Tadmor prison in Syria "The Cell of Survival"!

Tadmor prison is located in Tadmur in the deserts of eastern Syria approximately 200 kilometers northeast of Damascus. The structures were originally built as military barracks by the French Mandate forces. Amal Hanano calls it "The Cell of Survival". His story begins on March 5th, 1984, an ordinary Damascus morning. He was on route to university, where he was a second year electrical engineer student. He would disappear for the next twelve years, touring the depths of Assad’s dungeons, in Hama, Tadmor, and Sayd Naya. Bara Sarraj was twenty-one years old. He is still haunted by the sounds: creaking doors, rattling keys, gunshots, the dreaded shuffling of heavy feet in the corridor, the sound of torture, the sound of screams. Tadmor, was “the symphony of fear.” His account describes the tools of torture in detail like, the dreaded dulaab, a car tire used to fold the prisoners’ bodies into human contortions while suffering intense beatings with the kirbaaj, a one meter long rubber belt, embedded with metal pieces, used for fixing tank wheels, that dug into their flesh and scarred their bodies, or the technique of hanging prisoners from their wrists for hours, or beatings while being forced to write their confessions of treason against the country, or the falqa, the continuous whipping of the soles of their feet. After enduring a falqa session, they would hop on their damaged feet to combat the swelling...