'We ate and drank from the same bucket used as toilet': Sedanaya prison survivor to THE WEEK

Abu Zaed doesn't lift his head up. His eyes face the ground as he begins to talk with me, lying on a narrow bed in a small room inside his brother's house tucked in a small lane on the outskirts of Qamishli in Northeast Syria. Clad in a light-coloured winter coat and a quilt wrapped around his legs, Zaed is a frail 32-year-old man with a feeble voice.

An uneasy silence prevails inside the room besides the water tickling sound from the heater to keep him warm. My translator calls him, "Abu Zaed." Zaed is unresponsive as if nothing is happening around him. Once again he calls him "Zaed". This time his eyes opened up a bit as if he had heard someone saying something. Zaed has almost forgotten his name. For him, he is number 125.

It is just 40 days since Zaed had returned from the Sedanaya prison, dubbed the “human slaughterhouse" in Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime. A Kurd from Qamishli, Zaed was finishing his mandatory military service in the Syrian Defence in 2018, when the Syrian revolution took a different turn. After a two-day long fight in Kobani, Zaed decided to quit the service, left his weapons and fled the place. He and his four friends slept in the road, ate from the garbage before finding their way out of Kobani. But he was recaptured by the military and taken away by the authorities. He was taken to a the notorious Palestine Branch in Damascus for three months, he was eventually transferred to Sednaya prison. Initially, he believed that if he obeyed the orders, he will be released. But Zaed never knew he was inside the Sedanaya prison and would undergo the most traumatic days of his life. Every day, he was beaten with whips, belts and hurt with cigarette butts on his private parts. 

Initially, he was lodged in a 40 cm room which had a toilet closet. The roof was so low that he could only sit inside with his head facing down the floor. Everyday he was fed with a piece of bread and a half potato. There was no water to drink. Later he was taken into a little bigger room with nine more inmates. He never knew who they were as they were forbidden to talk to each other. "The authorities will beat us to death if they hear anyone talking," Zaed recalls. The women were beaten, raped in front of the inmates and their children and some of them were burnt with acid.

His voice trembles as he recounts the horrors he witnessed: “We were 10 people crammed into a tiny cell. There was no space to stretch. We ate and drank from the same bucket used as a toilet.”

When he refused to eat once from the bucket, he was struck 150 times with an electric cable. There are injuries and scars all over his legs and other body parts. 

Zaed was in love with a Christian girl before he was taken to the prison. He wanted to marry her, even when her father refused because he was a Kurdish Muslim. To keep himself alive in the prison, every day he used to run his thoughts about her and the life he wanted to live with her. Sometimes he imagined cooking food and eating it on a large plate by sharing with his brothers and parents. When I asked him, what he wants now, he says, "I want to get out of Syria. Find me a way out." And again when I asked him what he wants to do by getting out of Syria, his brother shows me two A4 sheets with pencil sketches. The first one is the profile face of a beautiful girl with tears rolling down her eyes, the second is a little boy and a girl watching a picturesque neighbourhood." Next I will sketch the face of my Christian lover girl and our child." Zaed says.

Zaed has managed to travel in a bus, walk and crawl to reach his brother's house in Qamishli only to know that his parents are dead, his brother's family separated and one other brother fleeing to Netherlands as a refugee. "I am getting him the medical support. He continues to nightmares every day. I don't know what is the way out," says his brother Lucman.