‘Two prisons’: Freed from detention, Syrian women face a second trial

DAMASCUS — Sabah Harmoush sits in the cramped apartment she shares with her three children and in-laws in Jdeidat al-Fadl, a village just outside Damascus, and remembers. At 37, torture has left her with physical wounds that still burn and psychological scars that make earning a living nearly impossible. 

It has been one year since Harmoush came home. In the hours before dawn on December 8, 2024, opposition fighters forced open the door of her cell at the Mezzeh military airport. “We were liberated by rebels,” she said. “I called my mother-in-law first and said I was free and heading home with my friend Umm Muhammad.” Together, they walked for two and a half hours through the darkness, the sound of gunfire echoing in the distance.

Images of women and men freed from Assad’s detention centers were among the most dramatic scenes to emerge from Syria during the 11-day offensive that toppled the regime last year. In city after city, as opposition forces pushed towards the capital, cell doors were torn open and those inside, their bodies thin and their faces pale, poured out.

Harmoush had been detained by the regime since March 2024, at first held in Adra Central Prison alongside her three children: 13-year-old Fawaz, five-year-old Anoud and four-year-old Omar. After three months, “they told me they were sending my children to an orphanage,” she said, and transferred her to Mezzeh alone. 

She was not arrested for anything she had done, but as leverage to force her husband, an opposition fighter in Idlib, to turn himself in. Harmoush also believes her detention was punishment for being the niece of Hussein Harmoush, the first officer to defect from Assad’s army in 2011. 

Her story is one among thousands. Throughout Syria’s nearly 14-year conflict, women like Harmoush were detained for reasons ranging from participating in anti-regime demonstrations to simply crossing a checkpoint or having a relative involved in the opposition. These arrests were rarely incidental; they were strategic, used as a weapon of war. Once detained, women endured beatings, humiliation, threats or acts of sexual violence, and, as in Harmoush’s case, the use of their children as blackmail.

According to a November 2025 statement by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), at least 10,257 women remain detained or forcibly disappeared in Syria, including 8,501 women detained by the Assad regime. At least 29,358 women and girls have been killed since March 2011, including 22,123 by the former regime and its allies. The network has also documented 11,583 incidents of sexual violence against women and girls, nearly 70 percent of which were committed by regime forces.

“Women were detained to break families, to break communities,” psychologist Ahmad Arafat, who previously worked supporting formerly detained women in Idlib, told Syria Direct. “The regime understood that detaining a woman sends a shockwave through an entire family to hurt their honor. It was deliberate.” 

Sabah Harmoush, who was freed from regime detention on December 8, 2024, stands in the apartment she shares with her children and in-laws in Jdeidat al-Fadl, a village 15 kilometers from Damascus, 6/11/2025 (Bushra Alzoubi/Syria Direct)

When Harmoush finally reached Jdeidat al-Fadl on December 8, she learned her husband had been killed just one week earlier during the opposition push to topple the regime, leaving her alone. But she was reunited with her children, who were among hundreds taken from detained parents and placed in institutions. 

The children’s uncle had gone to the Dar al-Rahma orphanage to retrieve them as soon as the regime fell and employees fled. The Air Force Intelligence Directorate, which held Harmoush, hid more than 300 children in this manner, including at Dar al-Rahma. “One did not recognize me, it took him a while to accept me,” she said. 

A year has passed, and Harmoush and her children are still struggling, like many former detainees who have found little concrete support. Her dreams are simple, but feel out of reach. She wants a home of her own, a steady income and a dignified life. She wants those who did not survive what she did to be commemorated through accurate documentation, so history cannot be erased. “I have many demands, but nobody is listening,” Harmoush said. 

The regime is gone, but the story did not end on December 8, 2024. The lives of the women who survived its darkest corners have been shaped by imprisonment, torture and social stigma—challenges that persist long after the prison doors opened. 

‘A double injustice’

Noura (a pseudonym) steps quietly off a bus that drops her in the middle of one of Damascus’s largest avenues, just across from the National Museum. Tall and slender, she moves as if trying to disappear, hoping to become invisible in a country whose war wounds will take years to heal. 

Still, she wants to be heard. “I want the outside world to know what I went through,” she said, settling into a café table.

