The Assad regime cannot live without the very pillar of its existence: the gulag. This is the case made by Jaber Baker and Uğur Ümit Üngör in their book Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System, published in October 2023.
In this meticulously researched and eye-opening work, the authors argue that the carceral system built by the Assads straddles the “gray zone” between concentration camp and prison. “Its scale, levels of violence, and impact on society transcends a regular penal system,” posing a threat to the stability of Syrian society and standing in the way of any alternative future for the country.
This book decidedly centers the voices of former detainees and their subtle methods of subsistence and resistance. This grounded approach is not surprising, given the background of the authors: Baker is an ex-detainee himself, who was held in a Syrian military prison for two years and now works as a human rights activist. Üngör, a Dutch-Turkish academic, historian, and professor, specializes in Holocaust studies and mass violence. Together, the co-authors are well-positioned to expose what are widely recognized as some of the deadliest prisons in the Middle East, if not the world.
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Employing the term “gulag” – a Soviet term that refers to a network of “camps, prisons, transit centers, secret police, informers, spies, interrogators, torturers, and executioners” J. Baker and U. Üngör, Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023, p7 – Baker and Üngör trace the gradual increase and expansion of the Assad regime’s political imprisonment system, which reached its peak following Hafez al Assad’s internal coup in 1970. During this transition, imprisonment gradually became used as a “tool of governance.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p4 Hafez al Assad developed an elaborate carceral network composed of both a formal prison system (military prisons, civil prisons, and secret prisons) as well as intelligence prisons.
The book begins with the harrowing personal accounts of detainees. There is the story of Akram, a young Syrian man who, in his last year of university, was arrested on the streets of Damascus and beaten all the way to the torture dungeon at a detention center at Mezze military airport. There he remained for three months. His crime was simply having liked a social media post criticizing the Assad regime. There is Mohammad Qannas, who was arrested and tortured for a dream in which he detained a member of the army, killed him, and dumped his body in a well. After telling his friends about this dream, one of them wrote a report to intelligence which led to Qannas’ arrest. In a similar vein, Mutayyam al-Taweel was arrested for commenting against Assad’s regime at his workplace. R.A.S., a young Kurdish singer, was arrested every time he played the tembûr, the Kurdish lute, or sang Kurdish songs during a wedding or a secret Newroz celebration. Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p90
The intelligence apparatus of the Syrian regime is clearly quite sophisticated and predominantly depends on the “security report” or taqrir, which has become the regime’s “most prominent form of intelligence intervention in the daily lives of the Syrian people.” Through this mechanism, the regime consolidated its control over civil society: “Everyone was watching everyone in the republic of fear and tyranny, and that’s what made the regime last for decades.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p116
Immersed in the testimonies of former detainees, it is easy to forget that the setting of these accounts is not the “prison” itself but rather a larger, monstrous creation by Assad: the security and intelligence departments’ “unofficial” detention centers. Only later in the book is the reader introduced to the “formal” prison system in Syria, making excruciatingly clear the purpose and role of imprisonment in Syria: to “protect the Assad regime from internal danger” and destroy any threat to the regime’s power. Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p147
Penetrating Syria’s Gulag
The Assads’ prison system is particularly well-known for being one of the most elusive, impenetrable, and inaccessible in the world. How, then, did Baker and Üngör make visible the reality of life behind prison walls? The plurality of writing styles used in Syrian Gulag, as well as the inclusion of creative research practices, is an inventive methodological choice that allowed the authors to aid the reader’s comprehension of this horrific labyrinthine system.
For example, the book incorporates a multitude of different sources, including the memories, dreams, and life histories of survivors of Syrian prisons; film, podcasts, and TV shows; memoirs and poetry; and leaked regime archives and photos. Vignettes of stories from former prisoners are interspersed throughout the book, helping channel the focus of the reader on the voices and experiences of prisoners. For example, one recalls the alarming scarcity of medical care which structured everyday life within detention centers, while another illustrates the ruthless cruelty of the prison guards who had gotten into the habit of putting their military boots, covered in dirt and animal waste, in the detainees’ food bowls. Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p187
By combining such a variety of sources, voices, and writing styles, the book captures the minute embodied, sensory, and habituated aspects of carceral experience that are otherwise overlooked, as well as the personal stories that are forgotten.
Suppression and Indoctrination
What is life like inside the gulag? Conditions inside the regime’s assortment of detention centers, jails, and prisons are nothing short of completely atrocious. Aside from the brutal torture tactics deployed in these spaces – depicted in a set of drawings midway through the book – the complete absence of basic living standards in the prisons seems to function as an added layer of torture-by-neglect. Medical care, food allocations, bathrooms, heating and ventilation are severely lacking in carceral spaces across the country. This is accompanied by overcrowding and congestion, leading to several health catastrophes such as epidemics of lice, scabies, and diarrhea.
