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Inside Syria's Gulag

An exclusive firsthand account from a Syrian who was detained in a state prison in Aleppo.
Syrian detainees, who were arrested over participation in the protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime,are seen walking at the Damascus police leadership building to sign their release papers July 11, 2012. The Syrian government said it had released a total of 275 prisoners, who had not been involved in homicide. A portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is seen at right.  REUTERS/Khaled al- Hariri (SYRIA - Tags: POLITICS CIVIL UNREST CRIME LAW) - RTR34TZJ
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“Prison is for real men” is an old saying we have in Syria, and one that I kept repeating to myself as I paced anxiously back and forth across my small, dingy cell in an almost hypnotic trance of meditation. Time seemed to melt and mold in that dungeon; it was an abstract entity that only existed in the world of mortal men as they went about their normal lives and daily routines. For us, the condemned and the damned, time had no meaning. The only way we measured it was in intervals of going to the interrogation room or bathroom breaks. Everything else was a fuzzy haze of being in a cell and sometimes out of it. It was a room where time stood still yet slowly oozed away. Yes, this was the edge of madness, the edge of the abyss, and I was right there on the brink.

Yeah, it’ll be alright, I thought. This is a character-building experience. I’ll emerge wiser and none the worse for wear. Occasionally, however, a terrifying thought would creep into my mind, interrupting my meditative internal monologues: “Except this kind of prison isn’t for men. It’s for animals, and it’s run by animals, too.”

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