Languishing in a dungeon cell of Syria’s then-ruler Bashar al-Assad, an unknown prisoner scrawled a verse of Arabic poetry on his cell wall — an expression of pain and love amid his torment.
“My country, even if it oppresses me, is dear. My people, even if uncharitable to me, are generous,” he wrote. It’s a well-known verse, composed 800 years ago by a poet defying a tyrannical caliph.
As you walk through the cold, dark cells of Assad’s prisons, the graffiti on the walls cries out. The messages plead to God and yearn for loved ones. Often mysterious, they preserve fragments of what anonymous men were thinking as they faced torture and death.
“Trust no one, not even your brother,” someone darkly warned on a cell wall in Damascus’s notorious Palestine Branch detention facility.
“Oh Lord, bring relief,” groaned another.
Since 2011, tens of thousands of Syrians vanished inside the network of prisons and detention facilities run by Assad’s security forces as they tried to crush his opposition. Inmates went for years without contact with the outside world, living in overcrowded, windowless cells where fellow prisoners died around them.
Layers of graffiti marking generations of suffering
Torture and beatings were inflicted daily. Mass executions were frequent.
Most inmates would have fully expected to die. They had no reason to believe anyone would ever see the messages they scratched into the walls, except future prisoners.
One wrote a single word in Arabic, “ashtaqtilak” (“I miss you”) — a love letter that could never be sent to a beloved whose name only the writer would know.
More than a month after the prisons were opened by insurgents who ousted Assad, The Associated Press toured several facilities to view the graffiti left behind. Nothing can be known about the men who drew and wrote them.
Only a few bear names, and few are dated. It’s impossible to know who of them lived or died.
Some walls have layers of graffiti on top of each other, marking generations of suffering.
“Don’t be sad, mother. This is my fate,” reads one dated Jan. 1, 2024. Underneath it are traces of an older text, so faded that only a few words are legible: “…. except for you” — a hint of longing for a loved one.
Calendars mark years on the wall
Many of the writings and drawings are cries to parents or loved ones. Someone drew a heart broken in two, with “mother” written in one side, “father” in the other.
Some quote poetry. “When you wage your wars, think of those who ask for peace,” reads one, slightly misremembering a verse by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Many kept calendars, filling walls with grids of numbers. “A year passed,” was one prisoner’s terse summary above a field of 365 dots arranged in rows.
Some drawings are even playful, like googly-eye cartoon faces or a joint of hashish. Others are flights of fancy whose meaning, if any, was known only to the prisoner. One scene shows a landscape of rolling hills and forests of bare trees, where a pack of wolves howls at the sky and a bird of prey grips a hissing snake in its talons.
Darkness and fear hang over most, along with attempts to endure.
“Patience is beautiful, and God the one from whom we seek help,” one wrote. “God, fill me with patience and don’t let me despair.”