A principal aspect of Syria’s gulag is its torture apparatus. Developed over the past half-century, the torture methods used against detainees are beyond belief and beyond expression. The book relays the story of MAK, who “suffered from a lifetime of amnesia as a result of being tortured, even after he fled to Europe.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p31 Former detainees like MAK are afflicted by a “certain speechlessness,” as the authors put it – the violence they endured was “literally unspeakable and they remain at a loss of words.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p31
After exhaustively describing the regime’s vast assortment of torture mechanisms, the book answers the question percolating in the back of the reader’s mind: Why? “Why did the Assad regime set up such a huge prison industry? Why does the regime torture people so violently and massively?”
The answers to both of these questions are interconnected. The regime’s gulag, with imprisonment and torture at its core, is geared towards one supreme goal: the extermination of dissent. “The regime aimed to remove every inkling of genuine politics from society, because it was and is at war with society”, Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p313 write the authors. In the same vein, while we frequently understand torture as a barbaric and violent mechanism to obtain information, Baker and Üngör instead stipulate that torture is meant to impose information. Torture is meant to send a terrorizing message to the Syrian population and accordingly deter it from conducting any form of opposition politics.
The Tortured and the Torturer
How is it that people come to occupy the role of “torturer” in Assad’s gulag? The testimonies of torture from former detainees are spine-chilling, exposing an absolute and unfathomable ruthlessness in the jailers. The authors explain that “killing or torturing for Assad was a form of relationship management: the more you torture, the more you demonstate to others that you support him.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p315
At the same time, for mukhabarat officers, the detention system is “as much a repressive tool as it is a lucrative business.” Countless stories litter the book detailing how family members of detainees frantically scrape together money to “bribe intelligence officers who can help them gain information” about their loved ones. Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p90 The Syrian gulag is a “form of rent-seeking” – as the father of one Syrian detainee said: “If you have a detainee [in your family], it means that the same officers who are responsible for your pain enjoy your money.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p315
But it is also worth considering how imprisonment engenders these particularly violent and brutalizing relationships between torturer and tortured, incarcerator and incarcerated, prisoner and warden. The order of the prison is specifically designed to “break the relationship between the prisoner and the warden.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p84 This is accomplished through specific rituals and processes, such as the “welcome reception,” when the warden beats the new detainee upon their arrival at the prison. The warden is “prohibited from asking any questions or knowing any details about the detainee” – the detainee is not even referred to by name, but by number. A former detainee, Yohanna, says: “I was placed in cell number 42, and from that day on, my name became the cell number. No one called me by my name.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p41
All of these factors contribute to an atmosphere of anonymity and dehumanization – of the detainee, but also of the warden, whom the authors effectively depict as a cog in a machine. The detainee’s anonymity enables the warden, officers, and guards to see them as less-than-human and proceed in their merciless and mindless torture, perhaps convincing themselves that the detainee deserves it.
Understanding how the prison order strives to break the relationship between warden and prisoner allows us to conceptualize the prison as a social relationship that produces such learned behaviors and violent subjects. Prison thus emerges as a way of relating to one another, rather than a distant, far-away, and abstract system or institution.
Carceral Expansion
Throughout the book, the authors show the gulag as a comprehensive system that encompasses various arms of the Assad regime, including its military, air force, intelligence and security departments as well as its operations of disappearance, torture, imprisonment, and execution. In so doing, the authors effectively illustrate how incarceration functions in relation to other systems and practices of state violence. One important way in which Baker and Üngör do this is by shedding light on the Assad regime’s “omnipotent” power, made possible through a highly complex and authoritarian intelligence system which enables it to usurp any other state institution and abuse public resources. Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p285
What Baker and Üngör are exposing here is the transference and reproduction of carceral power across a variety of societal institutions and spaces. The Syrian regime excels at this process of carceral expansion, particularly during times of unrest when the influx of political prisoners puts prisons at overcapacity. In the 1980s in Hama, and after 2011, the regime used “nearby schools, military headquarters, government buildings, mosques, buildings of trade, agricultural associations, and sports stadiums” to temporarily detain prisoners. Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p286 Carcerality thus emerges as a modality for the exercise of power that is expansive and malleable: it is creatively molded and reformulated to suit the objectives of the regime while additionally being outsourced to private parties, agencies, and/or individuals who act on behalf of the regime.
Baker and Üngör present the prison system as central to understanding the Syrian regime’s power structure, suggesting it as a crucial starting point for analyzing how power works in the country. The regime’s employment of different carceral sites, its outsourcing of incarceration to third parties like militias, and its encroachment on public institutions, all attest to the centrality of carcerality in understanding the Syrian regime and its power.
In the Heart of the Death Machine
“In the heart of this burning desert prison, tales of resistance and life were created,” write the authors about Palmyra Prison. Despite the brutality that shapes life in Syria’s prisons, Syrian Gulag is also scattered with stories from ex-detainees that showcase how prisoners cooperated to create liveable zones amidst their captivity.
