Escape from Assad’s house of horror
Sami Al Sari endured four months of torture by the Syrian regime before escaping in a hearse, writes Foreign Correspondent Omar Al Muqdad
ISTANBUL // They call it Apparatus 215 – Bashar Al Assad’s grim centre of torture, filth and deprivation, for those who dared to question his absolute rule.
Sami Al Sari was one of the few lucky enough to escape, hidden in a hearse lorry full of those inmates whose luck had run out.
“They were naked, signs of torture were obvious on their bod- ies and faces,” said Sami, 25.
On July 16, 2012, the young university student was picked up at his home by Syrian security officers after taking part in an Arab Spring-inspired rally in Damascus against the Assad regime. There began four months of persistent brutality, memories of which are inextinguishable, even four years later. It ended only after his family paid 2 million Syrian pounds to get him out.
ISTANBUL // Sami Al Sari will never forget the sheer terror of lying next to so many corpses in the back of the hearse.
“They were naked, signs of torture were obvious on their bodies and faces,” he says of the day when he was finally reunited with his family after four months of vicious torture at the hands of Syria’s regime forces.
The 25- year- old Syrian was smuggled out of a notorious prison in a hearse full of dead inmates, and dumped in a desolate area outside Damascus in November 2012.
His escape was possible only because his family paid two million Syrian pounds (Dh34,440) to rescue him.
“I was surrounded by horror for a whole hour that felt like a decade,” Sami says. When the Syrian revolution started in 2011, he was 20 years old and in his final year of a political science degree at Damascus University.
Like many other youths at that time, he could not sit and watch the uprising happening in his country without taking part in it.
Full of hope and ambitions for himself and his people, Sami never imagined his life would take the turn it did on that fateful day in 2012.
On July 16 that year, more than a year after the Arab Spring started, Syrian security forces stormed his house and arrested him and four friends for taking part in a protest in front of the Iranian embassy.
“At that moment, everything turned dark in front of my eyes. Not just because I was blindfolded, but also because I knew where I was being taken,” Sami says. “I heard many horror stories of that place, and I thought I would be one lucky guy if I ever made it out alive.”
He and his friends were taken to the so-called “Apparatus 215” – an infamous detention centre run by forces loyal to president Bashar Al Assad.
It was there that the “torture festival” began, he says. The guards separated the friends and placed Sami in solitary confinement. He has not seen or heard of his friends since.
“The cell was very dirty. There were bugs and rodents everywhere. I was getting one meal a day that contained a piece of bread with a barely edible potato, and one dirty bottle of water,” he recalls.
His torture, he says, “took many shapes and methods. I was beaten and lashed with a whip on my whole body, put on a torturing chair called ‘Nazi’s chair’ that al- most broke my back, cigarettes were put out on my body, and I was hung from a windowsill for hours. It was four months of non-stop torture”.
“Then came the electrocution. They would shock me on my head, my neck and all over. It was extremely painful.”
Sami was routinely electrocuted until one day he lost consciousness during one of the sessions. He thinks it was about this time that he suffered a temporary loss of memory and has little recollection of what his tormentors did to him after that.
He believes, however, that they continued to torture him.
“When I eventually regained some of my memory, I was able to see clearly the signs of torture all over my body,” Sami says.
During his captivity, his family tried tirelessly to get him out.
After a few weeks, they were finally able to reach an officer from the prison, who agreed to help them if they paid him 3 million Syrian pounds, and came up with the idea of smuggling Sami out with his dead fellow inmates. He also agreed to deliver him to an area outside Damascus.
It was when he was next to all the dead bodies that he “started recalling everything I went through”, he says. After an hour, “the car stopped, the back door was opened and I was dumped on the road”.
“I saw my brother approaching the car. He held me and hugged me, and took me home.”
Plagued by memories of the experience, he was unable to eat or sleep, with constant nightmares.
His family eventually took him to Lebanon for treatment, where a psychiatrist took care of him for a few weeks, before he returned to Syria.
Not long after, the security forces began pursuing him again
‘ I was hung from a windowsill for hours Sami Al Sari who escaped Syrian fighting
when they heard of his escape. After months on the run, his family moved from Damascus to the eastern city of Deir Ezzor, where they were originally from.
Sami made it to Turkey in April this year using fake identification papers.
It was only when his family man- aged to escape to Turkey that he broke his silence.
But like so many other Syrian refugees who have escaped torture and death under the tyranny of war, Sami is still struggling to get back on his feet.
“The screaming of other inmates echoed all over the place through the day and night,” he says of his time in prison.
“It was a horrifying thing. It was unbelievably inhuman.”