PBS-TV's "Frontline" Exposes Syria's Past – And America's Likely Future – in "Syria's Detainee Files"

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, June 11) I watched a quite moving but also very depressing documentary on PBS’s long-running Frontline series: “Syria’s Detainee Files.” We Americans used to be able to watch shows like this detailing the repression by which dictatorships in other countries kept themselves in power in the comfortable assurance that “it couldn’t happen here.” Today we can’t believe that anymore: given the armed invasion of the streets of Los Angeles by 4,000 California National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines ordered by Führer Donald Trump (over the objections of both California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass), ostensibly to facilitate deportation operations being carried out by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) but actually to suppress peaceful protests against them, this depiction of Syria’s past looks all too much like America’s future. It was a program to which I had to pay strict attention because virtually all the interviews were in Arabic, and rather than do voice-over translations directors Sara Obeidat (who also co-produced and narrated) and Sasha Joelle Achilli chose to run the English translations as subtitles. That meant I pretty much ignored my husband Charles when he came home from work about three-fifths into the program. What made the show especially fascinating was that it included interviews not only with some of the victims of the Syrian government’s torturers but also some of the torturers themselves.

Syria is a Middle Eastern country which was put under the control of France through a League of Nations “mandate” after World War I in 1920. Its formal independence was guaranteed after World War II when it was admitted to the United Nations, and in 1958 it briefly merged with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt as the United Arab Republic. In 1961 a military coup took place in Syria and the generals now running the country terminated the political union with Egypt. In 1963 the Ba’ath Party, whose main platform was (ironically) the union of all Arab countries into a super-state, took over and Hafez al-Assad emerged as dictator in 1970. When Hafez died in 2000 his son Bashar al-Assad took over and ruled until late 2024, when after decades of insurgency his regime was finally overthrown and he sought and received political asylum from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Under Bashar’s regime a vast network of intelligence agencies was created, of which the most brutal and repressive was one with the innocuous title “Air Force Intelligence.” Agents of Air Force Intelligence – including its national chief, Major General Jamil Hassan – ran several private prisons, detention centers and torture chambers while Bashar claimed “plausible deniability.” A surprising number of participants in Air Force Intelligence’s torture activities agreed to be interviewed, though only one – a bulldozer driver named Yusuf Obeid who was pressed into service to use his bulldozer to dig mass graves for people who’d died under torture – actually allowed his real name to be used.

Obeid recalled that he’d been working as a bulldozer driver for the city of Damascus when one day he received orders from an intelligence officer to drive his bulldozer to Najha cemetery on the outskirts of the city. “There was an armed agent,” Obeid said. “He said, ‘Follow me,’ and drove in front of me. He arrived at the cemetery entrance and I followed him. We continued until there were no more graves. He told me to dig a large 15x15 meter pit, at least 3 meters deep. A black Mercedes arrived, followed by two large, refrigerated trucks, then a military truck carrying soldiers. I started to smell something. As they got closer there was a horrible stench. Then I realized what was inside those fridge trucks. It smelled like rotting dead bodies.” One of the torturers, interviewed under the name “Hussam,” said, “On Wednesday mornings, back when I worked there, we would have an ‘execution party.’ Our role in executions was to place the rope on the prisoner, then step aside. Only an officer can push the chair out. One time, we put a guy on the rope. [The officer] pushed the chair, the rope tightened, but after 22 minutes, he still hadn't died. So they told me, ‘Grab him and pull him downward.’ I grasped the prisoner like this and I pulled him down. He still didn't die. So another guard who's bigger and stronger said, ‘Go, I will do it.’ Before he died he said one thing: ‘I’m going to tell God what you did.’ Just that, that's all he said.”

