Writings on the walls of Assad’s prisons express the fears and love of tortured Syrians

An unknown prisoner lies in the cell of the then ruler of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, and writes a line of Arabic poetry on the wall of his cell, as an expression of pain and love amidst his torment.

“My country, even if it oppresses me, is dear,” he wrote, “and my people, even if it has no mercy on me, is generous.” It is a famous line of poetry, composed 800 years ago by a poet challenging the tyrannical caliph.

As you walk through the cold, dark cells of Assad’s prisons, the graffiti screams. Messages praying to God and missing loved ones. Often obscure, they preserve fragments of what the nameless men were thinking as they were tortured and dying.

“Trust no one, not even your brother,” someone warned on the wall of a cell in the notorious Palestine Branch detention center in Damascus.

Another groan: “Lord, have mercy on me.”

Since 2011, tens of thousands of Syrians have disappeared into the network of prisons and detention centers run by Assad’s security forces as they attempt to crush his opponents. For years, the prisoners remained without contact with the outside world, living in crowded, windowless cells, as their fellow prisoners died around them.

Layers of graffiti indicate generations of suffering

Torture and beatings were practiced daily. Mass executions were frequent.

Most prisoners fully expected to die. They had no reason to believe that anyone would see the messages they inscribed on the walls, except future prisoners.

Someone wrote one word in Arabic, “I miss you” — a love letter that could never be sent to a lover whose name only the writer knows.

More than a month after the prisons were opened by the rebels who ousted Assad, The Associated Press toured several facilities to see the graffiti left behind. Nothing can be known about the men who drew and wrote them.

Only a few bear names, and few of them are dated. It is impossible to know which of them lived or died.

Some walls have layers of graffiti on top of each other, indicating the suffering of many generations.

“Do not be sad, mother. This is my destiny,” reads one of them, dated January 1, 2024. Beneath them are traces of an ancient text, so faded that only a few words can be read: “…except you” – a hint of longing for a dear person.

Calendars mark the years on the wall

Many of the writings and drawings are cries to family or loved ones. Someone drew a heart broken in two, with the word “Mother” written on one side, and the word “Father” written on the other.

Some poetry quotes. “When you wage your wars, think of those who ask for peace,” says one of them, incorrectly recalling a line by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Many of them kept calendars, filling the walls with grids of numbers. “It’s been a year,” was one prisoner’s terse summation over a field of 365 dots arranged in rows.

Some of the drawings are even funny, such as cartoon faces with googly eyes or a piece of weed. Others are flights of fancy whose meaning, if any, only the prisoner knows. One scene shows a landscape of rolling hills and bare-tree forests, with a pack of wolves howling at the sky and a bird of prey holding a hissing snake in its talons.

Darkness and fear loom over most people, along with attempts to endure.

One of them wrote: “Patience is beautiful, and God is the one we seek help from.” “Oh God, fill me with patience and do not let me despair.”