With overthrow of Assad regime, Syrian Canadian recalls 20 years of 'torment' inside its prisons

WARNING: This story includes graphic descriptions of torture.

Nabil Hawara painfully remembers the endless cycle of torture that he endured in one of Syria's most notorious prisons.

For 20 years, from 1975 to 1995, he says he lived in constant fear of death and torment — from being beaten with iron bars and whips each day to guards urinating in food bowls or jumping on his back, ultimately rupturing a lung.

Hawara, who didn't know if he would ever make it out alive from the four walls of his cell in Tadmur Military Prison in Palmyra, in the deserts of eastern Syria, ultimately fled the country for Canada as a refugee.

The prison, which held mass executions and what Hawara calls an around-the-clock "torture program," was mere metres away from a high school and a playground — and children were too afraid to say anything or even look at the facility. ISIS, militants fighting to establish an Islamist state, blew up the prison in May 2015 when it was empty, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, although there are varying reports on how much damage was caused.

Unlike many of the Syrian regime's other prisons and detention facilities, Tadmur's walled-off military complex was built into the ancient city, where it was in plain sight, visible to everyone.

When detainees were being tortured at the hands of prison guards, they would hear the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, from the mosque nearby, or at times children walking by or playing, Hawara said.

"Every day was a journey of torment. We didn't know if we would survive to see the next day," Hawara, now 70, told CBC News in an interview.

In 2015, a Syrian opposition activist from Palmyra told The Associated Press that people would pass by the prison, but no one dared look inside.

Syria's vast network of prisons and detention facilities continues to unravel following the fall of the deposed Assad regime on Dec. 8, nearly 14 years after Syrians took to the streets in peaceful protests against a government that met them with violence.

Prisoners who had been arbitrarily detained were released after years or even decades, but hundreds of thousands remain missing, bringing to light how former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his father, who began the family's half-century rule, governed the country with an iron fist — through forcibly disappearing, torturing and executing anyone accused of opposing the government or even offering humanitarian aid to Syrians.

After the Syrian revolution erupted in 2011, Hawara, fearing persecution, applied for asylum in Canada in 2013, eventually settling in Montreal with his wife and three children — a twin son and daughter, 27, and a 25-year-old son. They are now Canadian citizens.

He remembers the night he was detained like it was yesterday. On July 7, 1975, Hawara was studying for an exam as a second-year mechanical engineering student at the University of Damascus. That night, military secret police came to his family's home in Damascus, the Syrian capital, detained him and searched the premises.

"They told me they just needed to speak to me for five minutes and I could go back," said Hawara, who was detained at the age of 20 and released at 40. "I thought to myself, 'They must have made a mistake in names. In the morning they will release me so I can go do my exam.'"