Malak watches Al-Rawda cafe gradually fill up. It is 4 p.m. on a February afternoon, and the 32-year-old lawyer is regaining a taste of freedom, after spending six months in the jails of the regime of former President Bashar al-Assad.
The human rights activist feels at home in this epicenter of Damascus’ political and cultural activism. A smile lights up her face, wrapped in a light beige veil, as a small group of people come to embrace her, among them a tall man with dark mid-length hair and a close-cropped beard. He is a former employee of Assad’s intelligence services.
For the past four years, Malak has worked in a youth support association dedicated to, among other things, getting kids off drugs. The organization was registered with the Ministry of Social Affairs. Everything was in order — a perfect cover. With her colleagues, Malak was actually collecting information on people disappeared by the Syrian regime.
“This man was our source in the [intelligence agencies]. Thanks to him, we were able to send data to Syrian [nongovernmental organizations] in Europe, so that they could put together files,” she explains. The operation lasted for over two years, until one evening in June 2024, when the Damascene was leaving a shopping center where she had dined with friends and her 11-year-old son.
“On the way back, a car and a van blocked our road. Fifteen men got out. My son was scared to death,” says the mother, fighting back tears. “I begged them not to leave my child alone in the middle of the road. They finally agreed to let me call my mother to come and get him.” Malak was transferred directly to the Political Security Branch prison in Damascus. Her intelligence contact was locked up in the infamous Sednaya.
For six months, she was regularly summoned to a military court where death sentences were often handed down, and which the judge would attend now and then, leaving a question mark over her fate. Malak was eventually convicted of “collaboration with a foreign state,” then transferred to a second prison. Finally, she was sent to the civilian detention center of Adra. To ease her living conditions, her parents paid $40,000 to an intermediary in the prison administration, a typical extortion mechanism of the Assad regime, exploiting the fear and interminable waiting of detainees’ families.
“Normally, given the charge, I should clearly have been sentenced to death,” says the lawyer. “I escaped that because my parents paid money. But in the cell, I was mixed up with real criminals.” Malak shared her cell with a mother who had killed her daughter, and with two Russian and Chechen female jihadists from the Islamic State group. “The hardest part was seeing my son in court, telling me, ‘Mom, you have to stay strong.’ It hurt so much that one day, I collapsed on the floor,” she says, squeezing the straw of her Pepsi between her fingers.
Malak — whose name has been changed at her request, as have those of others interviewed in this essay — is one of the “lucky ones,” whose incarceration did not leave indelible physical marks. But her story, and the stories of other women who suffered physically, illustrate the particular challenges faced by women acclimating to life after years of detention and torture in Assad’s notorious prisons. These women face unique challenges reintegrating into society, particularly given the types of abuse they have suffered and the associated stigma.
The stories of Ilham and Mayssa, who live about 200 miles apart, the first in the suburbs of Damascus, the latter in Binnish, a village near Idlib, are striking in their horror and similarities. Ilham is 57 years old, some 25 of which she has spent behind bars, mostly in Adra Prison, for being the wife of a man involved in clothes smuggling from Turkey. Mayssa, 30, was imprisoned in 2014 for being the daughter of a deserter from the Syrian army — who had also deserted his family, and from whom she had barely heard for a long time.
Both women were three months pregnant when they arrived in prison. Both were beaten by the guards to make them lose their babies. Though Mayssa suffered a miscarriage, Ilham’s baby survived. “But they took my son away from me when he was 2 years old,” Ilham says, her voice faint. The memory seems even more painful when told in her dark living room, on the first floor of a dense neighborhood, barely lit by the single window. Electricity only comes for three hours a day here. Ilham’s face is constantly closed, contrasting with the smile of Riad, her husband, sitting next to her on the flower-patterned sofa. Yet he, too, was incarcerated, including in the “human slaughterhouse” of Sednaya. He, too, was released on Dec. 8, when the Assad regime fell. But for some reason, this white-haired, mustachioed man talks with more ease.
Ilham, for her part, struggles so much to speak that sometimes Riad starts telling her story for her. Then she gets angry, interrupts him and manages to regain her voice. “When they came to my cell to take baby Louay away from me, they didn’t even let me bring him myself to my in-laws, who had come to pick him up. A guard showed up and just took him from my arms. Across the corridor, I yelled at him that if he put him in an orphanage, I would kill myself.” During her long stay in prison, Ilham had several heart attacks.
Further north, in the family home in Binnish, a white neon light illuminates Mayssa’s living room. She sips her tea sitting on the floor cushions, dressed in a white abaya and with dark circles under her eyes. Her gentle face swells with each long drag on a cigarette. Words hardly make their way out of her mouth. “After they killed my baby, they took me to the hospital (to remove him from her womb). The same day, I was back in my cell,” she says.
In a pattern common to female prisoners of the Assad regime, Mayssa was first incarcerated in the Political Security Branch in Damascus, before being transferred to the civil prison of Adra, which contained an all-female wing. The facility was nicknamed the “five-star prison,” for its living conditions, known to be more lenient than elsewhere. A telephone, for example, was made available to prisoners to contact their families. While insults and psychological pressure were common, physical torture was not as systematic as in the regime’s other jails. But in the Political Security Branch in Damascus, Mayssa’s experience was horrific.
