One body, rabid and diseased, split into torn flesh, bleeding into itself. A single, sick reality.
What lies beneath devours what walks above. One above ground, one beneath it. One tortured by the denial of life; the other tormented by the denial of death. One screams from the depths, while the other descends into madness, convincing itself the cries aren’t real. One pounds their fists bloody against the ceiling of their cell, while the other unknowingly walks atop raw flesh. One crushed between metal boards, the other suffocated by walls that hear, institutions that humiliate, and systems that choke. One fights for crumbs; the other starves for meaning in the delusion of abundance.
The walls in Syria did not just have ears—the ground beneath had mouths that carried screams.
Assad’s Syria was not a regime; it was a sadistic, twisted mirroring—a sprawling torture chamber masquerading as a country. You stare right at it, but every indulgence before you carries the weight of violence behind it. It drives you to the edge of psychosis. It’s a truth so brutal, immediate, and inhuman that it resists articulation. It’s embedded deep, woven into the fabric of life so thoroughly that to pull it apart is to tear yourself wide open.
Assad’s rule defies frameworks, exceeding even Fanon’s depiction of violence and death and Foucault’s exploration of power and punishment. Assad’s Syria does not punish; its existence is the punishment. Torture doesn’t stop at the opening of a cell door—it persists in the waiting, in the watching, in the psychological toll of those camping outside the prison walls. In the idea that people exist beneath the ground. Beneath the torture complexes of the Syrian government’s vast network of detention centers, people cannot be found.
In Assad’s Syria, the act of searching was placeless. Searching should mean freedom—the ability to move, run, knock on doors, and seek and find. But in Syria, you could not run free across the country to search for the detainees. You don’t just move from door to door, from building to building. Instead, you run in circles within the same building. You were stripped of the freedom to search and instead tied to a placeless place, confined to lists of papers with unconfirmed names. Syria’s Satan left to reduce search to an agonizing ordeal. You are trapped in a labyrinth where every turn leads back to the same point of despair. The walls close in, and the act of searching becomes an endless loop of punishment—a dystopian cassette replaying as you're driven into madness.
The walls taunt you, the doors suffocate you with the knowledge that they are there. Somewhere close. Behind these doors, beneath these floors. It’s the torment of imagining, of knowing. The unbearable weight of proximity—of standing so close yet being trapped by the same walls that cage them, no sense of time and place.
It’s the tears you cry, streaked with blood, as you scream from the depths of your soul: We’ve done it. We’ve crushed Assad, we’ve ended him. Get out, leave—this is no longer Assad’s Syria. But beneath the ground, they cannot know. Their cries of hopelessness cannot meet our screams of victory and cries of despair; their voices, drowned in blood, cannot mingle with our maddening knowledge.
We know. We know a beautiful, terrible truth. But we cannot tell them.
They thought they imagined it. The faint screams beneath their feet, rising from under universities, under public institutions. They heard the echoes but refused to imagine meaning. Because to imagine meaning, to give weight to those sounds, was to invite unbearable pain. But Damascus was screaming—from beneath and from within.
Damascus, you beautiful, broken city—they carved you into unimaginable depths. Depths that swallowed your children whole. The doctor split Damascus open. He slit her veins and let her lifeblood drown her children. He breathed venom into her veins and cauterized them with the iron board he used to crush her dead.
I cannot think of the tunnels found beneath their houses as anything other than an extension of their sadism—to split the city into two, to carve it dead, and then carve yourself a way out.
But Damascus refused him. She refused to let the venomous rat burrow into her core again. She spat him into the abyss, to go down in history as life’s Satanic doctor, the greatest criminal to ever rule over blood—both beneath the ground and above it. He is cursed, doomed to hellfire, above and beneath. No earthly vengeance could ever deliver justice to Syria’s detainees, to its mothers, fathers, lovers, sisters, and brothers. To our martyrs, our refugees, and our displaced.
Beautiful, broken Damascus—to the purest revolution. To those who kept their promise, who screamed their truth through your songs, chants, and tears. To the revolutionaries who spoke the word of justice with their very first cry and fought for her with their weapons. To those who dared to tell the world what happened. To those who rose from the heart of oppression, who stood for justice, who were slaughtered, bombed, and crushed under barrel bombs. To those who endured horrors beyond the limits of language. To those who clung to their rights and refused to kneel.
To the martyrs, displaced, and those who carry the unbearable weight of truth and a cause too heavy to bear. To those who refused to return to a Syria that was no longer theirs. To those whose lives were stolen by exile, to those who endured pain too deep for words. Syria bled—not just from the outside but from deep within.
They killed Damascus, slit her open, and carved through her. But we shall breathe life into her. The blood of our martyrs, our tears, and the sweat of our broken hands rebuilding it will breathe life into Syria once again and for eternity. Satan’s flames were smothered underfoot, and his idols were dragged through the ashes by the hands of Syria’s sons and daughters. Assad fell, and Syria will live.
Image credit: The Architecture of Dictatorship in Syria 1971-2024 by Wesam Al Asali
