I met my maternal uncle, Burhan, for the first time in 2018.
At the time, I was living in Istanbul and he had taken refuge with his family in another Turkish city. After we helped him obtain the permits he needed to travel to Istanbul as a refugee, my parents also traveled there to meet him.
My mother had not seen her brother since 1980, since before she left Syria forever, got married, and raised me and my siblings far from her family, in a foreign country. So when she finally hugged him for the first time in 38 years, after having spent half of those years not knowing if he was dead or alive, it was a sight to behold. As they hugged each other to try to make up for the many lost decades, it seemed as if we were all frozen in time. For a fleeting second, I was able to see my mother as the hopeful young woman she once was, before Syria's brutal regime uprooted her and devastated her family, killing many of her relatives and scattering survivors across the world. .
My uncle was arrested and sent to Syria's infamous Tadmur prison in 1980, just weeks after the most horrendous massacre in its history, in which hundreds of political prisoners were executed in a single day.
He remained in that death factory in the desert city of Palmyra, in eastern Syria, under the most inhuman conditions and suffering the worst torture imaginable, for 17 long years. Burhan was finally freed in 1997, abandoned on the side of the road without any explanation, still not completely free. The regime prevented her from traveling outside Syria and meeting his relatives for another 15 years. After the revolution broke out, he finally managed to move his family to Türkiye. He, however, never truly recovered from the trauma he experienced in Tadmur.
“Death surrounded us in Tadmur,” he told me in one of our first conversations. “Little pieces of flesh and blood of the [June 27] massacre were in the cells upon our arrival. And there they remained, while our friends died around us, due to the torture we suffered and the lack of medical care.
Today marks the 44th anniversary of the Tadmur prison massacre, the immediate aftermath of which my uncle witnessed. Every year we commemorate this day to remind the world of the Assad regime’s unending brutality and blatant impunity and to renew our calls for justice and accountability. Almost half a century has passed since that fateful day, but no one has faced any responsibility for the June 27 massacre, or for the killings and torture that took place in Tadmur for many decades before and after.
How did the massacre arise?
The Tadmur prison massacre of June 27, 1980, was a retaliation for an assassination attempt against Hafez al-Assad, then president of Syria and father of current president Bashar al-Assad. The regime blamed the attempt on the Muslim Brotherhood and sought to avenge it by attacking imprisoned members of the group and alleged sympathizers.
That morning, under the orders of Rifaat al-Assad, Hafez's brother, about 100 soldiers from the Defense Brigades descended on Tadmur from helicopters. They separated suspected Muslim Brotherhood supporters from other political prisoners and then massacred them with machine guns and hand grenades, leaving none of them alive.
The other political prisoners were forced to listen in horror to the carnage.
An estimated 1,000 prisoners were killed within an hour and their bodies were dumped in a mass grave outside the prison. Syrian human rights groups are still working to create a full list of victims.
This was an atrocity committed in the utmost secrecy. News of it did not reach the outside world until eight months later, when several Syrian soldiers who took part in the massacre were captured in Jordan during an attempt to assassinate the Jordanian prime minister and confessed to their crimes.
Jordan made his confessions public and recorded them in an official communication addressed to the president of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in March 1981.
Today, as we remember this massacre on its 44th anniversary, we remember not only those who were massacred on June 27, 1980, but also those, like my uncle, who suffered the wrath of the Assad regime in Tadmur and other Syrian prisons in the years that followed.
The Syrian Human Rights Committee (SHRC) estimates that between 17,000 and 25,000 prisoners were killed in Tadmur between 1980 and 2001, the year it was finally dismantled.
Of course, the abuse and torture of political prisoners in Assad's Syria did not end with the closure of Tadmur.
Since 2011, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) estimates that at least 15,383 people, including 199 children, were tortured to death in Syrian prisons. Additionally, at least 157,287 people were forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime and other groups involved in Syria's devastating conflict in the same period. The Syrian regime is believed to be responsible for around 86 percent of these cases of enforced disappearances.
waiting for justice
“There are no words to describe what we saw, what happened to us, what was inflicted on us in Tadmur,” my uncle Burhan told me during our first meeting. It was clear that his inability to describe what happened to him was not due to the shock and trauma endured, but rather a genuine inability to find the words and expressions to accurately describe the sheer horror of his memories. He was simply unable to describe to the world the magnitude of the atrocities he witnessed and demand accountability for those responsible.
However, my father, Walid, tried to do just that. A former detainee himself, who was tortured in Assad's prisons and left with a broken back and visible scars all over his body, he dedicated his life to exposing the reality of Syria's prisons and holding the Assad family accountable for what they did to the Syrian people. .
In the late 1990s, after Rifaat al-Assad fell out with his brother and moved to Europe, my father repeatedly tried to take him to court for his role in the Tadmur massacre and other atrocities. He spent years giving testimony about Rifaat’s numerous crimes against humanity before courts in Spain and France. However, courts in both countries refused to take action, citing a lack of jurisdiction.
In 2003, SHRC was called to court to testify against Rifaat, in a case he initiated in a Paris court against activist Nizar Nayyouf. Nayyouf, who had served nine years in Tadmur, accused Rifaat al-Assad of being responsible for the Tadmur massacre live on Al Jazeera Arabic, prompting Syria's former vice president to take him to court for defamation.
The court ultimately ruled in favor of Nayyouf, but al-Assad did not have to pay any significant price for the crimes he committed, nor for his brazen attempt to use the French judiciary to try to silence his critics.
To this day, neither Rifaat nor any other senior member of the Assad regime has faced any responsibility for the pain and trauma they inflicted, and continue to inflict, on detainees in Syria's prisons.
In March 2024, the Swiss Attorney General's Office accused Rifaat al-Assad of “ordering murders, acts of torture, cruel treatment and illegal detentions” carried out during the Hama massacre in 1982, as well as the Tadmur prison massacre. from 1980.
There is no reason to expect that Rifaat al-Assad, 86 and believed to be back in Syria, will ever appear before a judge in Switzerland and pay a real price for the crimes he perpetrated against the Syrian people. However, the indictment provides respite to his surviving victims and the families of those he massacred, and shows us that the world is finally recognizing the damage he and the rest of the regime inflicted on us over the years. .
In 2015, ISIL destroyed the Tadmur prison, a major victory for the Assad regime that erased crucial evidence of the June 27 massacre and decades of horrific atrocities.
This grim legacy began with the 1,000 prisoners murdered on June 27, 1980, followed by tens of thousands more over the next 21 years in Tadmur, and continues with hundreds of thousands in Syrian prisons to this day.
We will never forget what happened in that desert prison, nor what is happening in the present, and we will continue our quest to bring those responsible to justice.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