“There were 15 of us packed in a cell, sitting with our knees bent all day,” she recalls. “Then, at one point, the guard would open the door. He liked teenage girls. There was a girl of 15 or 16 among us. When he entered the cell, she would grab the hand of the oldest prisoner so he wouldn’t take her away.” The young girl wasn’t able to tell how many men had raped her because they blindfolded her each time, according to Mayssa. She pauses. “I wish he had killed me instead. She was just a kid who had taken pictures at a protest.”
How does a woman recover from the horror of incarceration in Syria’s infamous prisons, especially in a country exhausted by 13 years of war, which is not equipped to deal with such a profusion of trauma? At least 136,047 people were imprisoned or forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime from March 2011, according to a December 2023 report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, cited by the U.S. State Department. The actual figure is far higher, and most of the disappeared have likely died, according to the organization. Among them were 8,495 women and 3,696 children.
“There is no infrastructure to accommodate these people and no regulatory procedures to help them,” says the Damascene psychiatrist Tayseer Hassoun, who himself spent nine years behind bars. “This is partly due to the collapse of the health system.” While Syria’s public hospitals are in tatters, understaffed and poorly equipped, the country’s three main psychiatric centers (two in Damascus and one in Aleppo) treat chronic mental health disorders, such as schizophrenia. “They are not qualified to receive trauma cases, especially trauma resulting from detention,” the doctor emphasizes.
Some NGOs are trying their best to fill the gap. After Dec. 8, Women Now, an association based in France and dedicated to supporting Syrian women, set up free weekly psychology sessions for former prisoners, both women and men. So far, only 150 people have registered, including 50 women. “It’s not really ingrained in our culture to seek psychological help,” says Shaimaa al-Hazwani, program coordinator at Women Now, explaining the low number of registrations. “It’s even more complicated for women, because they are often stigmatized as having experienced sexual violence, even when this is not the case.” Women therefore naturally tend to avoid talking about their detention, she adds. “Often, their families are quite reluctant to let them talk about their experiences, so as not to have their name associated with this stigma.”
Each person’s experiences are expressed differently, depending on their character, social or cultural background, and the experience of detention itself. Unlike Ilham and Mayssa, Malak, who attends the Women Now psychology sessions twice a week, shares her story without hesitation. “I have a lot of support from my parents. My only concern now is to be able to help them recover the $40,000 they spent to ease my detention conditions, because they got into a lot of debt,” she says.
The prison experience has actually put Malak off her job. “I can’t set foot in the courthouse anymore, it reminds me too much of prison,” she says bitterly. As for her fellow lawyers, she is struggling to find the desire to see them again. “They helped me a lot at the beginning, they pleaded my case to the authorities. But it was becoming dangerous for them to support me, so they gradually backed out,” she says, her gaze vacant. “On the one hand, I understand them, and on the other, I can’t help but be disappointed.”
In her village near Idlib, Mayssa finds herself in a kind of prison. “I don’t want to see anyone, I scroll on my phone all day,” she says, huddled next to a fuel heater. “I don’t dare go out into the streets, I’m afraid of being judged. A man could go out for a walk at midnight without any problem. But I’m a single woman who has just been released from prison,” she explains. Her husband also disappeared during the war.
Mayssa says she feels out of step, like a stranger to the rest of society, even within her own family. Her younger sister, now 15, was only 1 year old when she was incarcerated. “Sometimes, I have the strange feeling of living with fellow inmates,” she says of the home she shares with her mother and four sisters. “I asked my mother if I could live alone, but she refused.” Mayssa is also afraid of going back to work, even though she desperately needs the income. “Who will hire a former prisoner? Everyone knows that it’s hard to readapt to society, it won’t work,” she sighs. In Damascus, Ilham would also like to find a job to pay for an eye operation to fix her declining sight, and to take care of her damaged heart. “I don’t know yet what job I could do, I haven’t thought about it,” she says.
Her psychology sessions will also have to wait. “Having found my family is enough for me,” she says with a frown. In his red Ferrari hoodie, Louay, the child Ilham gave birth to in detention, goes back and forth between the kitchen and the living room. “I have hoped all my life to be reunited with my parents, so everything they ask me today, I say, ‘Amen,’” says the 23-year-old son. His mother is more cautious, faced with this young man she is only just discovering. “We are learning to live together. It’s not easy. There is so much to catch up on, and, at the same time, I don’t want to be too intrusive in his life.”
“As soon as I feel like working again, I want to get involved in a profession to support women’s rights,” Malak says. Prison, where she experienced repression firsthand with her fellow inmates, made her want to take up this mission. “What keeps me going is my son.”
For her part, Mayssa places all her hopes in the goal of justice being rendered to all victims of Assad’s barbarity. “That our ills be recognized,” she emphasizes. Expectations of the new government are also very high. “We spent our lives in prison. We need jobs, and medical and psychological support.”
In her large living room in Binnish, the young woman would like to be treated by a psychologist. “But I am ashamed to ask.” After we leave, she sends us a text message: “Do you know how to find one?”
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