A Syrian woman holds a photo of activist Razan Zeitouneh during a funeral procession for Mazen al-Hamada, an activist who was killed in Sednaya prison, Damascus, 12 December 2024 (Hanna Davis/MEE)
Women's underwear lay on top of a pile of clothing stacked outside a massive freezer where the bodies of dead prisoners had been stored.
Not long ago, the undergarments had most likely been stripped off women prisoners killed in Syria’s notorious Sednaya prison, known as the “human slaughterhouse”.
“Here, there was very brutal cruelty, in every sense,” said Khaled Mohammad al-Khan, an opposition fighter from the country’s southern governorate of Daraa. “It was disgusting, slaughter, hanging, and rape,” he said, as he showed Middle East Eye around the prison compound.
Khan was at Sednaya prison on 8 December, when hundreds of inmates were released following the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s administration. Among those released were dozens of women and girls, he said.
The rebel fighter recalled an unmarried 16-year-old girl, with five young children, whom he spoke with briefly just as she was leaving. “They didn’t believe they were leaving the prison, they were afraid. ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ they asked us,” he said.
Khan said when he first arrived he saw about 50 women on the prison’s surveillance cameras, in the compound’s underground cells.
Before the downfall of Assad, thousands of women were being held in an infamous network of prisons, where inmates were known to be subject to ruthless forms of torture, beaten, and deprived of food, water, medicine and basic sanitation.
Female prisoners face a unique set of challenges, including rampant sexual violence and social stigmatisation upon their release.
‘Women as a weapon of war’
Since the start of the 2011 revolution, women have had a strong voice calling for political change across Syria.
The Assad government arbitrarily detained many of these activists, subjected them to torture and sexual abuse, and sometimes kept them longer to exert pressure on their families or deter their relatives from joining anti-government protests, EuroMed Rights, a human rights protection group, said in a 2015 report.
“Like other conflicts, Syria's protracted turmoil has seen the gradual instrumentalisation of women as a weapon of war and terror,” the rights organisation said.
A man walks past empty cells at the Sednaya prison, north of the Syrian capital Damascus, on 15 December 2024 (AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) reported in February 2024 that at least 10,197 women were still detained or forcibly disappeared by parties to the conflict and controlling forces in Syria.
The vast majority - or at least 83 percent - of these women were arrested by Assad's forces. Others had been arrested or kidnapped by armed opposition groups such as the Syrian National Army (SNA), Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
SNHR also recorded 115 women who died of torture, 95 at the hands of Assad government forces. Former female detainees interviewed in the report detailed multiple forms of torture, such as electric shock, heavy beating, harassment and being hung from the ceiling for long periods of time.
Psychological toll
In her small office in Jaramana neighbourhood of Damascus, Milana Zin Aldin spoke of her efforts to provide psychological services to hundreds of women who were incarcerated in Assad’s prisons and then released - work she had done secretly until just about two weeks ago when Assad fell.
The 37-year-old therapist pulled out a small agenda, where she had recorded the names and schedules of her patients. The names of those who had been detained were absent.
She motioned to her forehead, noting that she had memorised these patients’ schedules or recorded them in a secret notebook kept hidden at home.
“Keeping information in my office would have been dangerous for me and my patients,” Zin Aldin told MEE. “You were viewed as interacting with an opposer and a terrorist, and so consequently, you’d be under suspicion as well,” she said.
Syrian therapist Milana Zin Aldin speaks to Middle East Eye in her Damascus office (Hanna Davis/MEE)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">“Health workers didn’t always have the courage to receive these cases or provide them with help because simply a lot were arrested just because they were providing a medical service,” she said.
Now, even though the Assad government is gone, the fear of speaking up still lingers. Zin Aldin leaned over her desk and in a faint whisper said: “My patients still speak like this.”
“Currently, there is nothing that should make them whisper. Nothing that forbids them from talking, at least in this room,” she said.
“But the feeling of being watched, the fear, the worry, and the mistrust between one another is sadly still present. It’s buried so deep and even deep in us as individuals.”
