An unknown prisoner, languishing in the dungeon of Syria's then-ruler Bashar al-Assad, scribbled a verse of Arabic poetry on the wall of his cell – an expression of pain and love in the midst of his torment.
“My country, even if it oppresses me, is dear. “My people, even if they are unkind to me, are generous,” he wrote. This is a well-known verse, composed 800 years ago by a poet opposing the tyrannical caliph.
As you walk through the cold, dark cells of Assad's prisons, the graffiti on the walls screams. The messages plead with God and miss their loved ones. Often cryptic, they preserve fragments of what anonymous men thought in the face of torture and death.
“Don't trust anyone, not even your brother,” someone warned grimly on a cell wall in the notorious Palestinian Branch detention center in Damascus.
“Oh Lord, bring relief,” another groaned.
Since 2011, tens of thousands of Syrians have disappeared into a network of prisons and detention centers run by Assad's security forces as they try to crush his opposition. For years, prisoners were left without contact with the outside world, living in overcrowded, windowless cells, where fellow prisoners died around them.
Layers of graffiti marking generations of suffering
Torture and beatings were used daily. Mass executions were common.
Most prisoners would expect him to die. They had no reason to believe that anyone except future prisoners would ever see the messages they had scratched on the walls.
One of them wrote one word in Arabic, “ashtaqtilak” (“I miss you”) – a love letter that could never be sent to a loved one whose name only the author knows.
More than a month after the rebels who overthrew Assad opened prisons, The Associated Press visited several facilities to look at the graffiti left behind. Nothing is known about the people who drew and wrote them.
Only a few of them have names and a few are dated. It is not known who of them survived and who died.
Some walls have layers of graffiti that commemorate generations of suffering.
“Don't be sad, mom. This is my fate,” we read in one of them, dated January 1, 2024. Below it there are traces of an older text, so faded that only a few words can be read: “…. except for you” – a note of longing for a loved one.
Calendars mark the years on the wall
Many writings and drawings are calls to parents or loved ones. Someone drew a heart broken in half, with the words “mother” on one side and “father” on the other.
Some people quote poetry. “When you wage war, think of those who ask for peace,” one of them reads, somewhat misremembering a verse by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Many kept calendars, filling the walls with grids of numbers. “A year has passed,” was one inmate's terse summary above a field of 365 dots arranged in rows.
Some of the drawings are even funny, like cartoon faces with googly eyes or a hash joint. Others are inventions whose meaning, if any, was known only to the prisoner. One of the scenes shows a landscape of hills and forests of bare trees, where a pack of wolves howls at the sky and a bird of prey catches a hissing snake in its claws.
Darkness and fear hang over most, as well as attempts to survive.
“Patience is beautiful and it is God we look to for help,” wrote one of them. “God, fill me with patience and do not allow me to despair.”