Noura was arrested in January 2018 at a checkpoint in Damascus, along with her two young daughters, her mother- and father-in-law and her sisters-in-law, just three days after her husband and his brothers were detained. Accused of terrorism, she was interrogated and tortured for days by Air Force Intelligence at Mezzeh. 

“They wanted me to confess I was part of an armed group—a terrorist,” she recalled. She refused, and the beatings intensified. “It was very difficult,” she said softly, looking down and stirring her fresh juice with a straw. “I would rather not get into details. Some wounds I can’t reopen. Not now.”

After a long silence, she lifted her head. “They beat me in front of my daughters. During some interrogations, they hung me on the wall and beat the girls too.” Her daughters were two years old and six months old at the time. Back in her cell, she no longer had milk to feed her youngest, whose body twisted in pain from hunger. 

Cell doors stand open at the infamous Saydnaya prison near Damascus, 16/12/2024 (Sameer al-Doumy/AFP)

“The hardest thing was when they stripped me of my girls. They broke my heart. I will never forget when they took them away,” Noura said. “They told me they were in the hospital, but it was a lie.” Her daughters were taken from her for around three months, and returned after she was transferred from Mezzeh to Adra, where she would remain with them for five years. 

Noura was released in 2022, alongside her in-laws, but found little relief. Integrating back into society became another kind of punishment. 

“It’s as if I did something terrible. No one understands it wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t my daughters’ fault either,” she said. “I suffered a double injustice—one in prison and one outside. The one outside is harder, because in prison, you know your torturers. Outside, it’s your own people who don’t believe you.” 

Her in-laws pressured her husband, who was freed when the regime fell on December 8, to take another wife, something he refused to do. Other women avoided her. “Women don’t come close to me because they think I was raped,” Noura said. “The fact that women don’t believe me is even harder than when men don’t. As women, they should understand what I went through.” 

Freedom alone does not end the ordeal. Instead, stigma replaces the physical cell, perpetuating the violence long after release. 

Many women are hesitant to come forward about what they have experienced or register for what support is available, said Hala Haitham Alhaj, head of Women Survivors, an organization based in Turkey that supports formerly detained women.

“Many women face social rejection after their release,” Alhaj told Syria Direct. “Numerous divorce cases occur, and many survivors are forced to distance themselves from their communities” and “face threats of violence and ‘honor crimes’ from their own families,” she added. “They also struggle to find employment for the same reasons, and because they often receive no protection or support.”

When Doctors Without Borders (MSF)  launched a clinic supporting survivors in the Damascus area earlier this year, less than 15 percent of its consultations over the first two months were for female patients. “The very low number of female patients in our cohort is worrying, and even fewer children are seeking treatment,” the organization said in a report. 

“I do not believe reintegration has become easier after Assad’s fall,” Alhaj said. “There are success stories, before and after December 8, where women rebuild their lives…but this only happens when they receive strong social and psychological support.” 

‘I made my place in society’

In a quieter corner of Damascus, another former detainee has carved out a more public path. In an office tucked inside the Faculty of Law at Damascus University, 55-year-old Maisaa al-Ainiya sits behind a large wooden desk, at her new post as chief legal officer of the Association of Detainees of the Syrian Revolution. 

Founded in January 2025 under a decree by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, the association provides humanitarian support for former detainees. Al-Ainiya’s work mainly revolves around helping survivors navigate legal issues such as property confiscation orders and false death certificates issued by the regime. 

Visitors come and go, seeking al-Ainiya’s guidance, and she receives them—women and men alike—with the quiet authority of someone who has rebuilt her place in the world from the ground up. 

Maisaa al-Ainiya, the chief legal officer of the Association of Detainees of the Syrian Revolution, who is herself a former detainee, works at her desk in her office in Damascus, 1/12/2025 (Héloise Blondel/Syria Direct)

For al-Ainiya, the path to a prison cell began with a personal dispute over her dowry in the early days of the revolution. “I had problems with my husband, and we decided to separate, but he refused to pay my dowry,” she told Syria Direct. “They wrote a report and had the police accuse me of helping revolutionaries.” She was arrested and taken to the military security headquarters in Nabak, her town in Reef Dimashq. 

Over the next four months—the first of three experiences of detention over the course of around two years—she endured interrogations, intimidation, and the cold, overcrowded cells characteristic of the regime’s early crackdown. Humiliation was constant. During this period, her then-14-year-old son Mahmoud was also arrested. “They tortured him and crushed his toes to force him to incriminate me,” al-Ainiya said. 

