The give up of the Mazzeh air base exterior Syrian capital Damascus by Bashar al-Assad’s forces triggered a spherical of Israeli air strikes designed to stop his former arsenal falling into the palms of Islamist rebels.
But it surely additionally allowed a Syrian former detainee to revisit the ordeal he suffered on the hand of Assad’s ousted forces.
The president’s lengthy and brutal rule got here to a sudden finish final week, and on Wednesday younger rebels had been roaming Mazzeh, periodically firing an previous Soviet-designed anti-aircraft gun into the sky.
Fighter jets and helicopters lay wrecked alongside the runway, a few of them destroyed in an Israel strike, however the workplaces and workshops had been damaged into by Assad’s native foes.
A pile of medication, apparently the much-abused psychostimulant captagon, had been hauled out of an air drive constructing and set alight in an impromptu bonfire, which was nonetheless smouldering as AFP visited the positioning.
Mazzeh was not solely an air base for jets and assault helicopters, but additionally served as an advert hoc detention centre run by Assad’s air drive intelligence wing.
On Wednesday, 40-year-old father-of-three Riad Hallak was combing by way of the shattered ruins of a lecture theatre that he mentioned as soon as held 225 detainees.
– Sure and crushed –
In the course of the early days of Syria’s 13-year civil conflict, Hallak was arrested in 2012 whereas attending a funeral for protesters shot lifeless by authorities safety forces.
The tailor was certain, crushed and held for a month in a room designed to instruct air drive pilots, earlier than being transferred to a different facility and detained for an additional two months and 13 days.
When the bearded insurgent fighters on the gate heard his story, they allowed him again to the scene of his torment, to hunt out proof he hopes may assist different households discover lacking family members.
The as soon as ubiquitous portrait of Assad now lies within the mud, alongside the emblem of the air drive intelligence wing and a roll of barbed wire, incongruous among the many broken college-style desks.
Hallak tells of how for a month he solely left the room twice a day to make use of the bathroom in batches of three prisoners, who in any other case slept in heaps, packed collectively on the chilly concrete steps.
As soon as, when there was an explosion exterior, he and his fellow inmates celebrated within the hope that rebels had been storming the bottom — solely to be mocked and threatened by a normal and laughing troopers.
“If anybody complained concerning the circumstances, the overall would inform us we had been receiving five-star vacationer therapy, and threaten to switch us,” Hallak informed AFP on the base.
Since his detention, Hallak and his spouse have had three younger kids and now the household can hope to dwell extra freely in a Syria that has shed the half-century rule of the Assad clan.
However wanting in useless for data he hopes will make clear his ordeal and the destiny of lacking pals, he struggled, like many in Syria, to precise how this feels.
“It is tough to say,” he mentioned, wanting prematurely previous along with his close-trimmed gray beard.
“There is not any phrases. I am unable to converse.”
– Captagon haul –
Worldwide screens have raised issues that permitting former miliary bases to fall underneath the sway of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) insurgent group will result in chemical weapons falling into the palms of extremists.
Israel has used this worry as a justification for stepped up air strikes, together with one on Mazzeh.
However probably the most harmful substance that AFP journalists noticed was the haul of captagon.
Assad’s authorities was infamous for producing the amphetamine-based drug in business qualities, flooding the profitable Gulf market to bolster its wartime coffers.
The US authorities slapped sanctions on Syrian officers allegedly concerned within the illicit commerce, and Syria’s neighbours have seized hundreds of thousands of drugs in a dropping battle to stop its unfold.
However on Wednesday the fighters paid little consideration to the haul, which their comrades had apparently set alight, as they handed by on motorbikes or manned the gates of the complicated.
