Men search the underground tunnels of Sednaya prison in Syria, hoping to find survivors after the fall of the Assad regime, on Dec. 10, 2024. (Credit: Mohammad Yassine/OLJ)
Since the fall of the Assad regime, news outlets around the world have shed light on the central role and exceptional brutality of the prison system developed under the rule of the ousted family. Uğur Ümit Üngör, a specialist in the Holocaust and genocides at the University of Amsterdam, co-authored a seminal work in 2023 with Jaber Baker — a novelist, filmmaker, researcher and former Syrian political prisoner — on Assad’s prison network: "Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System." He discusses the system’s characteristics and historical roots with L’Orient-Le Jour.The title of the book you co-wrote with Baker explicitly references the Gulag to describe the Syrian prison system. Why this analogy?There are several reasons for this. First, there are direct historical connections between the Soviet Gulag and the Syrian prison system....
Since the fall of the Assad regime, news outlets around the world have shed light on the central role and exceptional brutality of the prison system developed under the rule of the ousted family. Uğur Ümit Üngör, a specialist in the Holocaust and genocides at the University of Amsterdam, co-authored a seminal work in 2023 with Jaber Baker — a novelist, filmmaker, researcher and former Syrian political prisoner — on Assad’s prison network: "Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System." He discusses the system’s characteristics and historical roots with L’Orient-Le Jour.The title of the book you co-wrote with Baker explicitly references the Gulag to describe the Syrian prison system. Why this analogy?There are several reasons for this. First, there are direct historical connections between the Soviet Gulag and the Syrian...