Surviving Syria’s Prisons BBC2 review — a former prisoner returns to detention sites in hard-hitting documentary

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In 2011, 27-year-old Syrian dissident Shadi Haroun was arrested during a protest against the despotic leader Bashar al-Assad. In the hard-hitting new BBC documentary Surviving Syria’s Prisons, Haroun says he was accused of forming a terrorist group, then interrogated, brutalised and dehumanised for 10 years before eventually being released.

The feature-length film follows Haroun as he returns to the detention sites where he was incarcerated, shining a light on the atrocities committed by the Assad regime, which finally fell in December, including the forced disappearance of an estimated 100,000 prisoners.

The film is in part a tribute to the extraordinary resilience of Haroun and his brother Hadi, who not only endured unimaginable physical and psychological horrors, but now revisit those traumas in search of evidence of what happened to missing inmates. It is also a confrontation with the very worst of humanity.

Haroun brings viewers into the coffin-like cells and interrogation rooms where he and fellow detainees were kept. Haroun says of the prison soldiers: “In every method they used . . . they have this mindset to make a human feel like an insect, like you are nothing.” In one abysmal place, he finds the chains that were used to suspend people from pipes for days on end. No less chilling are offices littered with scraps of bureaucracy related to the infamous Saydnaya Prison — also known as the “human slaughterhouse”.

There are searching interviews with perpetrators, enablers and overseers of the prison horrors whom the BBC’s team has spent two years tracking down. Some were insiders-turned-defectors, others were working for the regime until the end. Most remain anonymous.

For all the disturbing admissions of “execution parties”, bribes, coerced confessions and cover-ups, what emerges in these extraordinary testimonies is a monstrous regime that facilitated violence through a system of indoctrination and intimidation. Several of the contributors — from a prison guard who administered beatings, to a mortuary nurse who recorded evident murders as “heart and respiratory failure”, to a bulldozer driver who dug mass graves — describe acting out of fear or as a result of being “brainwashed”. 

But the film doesn’t exonerate individuals even as it contextualises actions. Interviewer-director Sara Obeidat asks direct, conscience-piercing questions that give the men a chance to accept responsibility. While some are evidently haunted by what they did or witnessed, a few more senior figures seem unwilling to concede personal moral failures. “There was nothing I could do, my hands were tied,” says a former colonel, who was second-in-command at an interrogation site famed for its “bloody practices”.

For Haroun, accountability is complicated by the fact that those at the top of the regime have fled the country and “left everyone to pick up the pieces”. What is imperative, he says, is to keep talking and keep investigating. The war may have ended, but the fight for justice, this powerful film reminds us, is only just beginning.

★★★★☆

On BBC2 on June 10 at 9pm and iPlayer thereafter