These stories paint a picture of a place with no hope, only pain.
The prisoners spent much of their time in silence with no access to the outside world, so it is no surprise that they say they knew nothing of the imminent advance of the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria until they were released that morning.
Kasem said they could hear what sounded like a helicopter taking off from the hospital grounds before the men’s screams in the corridors. But in a windowless cell, they couldn’t be sure.
Then the door opened and the freedmen rushed to run as fast as they could.
“We escaped from prison. We also ran away from fear,” Rakan says about his young children and his wife.
In a moment of chaos, he says, “I got hit by a car. But I don’t mind. I got up and continued running.”
He says he will never return to Saidnaya again.
Adnan also says that he could not look back at the prison as he ran to Damascus crying.
“I just kept going. I can’t describe it. I just headed for Damascus. People took us off the road in their cars.”
Now, every night when he goes to sleep, he is afraid that he will wake up in prison and find that it was all a dream.
Kasem fled to a town called Tal Mnen. It was there that a woman who provided freed prisoners with food, money and clothes told them: “Assad has fallen.”
He was brought to his hometown, where celebratory gunfire rang out and his tearful family embraced him.
“It’s like I was born again. I can’t describe it to you,” he says.
Additional reporting by Nihad Al Salem