Baker and Üngör describe how prisoners in Syrian jails, particularly Saydnaya Military Prison, developed creative ways to cope with their harsh reality. Despite the nightmarish conditions, detainees would organize cultural activities such as storytelling sessions, singing, poetry matches, foreign language lessons, and acting plays; they would make costumes from old clothes, prison blankets, or bedsheets. In Palmyra Prison, there were “lessons in Arabic, English, and French; lessons in history, geography, and chemistry.” Prisoners would compete in poetry, chess, dice, and physical exercises. These weren’t merely diversions; as one former detainee put it, they helped “create an integrated life in the heart of the death machine.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p204
The ingenuity and creativity of the detainees is truly extraordinary to read. They crafted items from available materials, including bone, wood, olive, or date pits, turning them into photo frames, beads and necklaces. Sometimes, prisoners even made musical instruments, such as the oud, and remarkably, wooden artifacts were sometimes used to “smuggle letters and literary works written by detainees to the outside.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p218 A quote by a former prisoner sums up this atmosphere of creativity:
“We exchanged our experiences and knowledge. We conversed a lot. We reviewed our political experiences at every stop. We ran oral courses in presentation, poetry, languages, economics, and engineering. We learned how to improve food and behavior. We created means of entertainment: theater, pantomime, charades of folk proverbs, chess games, cast table, barjis. We nicknamed each other.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p195
The poor prison conditions pushed prisoners to make up for the shortfalls in their own ways. The detainees “made power switches from the plastic parts of used injections” and designed refrigerators out of a drip system made of plastic boxes and burlap bags. Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p222 Wooden boxes were turned into a kitchen, cartons into cabinets, and buckets into lamp shades. Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p258
Because of the grim health reality in many of these prisons, where the hygienic situation is catastrophic and medical care is lacking, inmates had to depend on the doctors imprisoned alongside them. The detained doctors invented their own methods and tools, using “any available metal tools as surgical tools to burst abscesses and boils” while also developing dentistry tools, all of which were urgently needed. Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p201 Military doctors were only there as a formality, so prisoners fully relied on detained doctors to gradually build their own health system. “We took care of ourselves,” elaborates a former detainee, “Our fellow detained doctors prescribed us medicines that we bought through a special invoice. The life of cooperation allowed us to have a central pharmacy that provided the necessary medical resources for us and the rest of the prison population.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p221
Breaking and Building Bonds
Imprisonment, in general, functions to sever the relationships of the prisoner. Aside from being forcibly separated from their family, friends, and community, Syria’s prisons achieve this deprivation of care and relationship in many other ways. Several prison branches adopted mechanisms that built an “immediate barrier” between the warden and the detainee,” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p119 created an atmosphere of panic, fear, and distrust. Furthermore, prisoners were also regularly moved between different dormitories or cells to “ensure the breaking of any personal relationships amongst detainees.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p180
Despite this reality, detainees were able to forge relationships with one another that bypassed the regime’s goal of fostering animosity. In the regime’s civil prisons, prisoners set up several projects to help one another: they organized financial support for detainees who did not receive visits by preparing meals and selling them to prisoners who had money. They also established a literary course for women who were illiterate. Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p277
One story was especially moving. Towards the end of the book, the authors discuss the women’s civil prisons, explaining that many women were incarcerated while they were pregnant and were forced to give birth inside prison. Prison conditions were particularly difficult for these pregnant or postpartum incarcerated mothers: they did not receive adequate medical care or support, and their children, who often remained in prison for months or even years, suffered from malnutrition and neglect. One former detainee recounts how the prison administration refused to take her to the hospital when her contractions began. The judicial prisoners quickly mobilized to advocate for her.
“They started violently knocking on the big, black main prison gate. The noise they made was massive and loud,” she recalls. “This confrontation forced the administration to take responsibility and transport me to the hospital.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p282 She continues to say how the joy of her fellow prisoners “took away the pain” of childbirth in prison. “All fellow inmates celebrated the birth. Each prisoner made me her own birth recovery food according to the traditions of her region. My child became the joy of the prison.” Baker and Üngör, Syrian Gulag, p282
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Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System is an unforgettable book that presents the voices of Syria’s most forgotten population: the detainees who suffered disappearance, torture, and lifelong trauma under Assad’s torturers. Baker and Üngör comprehensively map the Assad regime’s carceral web, importantly directing our attention to the significant role played by the intelligence and security departments of the regime. Through this, the authors outline how the Assad regime built a complex carceral apparatus to safeguard their brutal hold on Syrian society, using torture as a tool to test the loyalty of prison staff and to threaten those who dare to dissent. Yet in spite of it all, detainees insist on practicing care and innovating solutions to ensure their survival.
The authors remind us to think of the flip side of the story, the “photo negative of the history of the Syrian Gulag,” – the countless victims who died horrific deaths, or who were too traumatized to express themselves properly. We have to imagine the depth of stories untold, repressed, and unremembered.”
I find this the book’s most important message – a message of remembrance, an insistence not to forget the impact of Assad’s violent encroachment on human life in the regime’s war against Syrian society. As Milan Kundera wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
