Anne-Marie McManus directs the ERC Starting Grant, “The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria” (SYRASP), at Berlin’s Forum Transregionale Studien. She’s the author of multiple articles and a book in progress on cultural production and activism for Syria’s detained and forcibly disappeared. Alongside her academic research, McManus is engaged in collaborative projects with Syrian researchers, artists, and activists. Among these are the Lab for the Study of Violence in Syria, for which McManus serves as an ethics and digital methods consultant, and Design of Necessity: Resilience Under Siege in Assad’s Syria (Coculture, 2025), a forthcoming book on siege and accountability that she edited and coauthored with the artist Khaled Barakeh. Diwan interviewed McManus in early January to discuss the Assad regime’s prison system and its potential impact on a successful transition in Syria.
Yezid Sayigh: It’s been over a month since a coalition of groups led by the Islamist militia, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, overthrew Bashar al-Assad’s regime, ending a 50-year family dictatorship. Can you give some context to the images that came out of Syrian prisons during and after those events?
Anne-Marie McManus: The liberation of the prisons and intelligence branches was not marginal to the fall of the regime. In ways that are really unparalleled in modern Syrian and regional history, the end of Assad’s carceral archipelago was at the center of this coup. Most readers will be familiar with images from Sednaya, the military prison liberated on the night of December 7–8, hours before Assad fled to Russia. The videos of prisoners, including women and children, being hustled out of cells are iconic for Syrians because Sednaya was the pinnacle of regime violence after 2011—a “human slaughterhouse” in Amnesty International’s phrasing in 2017. But Sednaya inherited its notoriety from another prison camp, closed in 2001: Tadmur, or Palmyra, which acted as a site for torture, mass execution, and indefinite detentions of the regime’s opponents during the 1980s and early 1990s. So, we’re looking at entrenched patterns of political violence that stretch back generations and whose impacts go to the very heart of contemporary Syrian politics and society.
The prison system was also an integral element of the regime’s military and political structures, with sites and detention centers run by different branches and divisions: Military Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, the elite Fourth Armored Division, and so on. So, the capture—or abandonment—of prisons was also a tactical question. Sednaya was only one of the prisons the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-led coalition liberated from the start of its advance. Those prisoners were actually freed by local, former opposition fighters, who persuaded the Sednaya guards to abandon their posts using threats that Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham fighters would soon arrive. Micro-events like these were decisive in signaling the regime’s imminent collapse. Compare it to less than two weeks earlier, when Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham released dramatic footage of its battle with government forces for Aleppo Central Prison, effectively announcing control of the prison as a strategic military victory. When you look at the timeline, you realize that, in scenes of dazed and overjoyed prisoners pouring out onto the streets of Hama, Homs, and other Syrian cities, we were watching the real-time dismantling of the regime.
YS: What have been the implications for the collapse of the prison system since December 8, 2024? Who are the main stakeholders in this issue today?
AMM: The end of the regime’s prison system has introduced massive challenges that the new state can’t afford to overlook. Start by considering scale. In 2022, my colleagues Jaber Baker and Ugur Üngör, in their book The Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System, estimated that a staggering 300,000 Syrians had been imprisoned since 2011, which is equivalent to 1,200 prisoners for every 100,000 Syrians. In the United States, the global home of mass imprisonment, the equivalent ratio was 629. So, massive swathes of Syrian society are involved in this issue.
First, you have recently freed prisoners, numbering in the several thousands, many of whom are in urgent need of medical attention and psychological support. Add to this the uncounted numbers of Syrians who worked as prison guards, interrogators, and informants for the state. Many remain in the country, unaccounted for. What happens to them? What’s their place in a future Syria? Will all or only some be held accountable for their roles in regime violence—and if so, according to what criteria and evidence?
The head of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Ahmad al-Sharaa, has clearly signaled transitional justice as a priority for the new state. In the past month, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham made several high-profile arrests, including reportedly of Mohammed Kanjo Hassan, who oversaw death sentences in Sednaya in 2011–2014. But the actual reality of transitional justice for Syrians is still distant. What’s needed is a community-oriented vision for transitional justice, going beyond a settling of accounts between military figures, to start healing the profound social divides caused by the regime’s carceral violence.
That vision requires the inclusion of a third, major group of stakeholders: the families of the disappeared. They’re a decentralized, women-led network of activists and groups, such as the Caesar Families Association and Families for Freedom, and they’re demanding information on the fates of their loved ones. Since the fall of the regime, they’ve raised a huge clamor online and are now holding sit-ins and protests inside Syria. For many Syrians, the families hold a unique moral and political authority because of the losses they’ve sustained, as well as the activism in which their groups have engaged over the years. Any transitional justice initiative will ignore them at its own peril. And right now, they’re expressing pain and anger at international organizations and, increasingly, the transitional government that no one is acting decisively to secure and protect information on the thousands of Syrians who, despite the liberation of the prisons last month, remain unaccounted for.
