Sara Obeidat: We started working on this in 2023. And at that point, the world broadly was ready to normalize with the Assad regime. He was already getting welcomed back in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and there was talk of the Arab League kind of bringing him back into the fold. And so, we actually started looking at this at a time where the regime had quote unquote won. It was a very difficult time to do this kind of work because we wanted to obviously focus on not just stories of survivors of prisons, but the people who worked as intelligence officers and enforcers for the regime. There were a lot of them who had defected and were living abroad and were kind of watching the developments and seeing that, okay, the world is ready to now normalize with Syria. And so, trying to track these people down and convince them to talk at a time where it was going to be very risky for them to divulge what was going on inside those rooms and those places that they worked in. It was very real. That's kind of when the journey started. At the same time, while we were looking for all these men who worked for the regime, you know, we were doing our search in Europe, in Turkey and parts of the Middle East, and Europe had started doing these trials holding certain officers who worked for the regime to account if they found them in Germany or in France, etc. And so, the people we were speaking to were worried about retribution from the regime on one hand, and then also from the countries that they were staying. When the regime actually fell six months ago, we were almost done. We had interviewed most of our characters, we had done most of our reporting, and we were ready to start editing in a few weeks. So, when the regime fell, we obviously knew that we had to jump and go to Syria, go to Damascus. But that was really kind of the last of the filming that we had never anticipated we would do. When we went to Damascus, I have to say, even though I had looked into this for two years, back then and kind of knew that there's almost 100,000 people missing. That's what Syrian human rights organizations estimate the number to be at. And we thought we understood the brutality of the police state that was enforced by the Syrian regime. But actually, I was surprised at how vast it actually was. The sheer size, the number of files, the amount of people detained, the amount of prisons that you would find in the basement of an office, in the basement of an air base. Like we were just going around from site to site and discovering more and more facilities, more files of detainees. And I think it really kind of caught me off guard despite having studied this for so long, just how widespread this practice was.
Patrick Center: And the level of the atrocities, what did you come across?
Sara Obeidat: We had already, through our main character, Shadi Haroun and his brother Hadi, who kind of spent almost a decade going from prison to prison and intelligence branch to intelligence branch, getting interrogated, tortured, etc. We had heard a lot about this. And I think going there, you really see how brutalized the population has been and also how afraid people were. I think what really stood out at me, which was a scene that I'll actually never forget, was we were filming at one of the most famous intelligence agencies that the Syrian regime had in Damascus. And it was a very notorious intelligence facility. But as we finished filming, we kind of go onto the sidewalk and we see lines of people who are sort of crunched on the side of the road, going through boxes of ID cards, passports, documents that have been collected from that agency. And when we kind of went closer to ask what's going on, we realized these are people looking for their relatives, looking for somebody they know, trying to see if they could actually find where that person that they're looking for disappeared to. And this was something that was just common. We were seeing this outside of so many other intelligence facilities and prisons. People kind of trying to find any clue about where their loved ones were. And you realize that the brutalization, it wasn't just for the people who were detained, it extended to family members and people who were related to those people who are missing. So, it's an ongoing issue and a thing that I think Syrian society is going to be recovering from for a long time. The story focuses on two brothers, Shadi and Hadi Haroun. They are from a suburb of Damascus, and they got detained in 2011 for participating in the protests during the early days of the uprising in 2011 against Bashar al-Assad. And so, the film very much follows their journey as they go from place to place and kind of get lost in the system. And then in the different places that they were held, we track down people who worked in some of those very same places and got them to tell us about what it was like working at those places, what were some of the orders that they were given. How they were told to deal with the detainees. And so, the film was about the men who had originally carried out some of those things, the foot soldiers, let's say, of the regime and these two brothers.
Patrick Center: The film is titled Syria's Detainee Files. Did you find files and what do they tell us?
Sara Obeidat: Shadi works for a human rights organization and their aim is to try and find out where are many of the disappeared who were held at Saydnaya Prison and where the detainees are. And we followed Shadi as he went to different prison facilities, trying to look through these files, trying to preserve those documents. Those places that we went into had so much files. The regime used to document every detainee that came into its security institutions. So, when people would go missing, you’d would have members of human rights groups say, how can they be missing? You definitely have a record of them because the regime documents everything. And you can see those files in all of those facilities littered across the floor of these detention centers. And people were coming in and sort of going through them trying to find their family members. There were a lot of files.
Patrick Center: You're interviewing a former colonel who tells you they could do as they pleased.
Sara Obeidat: He was telling us this in the context of at the end of the day, intelligence officers in Syria sort of operated with a huge degree of impunity. And, you know, depending on which intelligence agency you worked for, you know you had fiefdoms, depending on what area you were working in. You know, you could sometimes go beyond your remit and kind of get involved in any kind of business or trade. Or if you decided that you had a vendetta with somebody, then, you know, people would be really worried if you were an intelligence officer because they knew the kind of authority that you had. So, the state was very much a police state and officers, you know, had those kinds of perks where they kind of operated above the law.
Patrick Center: Who currently is investigating potential war crimes and what could happen to Bashar al-Assad who is in Russia?
Sara Obeidat: The new government has set up two commissions, one to deal with issues of the missing and another one on issues of transitional justice. And obviously Syrian civil society is the big, robust civil society with a lot of Syrians are now leading the charge, trying to figure out how to get justice and how to try and get some semblance of accountability for the war crimes. They're at the forefront of that. It is still early days. With Bashar al-Assad being in Russia, to be honest, I don't want to speculate. I don't know. But I will say that this was a vast regime that didn't just operate because of Bashar al-Assad. You have generals who have been there since the days of his father, who are responsible for war crimes that go back to the 80s. You have a large number of top-tier officials who fled the country now and are hiding in different areas. And they've sort of left this sort of middle to lower tier of enforcers in the country right now, and they are the ones who are now at the forefront of this current government's search for justice. And that's tough. That's tough because this was a system that kind of was so vast and required so many people to have their hands dipped in the blood, for the lack of a better example. And so, you've had society now kind of have to confront this division of, you know, who is a victim? There are many. And who is a perpetrator? And deciding who is a perpetrator and deciding the level of accountability and responsibility in a place that has had decades of brutalization is very tough because this was a system that was bigger than many of those people who were also enforcing it.
Patrick Center: Frontline presents Syria's Detainee Files. It airs tonight at 10 o'clock on WGVU Public Television Award-winning journalist and filmmaker Sara Obeidat. Thank you so much.
Sara Obeidat: Thank you.