Incredible moment CNN’s Clarissa Ward rescues ‘hidden prisoner’ from Assad’s hellhole jail while searching for American journalist Austin Tice
CNN’s Clarissa Ward witnessed the moment an incarcerated man at one of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s notorious prisons became a free man.
Ward was walking around one of the prisons where thousands of civilians were tortured and beaten to death in an effort to find American journalist Austin Tice, who was captured in the war-torn country 12 years ago, when she came across a still-locked cell with a blanket on the ground.
After a guard shot open the lock, Ward and one of the victorious Syrian rebels entered the cell where Ward remarked that she thought she saw the blanket move and asked if anyone was there.
Soon, a man could be seen sitting up with his arms raised, pleading: ‘I’m a civilian. I’m a civilian.’
Once the prisoner realized he was not in danger, he tells Ward how he had been held in a windowless cell for three months – clutching her arm with both hands.
Startled, Ward asked for water for the man, who gulped it down – later revealing that he was left without any food or water for four days when his captors fled during the fall of Damascus to rebel forces.
Once he was brought outside, the man stared up at the sky and breathed deeply, repeating the phrase, ‘Oh God, there is light.’
He then kissed both the reporter and the rebel she was with, as they sat him down.
CNN’s Clarissa Ward found a Syrian man still being locked up in one of former President Bashar al-Assad’s prisons while looking for American journalist Austin Tice
She and a rebel helped lead the man out of his windowless cell, and let him see the sun for the first time in three months
At that point, he pleaded with Ward to ‘stay with me,’ as he started to share his story.
‘For three months, I didn’t know anything about my family,’ the father from Homs said. ‘I didn’t hear anything about my children.’
When a rebel then tells him there is ‘no more army, no more prisons, no more checkpoints,’ the former prisoner could not believe what he was hearing, until the rebel insists, ‘Syria as free.’
The still-shaken former prisoner then kisses the rebel again, and tells how officers from Assad’s intelligence service took him from his home and started to interrogate him about his phone.
‘They brought me here to Damascus, they asked me about names of terrorists,’ he recounted.
The rebel then asks whether he was hit at all during his time in prison, to which he replied that he was.
By the time a paramedic shows up, the shock of his freedom apparently sets in, as he could be seen shaking and on the verge of tears.
‘Everything is OK. The Red Crescent is coming to help you,’ a man tries to assure him.
‘You are safe, don’t be afraid anymore. Everything you are afraid of is gone,’ he said.
But when the man was then led inside a vehicle, he once again seemed afraid, explaining: ‘Every car I got into, they blindfolded me.’
The Syrian Network for Human Rights has claimed that since the beginning of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, over 157,000 people were arrested or had been forcibly disappeared – including 5,274 children and 10,221 women.
The incarcerated included protesters, human rights defenders, political dissidents, doctors who treated demonstrators or opposition figures, as well as their family members.
Over 1,500 people died under the torture, which included electrocuting genitals or hanging weights from them; burning them with oil, metal rods, gunpowder or flammable pesticides; crushing heads between a wall and the prison cell’s door; inserting needles or metal pins into bodies; and depriving prisoners of clothes, bathing and toilet facilities, the human rights network said.
The worst seemed to be Sednaya Prison, outside of Damascus, which spanned the size of 184 soccer stadiums and was surrounded by two minefields.
A 2017 Amnesty International report found thousands were killed in mass hangings in Sednaya, which it labelled a ‘Human Slaughterhouse’.
Between 20 and 50 people were killed every week, usually on Monday and Wednesday nights. Amnesty estimated that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were executed between September 2011 and December 2015.
Assad’s prisons were known for their brutality, with Sednaya Prison (pictured) being dubbed a ‘Human Slaughterhouse’
Prisoners were sent to a ‘trial’ at one of the two field courts at the military police HQ in the al-Qaboun neighborhood of Damascus. These trials would last ‘one to three minutes.’
Then on execution day, prisoners were told they were being transferred to a civilian prison elsewhere – but were instead brought to a basement and severely beaten, before being transferred to another detention facility inside Sednaya to be hanged.
Those who survived endured intense suffering. They were blindfolded constantly, and were able to hear the sound of beatings and screams reverberate through vents and pipes.
Some victims were also held underground in freezing confinement cells designed for one person with dimensions of 8 ft by 5 ft, but which held up to 15 at a time.
Prisoners at the Mezze Air Base, meanwhile, were forced to act as dogs, donkeys, cats or other animals.
If they failed to play their part they would be beaten.
Guards at the prison would also regularly hang prisoners from a fence naked and spray water on them during cold nights, and the New York Times described how one prisoner there was crammed into a tire and beaten.
Sexual violence was also prevalent at these prisons, with the Syrian Network for Human Rights once reporting: ‘At midnight, they would take the beautiful girls to Colonel Suleiman [Juma, head of the Syrian state security’s Branch 320 in Hama] to rape.’
He and his friends would then sexually assault them in a bedroom adjoining his office that was decorated with Assad’s photo, where they would splash arak – a potent liquor – on the victims.
Assad had repeatedly denied killing thousands at the prison and branded US State Department allegations that up to 50 people were hanged daily at the military prison ‘a new Hollywood story detached from reality’
Rebels seized control of the country’s capitol on Sunday, prompting Assad to flee
When Assad’s regime was finally toppled on Sunday, many worried family members and rebels poured into these prisons to find their loved ones and rescue anyone who were still held in a cell.
Assad had repeatedly denied killing thousands at Sadnaya as well as using a secret crematorium to dispose of their remains in 2017.
He even branded the allegations by the US State Department that up to 50 people were hanged daily at the military prison as ‘a new Hollywood story detached from reality.’
The former president, though, has now fled his home country with the aid of the Kremlin.
Three sources told Bloomberg News that Moscow organized for Assad to escape via its air base on the Syrian coast, using a ‘transponder trick’.
He was reportedly ordered to tell no-one, switch his transponder off and get on his private plane in the capital Damascus.
The aircraft then travelled to Russia’s Khmeimim air base on the Syrian coast, before Assad headed to Moscow, possibly on a military plane, the sources have claimed.