Ultimately she was released in 2016, subject to a travel ban and confiscation of her property. On the outside, society turned its back on her, treating her as though she had disgraced her family. But in her case, everything changed the day Assad fell. 

“My relatives, who had treated me like a pariah, kissed my forehead to congratulate me on the regime’s fall,” she said. “They began calling me professor [as a term of respect], because they understood I had been right. It was my personal victory. We lived in humiliation, and it was incredible to get rid of this tyrant. I made my place in society by force, despite all the pressure.”

Her experience reshaped her outlook on relationships. “I never remarried,” she said. “I received many proposals, but I want to devote myself to my children and my professional ambitions. What I went through with my husband destroyed any desire for marriage—marriage can be hell. I no longer trust men, except my father, my son and my son-in-law, who supported me through everything. They believed in my abilities.”

Before she was detained, al-Ainiya was a housewife and caregiver for one of her daughters, who is disabled. After she was released, she pursued an education, studying side by side with her children. “I started studying with my son Mahmoud, who had not obtained his [high school] baccalaureate. We started together on our own, and passed at the same time. A few years later, my daughter joined us. The three of us continued our studies and graduated on the same day [in 2022]. It was incredible,” she said, proudly showing a graduation picture. 

“To every girl, I say—aspire to be proud of the black gown of accomplishment, not of the white bridal gown,” al-Ainiya added.

In a picture on her phone, Maisaa al-Ainiya (second from right) poses with her three children after she, her son and one of her daughters graduated from university in 2022. Al-Ainiya taught pronunciation and math to her other daughter (far left), who is disabled, so she could share the moment, 1/12/2025 (Héloise Blondel/Syria Direct)

‘Actual reparation’

As Syria enters a new chapter without Assad, the voices of women like Harmoush, Noura and al-Ainiya serve as both testimony and warning. The end of a regime does not erase decades of suffering, and justice must extend beyond the walls of prisons to the streets, schools and communities that make up society. 

“The role of society and the government is acceptance as a priority, and we need to treat women as victims who need support and empowerment to rebuild their lives normally,” psychologist Arafat said. “They need psychological, physical and mental assistance, and should not be treated as ‘guilty.’ Otherwise, detention becomes two prisons and two punishments: one by the regime, and one by society.” 

“Even the women who react harshly toward a survivor are themselves victims—triggered by memories or experiences. They try to save themselves and draw attention away by judging others,” he added.

Tangible support for former detainees remains far below the level that survivors and advocates say is needed, in part due to international funding cuts that have eaten into the capacity of organizations working to support detainees. In June, Amnesty International noted survivors faced a “critical lack of support” and called for concrete action to guarantee the right to “reparations, including rehabilitation, and to justice.” 

In May, Syria established the National Commission for Transitional Justice and National Commission for the Missing, independent bodies tasked with investigating human rights abuses, pursuing accountability and providing reparations. However, the presidential decree establishing the transitional justice body singled out violations by the former regime, not other perpetrators.

Until today, there are no official statements or mechanisms specifically addressing the needs of formerly detained women. 

For survivors, the work of rebuilding is ongoing, and it demands more than symbolic gestures. Arafat emphasizes the importance of structured support: “Women need compensation, jobs, and specialized spaces for psychological support. Without support, survivors may become destitute. Economic support is essential and is a government responsibility. Compensation must be both material and symbolic—actual reparation, but also moral and emotional recognition.”

“The government must recognize that what we are living today is the result of the sacrifices of all Syrians—especially women,” Alhaj of Women Survivors said. “They must acknowledge the violations committed against women in detention and guarantee survivors an active role  in defending their rights within transitional justice processes.” 

“The government bears responsibility for real accountability for criminals from all parties,” she added. “The security situation in Syria, with criminals roaming free and some even becoming part of the government, has caused fear among many survivors….We can’t deny that even those in power today are mostly perpetrators.”

For Noura, there is only one form of justice she still believes in. “I want them all to be judged because they were cruel to us. But even if they were tried, it would never be enough, it would not restore the justice we lost,” she said at the end of her conversation with Syria Direct. “I only believe in heavenly justice—that is the only justice that can satisfy me. Earthly justice will never compensate us for what we went through as it should.”