YS: Why is this the case?
AMM: The state of documentation in Syria is overwhelming and catastrophic—which is also why we have no precise numbers for the disappeared. On the one hand, huge quantities of documents have been found in prisons and detention centers. Social media images and videos show stacks of handwritten notebooks and documents by regime officials, including the names of detainees and informants, and detailed surveillance records. In a recent video, an activist walks through a secret office found in the Branch 215 detention center (Damascus), showing a room packed with reports on regime opponents from the 1980s to after 2011. And that’s only one room, in one branch. It has become apparent that the work of sifting through and making sense of these archives, which hold the answers to the fates of the disappeared and much more in Syria’s social and political history, will take years.
On the other hand, no centralized body is overseeing the securing of this documentation. Even the most frustrated activists expressed understanding for the chaos that unfolded at Sednaya in early December, when tens of thousands of family members descended on the prison to seek their loved ones. In the process, documents were destroyed and taken. But since then, no authority—state or civil, Syrian or international—has assumed leadership of the task to preserve Syria’s prison records. So, the chaos continues. Meanwhile, media interest in the regime’s downfall created new demand for sensational exposés on Syria’s prisons. As a result, we’re watching journalists walk across literal crime scenes, picking up sensitive documents to show the camera while their shoes crunch over other files. We’re even seeing images of human remains, bones taken from unguarded mass graves, left in the trash and on streets. This kind of coverage is fanning the flames of anger among Syrians who understandably want information and accountability before they can turn the page on the regime’s crimes.
YS: How do you assess the outlook for transitional justice for Syria? What do you see as the most effective frameworks moving forward?
AMM: The relative calm that’s held since December confirms there is an overall strong will to maintain civil peace after years of war. At the same time, calls for information on the disappeared are getting stronger and prolonged lack of action jeopardizes both civil stability and the future of transitional justice.
I see that two coordinated steps are needed. First, Syrian civil society groups, notably the families of the disappeared and human rights organizations, should form a new charter to oversee the safety and organization of evidence on Syria’s disappeared. This move will fit within the political balance that’s emerging between the new state, led by Sharaa, and civil society, most prominently represented today by the umbrella group Madaniya, which recently opened headquarters in Damascus.
Second, well-resourced international organizations with a history of engagement on this issue (for example, the United Nations’ International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism and the Committee for International Justice and Accountability) or presence in Syria (for example, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières) should offer their resources in manpower, documentation, and forensics to support the charter’s work. In the current political climate, any credible initiative must be Syrian-led and inclusive of all stakeholders.
As I’ve been emphasizing, the issues of prisons and the disappeared carry immense political and emotional weight. If they’re addressed sensitively and inclusively, there’s an opportunity for Syrians to build a new social and political order out of the wreckage of the Assad regime. But if transitional justice is top-down, tokenizing, and/or based on corrupted, incomplete, or dubious evidence, it will be a very effective way to promote polarization and civil unrest.
YS: What about the transitional government? How much credibility does Sharaa hold on this issue?
AMM: Not enough to lead a national movement for transitional justice. Sharaa is saying the right things, but at the time of writing he hadn’t convened a formal meeting with the family groups or convened a commission for the disappeared, for example. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham hasn’t moved an inch to liberate its prisons in Idlib, the area of northwestern Syria that the group has ruled since 2019. These prisons have a track record remarkably similar to the regime’s, which is why Sharaa’s perceived credibility on this issue is not strong.
For months in spring 2024, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Sharaa were the targets of popular protests in Idlib because their security forces, known as the General Security Service, were practicing arbitrary detention—killing prisoners under torture, failing to inform families of deaths, and dumping bodies in mass graves. Back then, the protestors turned what is now Syria’s national flag—the three-starred revolutionary flag—against Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, calling their prisons slaughterhouses and likening them to the Assad regime’s death camps. In light of this, it would be wise for the transitional government to oversee extensive reforms of those prisons while it delegates leadership of national transitional justice to the coalition of civil society actors I discussed earlier.
Looking at the wider Syrian context, prison camps in the northeast, controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, also remain in operation. For years, the United Nations and Médecins Sans Frontières have raised the alarm about dire human rights violations in these camps due to the arbitrary, indefinite detention of individuals—notably children—accused of affiliation with the so-called Islamic State group. For example, the Hol camp holds over 40,000 prisoners, primarily the wives and children of Islamic State fighters.
In all, the freeing of regime-held prisoners in December 2024 was truly joyful, but it marks a new and complex phase of the prison question in Syria—not its resolution.
