As rescue workers race to free any remaining prisoners from Syria’s notorious Sednaya prison, a Sudanese man in neighbouring Lebanon says he believes his father and brother-in-law, forcibly disappeared years ago by Bashar al-Assad’s administration, may be among the detainees.
Ahmed Abdelrazzaq does not know if the two men, whom he says are UN-registered Sudanese refugees, are still alive.
His story adds another nationality - alongside Syrians, Palestinians and Lebanese - to the thousands of men, women and children once penned in at Sednaya, a prison complex so horrific that Amnesty International dubbed it the “Human Slaughterhouse” in a 2017 report.
Abdelrazzaq, 35, was born in the Yarmouk refugee camp just south of Damascus to Sudanese refugees who had sought safety in Syria prior to his birth. He now lives in Lebanon, after fleeing the Syrian war a decade ago.
It was around that time, in 2014, that Syrian authorities arrested Abdelrazzaq along with his then 61-year-old father, Al-Tijjani Abdelrazzaq. He remembers the time well: “It was the first day of Eid al-Adha".
According to Ahmed, authorities took them to Branch 235, also known as the Palestine Branch, a feared prison run until recent days by Syria’s military intelligence. Videos emerged on Sunday of prisoners leaving the now liberated Palestine Branch, running dazed down a Damascus street.
Those scenes were unthinkable a matter of days ago, as Palestine Branch was known for severe torture, including the penetration of prisoner’s body orifices with broken glass bottles. The complex reportedly housed non-Syrians among its prisoners, according to the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a network of memorial sites that mapped prisons across Syria.
Ahmed Abdelrazzaq and his family are now homeless in Beirut (Raghed Waked/MEE)
"); top: -15px; left: 0px;">Authorities had arrested the father and son on “accusations of funding terrorism,” Ahmed tells Middle East Eye, denying the charge. “We stayed there for maybe 53 days - after that, we don’t know anything” about what happened to Al-Tijjani. The two were separated, after which Ahmed was taken “from branch to branch".
At one point, the family heard that Al-Tijjani had been transferred to the Adra prison near Damascus and then to Sednaya, which is also near the Syrian capital.
Ahmed’s brother-in-law, named Yassin Mahmoud al-Obeid, was also kidnapped by Syrian authorities, in 2012, Ahmed says. “They took him from Humeira in Sayyidet Zeinab [southern Damascus]".
“Last we heard about him, he was in Sednaya.”
Tortured in prison
It is a fate that is especially terrifying for Ahmed, who told MEE he was badly tortured in prison.
“This is something that hurts my heart deeply, memories of a time I wished each day that I could die. I said: ‘Please Lord, please Lord, please Lord, give me death.’ It wasn’t just physical abuse, but psychological, too. Things that shouldn’t happen to human beings,” he said.
Ahmed said that being Sudanese had no bearing on how the prison guards treated him. “On the inside, it doesn’t matter where you came from. You’re a number, and that’s it.”
“In the end, I could barely walk.”
It is unclear how many other Sudanese citizens may have been arbitrarily imprisoned under the rule of Bashar and previously his father Hafez al-Assad, Wadih al-Asmar, head of the Lebanese Center for Human Rights, said.
Asmar’s group has for decades worked to document the existence of such forcibly disappeared Lebanese citizens, eventually compiling a list of 623 men whose families believe their loved ones vanished into Assad’s prisons in Syria.
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“But until now I haven’t heard about any Sudanese”, Asmar told MEE, referring to the prisoners now released across Syria.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which documents forced displacement cases, and the UNHCR’s Middle East spokesperson did not respond to Middle East Eye’s questions about Sudanese citizens in Syria by time of publication.
Ahmed, too, has so far had little luck in finding any news of his father and brother-in-law.
Though he has family members still in Syria seeking out information as to their fate, here in Lebanon he is struggling simply to get through each day.
Israel’s military escalation on Lebanon in late September forced him, his pregnant wife and four children to flee their home along the southern border. Though they found shelter at the Sudanese Club, a social club in Beirut, he says they are now being kicked out.
“We found a home to stay in, but we have no money. We’re going to be living on the street.”
