For Syrian Women Released from Assad’s Prisons, a New Kind of Exile Awaits

This article is published in collaboration with Egab.

As the Assad regime’s grip on Syria weakened late last year, prison gates long shut for over a decade have begun to creak open. Thousands of detainees, many presumed dead by their families, stumbled into a freedom they never expected to see. Among them was Ahlam Issa, a pseudonym, released from the notorious Adra prison on the northeastern outskirts of Damascus, after serving one year of a ten-year sentence.

That single year, she told More to Her Story, was enough to “fracture her life beyond repair.”

Issa was arrested in the Damascus suburb of Saqba in mid-2023, just days after her husband was detained. The official charge was financing terrorism, but the real offense was receiving a money transfer through an unlicensed office, a necessity at the time due to the stark disparity between the official and black-market exchange rates.

Her husband was arrested on the same charge, and he did not survive detention. After only two months of severe torture at the notorious Branch 251, known as Al-Khatib, a detention and torture center located in the Muhajreen neighborhood in central Damascus, he died in custody. 

Issa recalls her time in detention as unrelenting “psychological torment.” Guards blindfolded her and placed her in solitary confinement for 10 days. She heard the screams of other prisoners being tortured, each cry a reminder that she could be next. Interrogations were always conducted at night, and they were violent, physically and verbally. 

Often, she returned to her cell, shattered, too traumatized to eat. 

“Sometimes I lived on nothing but a piece of bread for days,” she said.

After the Syrian uprising began in 2011, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad wielded arbitrary detention as a brutal “tool of violent repression,” according to a United Nations investigation released last year following interviews with 501 detainees. The scope of arrests broadened over time to include even minor economic offenses such as dealing in foreign currency. 

Women held in Assad’s prison system, including infamous facilities like Sednaya, dubbed a “human slaughterhouse,” faced brutal conditions, according to a peer-reviewed research article published in BMC Psychiatry. Survivors recounted widespread use of electric shocks, beatings, and sexual violence, including rape, forced miscarriages, and pregnancies resulting from assault. 

Many were coerced into confessions under threats to their families or forced to witness the torture of others, including relatives. Some women were raped in front of family members as a method of control and humiliation. Others died in custody from untreated injuries, illness, or outright execution. 

According to a December 2023 report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, at least 8,495 women were among an estimated 136,000 people imprisoned or disappeared by the regime since 2011, though the true numbers were likely higher.

Issa said prison was not just cold walls and cruel guards. It was also the rejection that awaited her outside. Her brother refused to speak to her, branding her a criminal. Her husband's family accused her of being the reason he had been arrested. Isolated and abandoned, she left Saqba with her children to start anew, alone.

Years before the regime’s unraveling, Amira Al-Tayyar, a nurse from the city of Hama, had escaped a personal inferno. An early supporter of the revolution, she secretly treated wounded protesters, a courageous act that led to her arrest three times. Her final stint behind bars in 2014 lasted nearly a year, during which time she suffered what she describes as “inhuman” abuse.

“They tortured me in ways that defy imagination,” Al-Tayyar said. 

She recalls being held in a cell alongside decomposing corpses and spending days in a mirrored room that pushed her to the brink of insanity. She lost her son to torture and sustained multiple fractures from repeated beatings. Dirty water left her with persistent health issues. Still, her deepest wound came after her release.

“My husband divorced me,” she said, “just because he assumed I had been raped in prison.”

Though the rest of her family welcomed her back like a hero, the constant whispering and probing questions took their toll. Eventually, she fled to Turkey, seeking a place to heal and escape the possibility of re-arrest. 

Even in exile, she was let down by those she thought would help. Non-governmental organizations and aid groups largely ignored her, and some who did reach out only sought to exploit her story. Despite everything, Al-Tayyar refuses to be silent. She shares her experience every opportunity she can, as does Maysoun Al-Labbad, another survivor.

Al-Labbad was arrested in Daraa and spent 18 months in Branch 215, another infamous military detention center in Damascus. She endured electric shocks, physical assaults, and the agony of watching a fellow inmate raped by six guards. 

“Their screams still haunt me,” she told More to Her Story. “The threat of harm to my children was a constant weapon used against me.”

After her release, Issa, like many others, was left to navigate her trauma alone. She thought that fellow revolutionaries and opposition groups would support her, but those hopes quickly faded. 

Disillusioned, she decided to leave Syria. After a grueling journey, she reached the United Kingdom and began using her voice to amplify the stories of others. 

“I want to make sure our voices are heard,” she said.

The same mission drives Mona Baraka, a political and humanitarian activist from the Qadam neighborhood near Damascus. An early protest organizer, she coordinated demonstrations and relayed news from besieged areas to media outlets. 

In 2012, she fled to western Ghouta, where she founded Shams al-Hayat, a grassroots initiative that provided communal kitchens, food baskets, and free medicine to local residents. 

Known by the alias Shams al-Dimashqiya, Baraka worked in secret for years, until she fell into a regime trap in Kisweh. She was arrested and transferred to Branch 215, where she spent two harrowing months.

“They used electric batons on me. They beat me with a stick embedded with nails until I passed out,” she recalled. “My hearing was damaged, and the bright interrogation lights left lasting problems with my vision.”

She also witnessed detainees dying under torture, scenes so haunting she still flinches when recalling them. 

“Food was another instrument of humiliation,” she said. “It was almost always raw potatoes, barely edible rice, and filthy facilities overrun with insects and rodents.”

Baraka was eventually transferred to Adra prison and released following negotiations between the Free Syrian Army and Assad’s intelligence services. But repeated harassment by security forces forced her to flee again – this time to Turkey. She now lives in Germany, where she continues her activism.

“The biggest challenge for a female detainee is being trapped in a world inside and outside prison that doesn’t reflect who she is,” she said. “You’re suddenly living among people with different values, different crimes, drugs, theft, things far from your own reality.”

She told of secretly communicating with young men in a neighboring cell by knocking on the wall. Through a tiny opening, she memorized their names and wrote them on her clothing, hoping to contact their families. Her plan was discovered. As punishment, the guards tore the garment off and subjected her to a brutal beating.

Most women who emerge from Syria’s prisons do not return as the people they once were. The wounds, especially for those who endured sexual violence, are deep and enduring. Many face harsh societal rejection on the outside that mirrors the abuse they suffered within.

Jamal Khalil Sobh, a psychologist and trauma specialist, explained that detainees often experience intense fear in captivity, fear for their lives and their bodies, amplified by the constant screams of fellow prisoners. Over time, they lose their sense of identity.

“In Syria’s prison, a woman is stripped of her name, her voice, her worth,” he said. “Everything is engineered to crush the self and force submission to inhumane conditions.”

For those who survive, freedom often brings a different kind of suffering: depression, agoraphobia, insomnia, emotional numbness, and recurring nightmares, especially among survivors of sexual assault.

“Rape is one of the most psychologically devastating traumas a person can experience,” said Sobh. “It can plunge women into isolation, grief, and lasting distrust of others. This is not something time alone can heal.”

He stressed that survivors need trauma-informed care and, crucially, unconditional acceptance from their families. 

“They may never fully overcome such trauma,” he added, “but they can learn to live with it, to reframe it. The fact that they are alive, that they made it out, is itself a victory.”