Another, an officer using the name “Osama,” recalled, “They would keep them under harsh torture day and night until they admitted to killing so-and-so. On that basis, they’re sent to the field court, where no questions are asked. It’s just about confirming your statement and signing it with your fingerprint. A month or two later, their sentence would be delivered to the prison.” The accounts from some of the torturers almost inevitably reminded me of the stories told by some of the Nazis who worked as guards in the concentration camps, who were at first appalled at the brutality they witnessed but ultimately not only became desensitized to it but emerged as willing participants. If “Syria’s Detainee Files” had any heroes, they would be the brothers Shadi and Hadi Haroun, who got caught up in the Syrian resistance during the so-called “Arab Spring” protests of 2010-2011. They recalled attending a peaceful gathering in one of Damascus’s town squares to demand that Bashar resign and allow free elections to replace him, when all of a sudden one of them noticed a sniper on a balcony overlooking the crowd. The sniper started picking people off, and then a full army unit invaded the town square and just started firing at people indiscriminately. Shadi was arrested and sent to the notorious Air Force Intelligence prison at Mezzeh, and Hadi took advantage of a series of town-hall meetings Bashar al-Assad was holding throughout Syria to confront the president and get him to release Shadi.

Hadi actually got an oral commitment from Bashar himself for Shadi’s release, but that wasn’t good enough for Major General Hassan. When he met the general, Hadi recalled, Hassan “raised his glasses and looked at me and said, ‘I don’t want to release your brother, it's that simple.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, Major General. There is an order from Bashar al-Assad to release him.’ I said it so confidently. He said, ‘Sure,’ then picked up the phone and dialed a number. ‘With respect, sir, you ordered the release of Shadi Haroun. But he is a danger to the country. I want to question him myself. Then, with your approval, I’ll decide if he should be released.’ He said, ‘You see, I don’t want to release him.’ I couldn’t understand what he was doing. Was he trying to send me a message that Bashar al-Assad may be the president of this country, but I'm the president of this mini-state? As in, ‘I am the president of the state of Air Force Intelligence.’” Ultimately Shadi was moved to an even nastier prison at Harasta and then to a still worse one at Saydnaya, where Hadi was also detained. The prison conditions were so overcrowded that prisoners were literally stacked on top of each other, and a number of them died from simple oxygen deprivation because the cells were so full none of the prisoners could get enough air. Shadi recalls one interrogator who stuck a gun in Shadi’s mouth and told him that he was going to be tortured to death anyway, so he should let the officer shoot him and get it over with relatively quickly.

When they were finally released, the Harouns understandably left Syria and fled to southern Turkey, where they remained until Bashar al-Assad’s rule of terror finally ended in December 2024. Then they returned to Syria, went to Mezzeh prison, and tried as best they could to piece back together the incomplete records of how the prison had been run under Bashar and who had been kept there. That wasn’t as easy as it sounds, since many of the records had been destroyed or thrown away. There’s one heartbreaking scene in which the brothers find a binder that was supposed to have held the records of anyone executed there – only the binder was blank. All the pages had been removed. Also, when they arrived there the prisoners were each assigned a number, and no record was kept of their names, because the people in charge wanted to be able to say honestly that they’d never heard of them. The sheer cruelty and organized viciousness of the Syrian authorities – or their brethren among dictatorships in general is very much apparent on this program. It gave rise to Atlantic journalist Adam Serwer’s oft-quoted comment (and book title), “The cruelty is the point,” and it’s also the attitude expressed by O’Brien, the representative of the ruling party in George Orwell’s 1984, when he tells the book’s dissident protagonist Winston Smith (as he’s torturing him), that power is the ability to make another human being suffer.

“Obedience is not enough,” O’Brien says, “Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” We are now experiencing in the United States the transformation of an imperfect but still hopeful republic into an authoritarian, even a totalitarian, dictatorship in which our new masters will demand, as Bashar al-Assad and hundreds of similar dictators throughout history have done, not only to be obeyed but to be worshiped. “Syria’s Detainee Files” illustrate the human cost of such a world and what it does to the torturers as well as the victims. One of the torturers interviewed in this movie, a former warrant officer in Air Force Intelligence called “Abbas,” said, “In my opinion, every human being has two souls – an evil soul and a good soul. They are in a constant state of war. One of them is telling you to think and have empathy. The other is telling you to be selfish and destructive, saying, ‘You’re an agent of this regime. Keep quiet. Or you’ll die.’” Actually I’ve long felt that Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Mike Johnson, Stephen Miller, and the people like them who are now ruling the United States and seeking to destroy its last vestiges of democracy don’t have “good souls” because they have deliberately purged themselves of everything noble and decent in their natures. They equate kindness, compassion, and empathy with “weakness” and believe, like O’Brien in 1984, that the world they want, like Syria’s past or America’s likely future, is “a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”