Torture, the very essence of the fallen Syrian regime!
One could almost marvel at the array of torture instruments featured in the repertoire of Syrian prisons! For the various branches of the mukhabarat had not been idle during more than fifty years of prolonged dictatorship. To exercise their perverse talents, extract confessions from their victims, and above all intimidate the population, Baathist torturers could choose between the “doulab,” the “‘abd al-aswad,” and the “bisat al-rih.” It is difficult to rank these ordeals, but the second on the list was so perverse that Amnesty International described it in its 1984 Report in the following terms: “The victim, bound, is seated on a device which, when switched on, inserts a heated metal blade into the anus.”
Take careful note of that date and consider who was in power in Damascus at the time. For there are still some in Lebanon who are nostalgic for the regime of Hafez al-Assad and who, in an effort to enhance the prestige of this autocrat, go so far as to disparage the performance of his son Bashar, whom they believe failed to live up to the mission entrusted to him by his father.
The East German Stasi as coach!
A preliminary observation: the various branches of the mukhabarat, pillars of the regime established in Damascus, were supervised—if not trained—by the infamous East German Stasi. And this lasted from the 1960s until the fall of the Berlin Wall! Yet here the difference in culture between the two intelligence and repressive services became apparent (1). Indeed, Stasi agents believed that their Syrian counterparts had adopted a model of spectacular and systematic torture and that their modus operandi was characterized by unrestrained brutality and “immediate sadistic violence.” They themselves, as refined artists from the banks of the Spree and the Elbe, preferred “psychological destruction, surveillance, and blackmail.” This shows that even by East German standards, the methods of the Assad clan were excessively ferocious, gratuitous, and unnecessary. In this regard, the archives of the political police of the so-called German Democratic Republic, examined by researchers and academics, suggest how much “Syrian praxis” was driven by vindictive, clan-based, and sectarian logics that did not exist behind the Iron Curtain (2).
Torture as the regime’s identity marker
Not only were the detainees in agony, but so too was an entire people—a people in whom every form of opposition and every inclination toward dissent had to be crushed through terror and intimidation. In January 2025, drawing on more than 2,000 testimonies, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria published a report entitled “The Web of Agony,” denouncing the systematic practice of torture by the ruling authorities. Giving free rein to their instincts, this is what the perpetrators of these dirty deeds inflicted: “Beatings, electric shocks, burns, the ripping out of fingernails, rape and other forms of sexual violence, denial of medical care, and psychological torture.” And this says nothing of arbitrary detention and mass executions.
The Damascus trials or the hour of judgment
A page has been turned! Survivors of the Syrian prison regime are now speaking freely on social media. Soon, courtroom hearings will take over from podcasts in recounting the horrors committed in detention centers. Of the Baath Party in Syria as in Iraq, only oppression, terror, and crimes will be remembered. It was certainly not during the eras of Saddam or the Assads that freedoms had any chance to flourish!
And just as one can never imagine Hitler without Auschwitz-Birkenau, nor Stalin without the gulag, one can scarcely evoke Hafez or Bashar without the infamous torture !
John O. Koehler, “Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police,” Basic Books, 1999.
Sophia Hoffmann, “Intelligence Fields: The Relations of the East German Stasi and Syrian Mukhabarat” (1960–1990), Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Publications, Berlin.