Yezid Sayigh interviews Anne-Marie McManus:

Yezid Sayigh: It’s been over a month since a coalition of groups led by the Islamist militia, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, overthrew Bashar al-Assad’s regime, ending a 50-year family dictatorship. Can you give some context to the images that came out of Syrian prisons during and after those events?

Anne-Marie McManus: The liberation of the prisons and intelligence branches was not marginal to the fall of the regime. In ways that are really unparalleled in modern Syrian and regional history, the end of Assad’s carceral archipelago was at the center of this coup. Most readers will be familiar with images from Sednaya, the military prison liberated on the night of December 7–8, hours before Assad fled to Russia. The videos of prisoners, including women and children, being hustled out of cells are iconic for Syrians because Sednaya was the pinnacle of regime violence after 2011—a “human slaughterhouse” in Amnesty International’s phrasing in 2017. But Sednaya inherited its notoriety from another prison camp, closed in 2001: Tadmur, or Palmyra, which acted as a site for torture, mass execution, and indefinite detentions of the regime’s opponents during the 1980s and early 1990s. So, we’re looking at entrenched patterns of political violence that stretch back generations and whose impacts go to the very heart of contemporary Syrian politics and society.

The prison system was also an integral element of the regime’s military and political structures, with sites and detention centers run by different branches and divisions: Military Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, the elite Fourth Armored Division, and so on. So, the capture—or abandonment—of prisons was also a tactical question. Sednaya was only one of the prisons the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-led coalition liberated from the start of its advance. Those prisoners were actually freed by local, former opposition fighters, who persuaded the Sednaya guards to abandon their posts using threats that Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham fighters would soon arrive. Micro-events like these were decisive in signaling the regime’s imminent collapse. Compare it to less than two weeks earlier, when Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham released dramatic footage of its battle with government forces for Aleppo Central Prison, effectively announcing control of the prison as a strategic military victory. When you look at the timeline, you realize that, in scenes of dazed and overjoyed prisoners pouring out onto the streets of Hama, Homs, and other Syrian cities, we were watching the real-time dismantling of the regime. [Continue reading…]