‘I don’t know if I’m a good woman or a dirty woman’
Zin Aldin said that all of her women patients who had been detained were subjected to at least one form of sexual violence.
One young woman - who was one of those released from Sednaya on 8 December - was raped, got pregnant and miscarried during the seven years she was imprisoned.
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“When they raped her, she lost herself,” Zin Aldin said, “She told me, ‘I don’t know if I’m a good woman or a dirty woman’. These words are stuck in my mind.”
She now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic depression, the therapist said.
The woman was just 22, a university student from a suburb in Damascus, when government forces arrested her at a checkpoint and accused her of “working against the state” and “conspiring with terrorists”.
She was then transferred between multiple prisons, including Syria’s notorious intelligence jail, known as the “Palestine Branch”.
Zin Aldin is currently treating three women who were recently released from Sednaya and their cases are all unfortunately similar, she said.
SNHR documented no fewer than 10,060 incidents of sexual violence against women in detention between March 2011 and the end of December 2023, including 7,576 perpetrated by Assad government forces.
‘I worry they will become victims again’
After being released, women and girls often face immense stigma from their communities, related largely to the chance that they had fallen victim to sexual violence.
“The biggest fear for me is what the community and family’s reaction will be to this girl who was in jail,” Zin Aldin said. “I worry they will become victims again.”
“Men [detainees] are heroes, but women, they are not, they are dirty,” she said. “There is great tension within our society over women’s modesty, body, maternity, and dignity.”
'The biggest fear for me is what the community and family’s reaction will be to this girl who was in jail'
- Milana Zin Aldin, therapist
In some cases Zin Aldin is aware of, families have killed their daughters as a result of their sexual assault in prison, claiming the victim has brought “dishonour” to the family name.
In other cases, husbands have divorced their wives following their release, or abandoned them.
Sometimes, in fear of these repercussions, women avoid returning to their families altogether, Zin Aldin said.
State media also publicly denounced women activists and detainees as “terrorists”, “saboteurs” and even “sex slaves” for “terrorist groups”, contributing to the negative image of female prisoners.
“Sadly, these perceptions lead to dangerous behaviours and negative attitudes that affect former women detainees’ reputation and relationships with the environment, and for that reason it can be seen as a form of violence,” SNHR said in its report.
“The arrest of women is a real horror,” said Shireen Saeed, 40, a lawyer who works with the Prisoners Care Association based in the coastal Syrian city of Latakia.
'The arrest of women is a real horror... The ones who left prison have huge psychological scars, and need rehabilitation in order to live again'
- Shireen Saeed, lawyer
“Today, we need justice and support for these women. The ones who left [prison] have huge psychological scars, and need rehabilitation in order to live again. This is one of the challenges we face today in Syria,” she told MEE at a busy Damascus cafe.
Under the close watch of the regime, Saeed said her work with the Prisoners Care Association was limited to helping families locate loved ones who had been forcibly disappeared. Anything beyond that would put herself and the organisation in danger, she said.
However, locating the disappeared was extremely difficult. Saaed said the costs were exorbitant - up to hundreds of thousands of dollars - for lawyers to enter the prison facilities and access information on detainees.
“There are people who sold their homes and all of their belongings just to get any information, not even for [their loved ones] to get released, just to know if they’re present, or not,” she said.
Justice for the disappeared
After the conversation, MEE left the cafe with Saeed to attend the funeral ceremony for Syrian activist Mazen al-Hamada. Hamada’s body was found on 9 December among others killed in Sednaya prison.
During the procession, hundreds gathered to celebrate the fall of Assad, but also to call for justice for those still missing.
Posters with portraits of forcibly disappeared people floated above the crowd. Saeed said she knew two of them, human rights defenders Razan Zaitouneh and Samira Khalil, who were kidnapped in Douma in 2013 by the armed rebel group Jaysh al-Islam.
As the crowds gathered, demonstrators simultaneously raised the posters in the air, and tears welled in Saeed’s eyes .
“The Syrian people are one! Free Syria,” the crowds chanted, and Saeed joined in.
