On December 9, 2024, while the world was stunned to understand that the rebels had taken Damascus without much resistance and that the dictator Bashar El Assad had fled to Moscow, a video recorded with a cell phone conquered social networks. In it, a Syrian – then unknown, pale and thin (he had lost 40 kilos) – enthusiastically says that he has just been released from the Mezzeh Air Base prison: “Now we are in the center of Damascus. And I swear by Allah, and there is no God but Allah, that they were going to execute me and this man half an hour before the release.” The video went viral, showing how much a life can change during the final throes of half a century of family dictatorship and nearly 14 years of war.
Today, a year later and at 39 years old, this inmate, Ghazi Mohamed, is moved when he remembers his planned execution in the courtyard and the sound of the blades of the helicopter which – as he will only understand later – had rushed to evacuate the soldiers before the advance of the rebels. “Everything happened very quickly. Only a few minutes passed between the helicopter taking off and them arriving to free us,” he said in the family carpet store in Maar Shurin, a town between the cities of Hama and Aleppo, where he resumed his activities. Although she suffered torture in prison and remains homeless (a bombing destroyed her, like hundreds of thousands of others in Syria), she has rebuilt her life and regained some of the weight she had lost. In fact, it is difficult to find him: he travels often because his family business exports to neighboring countries and the Gulf.
Benefiting from time to reflect, Mohamed now believes that family wealth (everyone knew that they were doing well financially) had more weight in his arrest than politics. His family sympathizes with the rebels and is from Idlib province, where the blitzkrieg that toppled Assad took place in secret for years, but two of his brothers were arrested in Daraa province in 2011, at the start of the revolt against Assad, and were released on payment of a fee. He fled to Lebanon.
In 2024, he said, he decided to move to Oman, for which he needed passports for his family. With virtually no fighting in much of Syria (where every procedure involved stealing a few bills), he had two options: pay $5,000 to a middleman or go to Damascus, then in regime hands. “I asked a few contacts and they told me nothing would happen to me, that I could go down and save the $5,000,” he says repentantly.
On the second day of their stay, a patrol surrounded the building and broke down the door. He ordered him and the friend who was with him to lie on the ground, he recalled. They were then handcuffed, covered with their faces and taken to an isolation cell, where “rats and worms were coming out of the toilets.” “I still remember the smell,” he adds.
“The first four days, I couldn’t sleep, because they took me all the time to question myself. They hit me and asked me what I was doing in Syria. The problem, he soon realized, was not him, but his older brother in Idlib. All the questions focused on him. “They asked me who was who in the different armed groups and I told them the truth, that I lived in Lebanon. »
Seeing that they were getting nothing, “they resorted to more brutal methods to make him confess,” he says. Above all, handcuff him to a pipe above your head and leave him hanging, without his feet touching the ground. “I was like that for 11 days. They only stopped when they brought food or decided to let me go to the bathroom. I wanted to go back to the cell. It was another form of torture, but less violent. They asked me who was who. And I would have loved to know, to have something to give them. I didn’t understand what they wanted.”
After a month, he was taken to a cell without toilets in the prison at Mezzeh Air Base in Damascus. This is how he remembers his arrival:
– What’s your name, kid?
– Ghazi Mohammed al Mohammed.
– No. Forget you have a name, kid. From now on, your name is 3006. So what’s your name, kid!?
– 3006.
He says he spent five months as a zombie. That he only realized how much weight he had lost once he was free. And he began to feel the voices of an imaginary being. “You know, like those things you see in the movies,” he illustrates.
This was little compared to the long years that thousands of people spent in a dictatorship with a hundred prisons (the most famous, Saidnaya, the great symbol of horror), an unknown number of secret detention centers and, even today, at least 130,000 people missing.
In November 2024, isolated from the rest of the world, he is completely unaware that an alliance of rebel militias is reversing the situation in the war, thus confirming the famous phrase attributed to the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin: “There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades pass.” Led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir El Sham (led by current interim president Ahmed El Shara, then Abu Mohamed Al Jolani), they seized regime territories with astonishing speed. It only lasted 11 days, between escapes and massive surrenders of soldiers and their allies, mainly Russia, Hezbollah and Iran.
He knows all this now. Then he simply started noticing “strange things” in the prison. “As a result, the one who brought us food didn’t come. Nor the one who accompanied us to the toilet. One day, for example, we heard gunshots coming from a place where they weren’t supposed to come.” He swings his foot nervously when he remembers.
On December 8, the jailers opened all the individual cells. “They chained us and gathered us in the corridor, while using sectarian expressions (they insulted us because we were Sunnis),” he describes. There were, he remembers with glassy eyes, 54 prisoners, arranged in two rows.
“I saw everything prepared for the execution. Even the barrels of diesel to blow up the site. I understood that this was the end.” Mohamed lowers his voice. It’s no secret to his brothers, but he doesn’t want to say it out loud: Islam condemns suicide and a taboo surrounds the wish for one’s own death, because only God decides the moment. “I had conflicting feelings. On the one hand I thought: ‘I have children, how will they live now’. On the other hand: ‘Enough, it’s time to rest’. Part of me was relieved that this was all over and I wondered what would happen to the soul when it separated from the body.”
Then he heard the sound of the helicopter landing; then, take off and, gradually, fade until it disappears. Very soon after, he heard screams coming from the area where the prey was located, like “Who are you! ? » or “God is greatest!” “I thought a lot about what happened in the middle,” he emphasizes. “I don’t think the soldiers had mercy. I think they just didn’t have time to kill us.”
The rebels arrived in their area and freed them. Mohamed “did not understand what was happening”, but he remembers “a very strong desire to leave”. He did it barefoot and almost naked. In fact, he explains, the clothes in which he appears in the famous video are not his, but those of families who gave them to him when they saw him like this in the street in the middle of winter. They also provided him with his first meal in freedom in months. They were just boiled eggs, but he found them “the most delicious” of his life. In the street, they started to tell him what was happening, and a relative who came to pick him up found him asking what happened next.
Today, Mohamed remembers that, during his months in prison, he abstracted himself from his terrible daily reality by imagining that his nephews would appear by surprise on a motorcycle to free him. Or that he has fulfilled the pillar of Islam of making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in his life. The first one wasn’t necessary. He made the second last June, during the last pilgrimage season and with the smile of someone who knows he is close to death.
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