government.
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‘They tortured my brother in front of me’
Without my flashlight I couldn’t see much. That was also part of the torture of the prisoners here.
“The regime used this method so that people do not know whether it is day or night,” Abu Firas explained.
As a soldier he witnessed torture. I asked him if he was ever tortured too.
“So much, electricity and different tools, you would always have a blindfold,” he told me.
“The ways they tortured us, me and my brother, they tortured my brother in front of me, and I in front of my brother, out of psychological pressure.”
The cells are located under an internal security complex in the heart of a residential area with large apartment blocks. A prison so close to the community feels like yet another message of repression to the population.
It appears that the officers who worked in this complex left in a hurry. There are half-drunk cups of tea, extinguished cigarettes, food on plates and jackets still hanging on office chairs.
In one of the rooms we found a cache of weapons and ammunition, mostly from Russia, all abandoned.
Files were also left behind – thousands upon thousands detailing the lives of citizens and their supposed political beliefs.
Everyone in Syria was being spied on and we were told that the people in these files were on a watch list.
We peered into another room, this one underground. It was burned out, documents turned to ash, and some still smoked from the heat.
These were the files on the prisoners themselves, we were told, and they were burned when the regime collapsed.
Who the prisoners were and what happened to them may never be known.
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