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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

It’s like coming up for air after 50 years - that’s the way one man described this moment in Syria.

Since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad, Syrians are celebrating. Some have wandered through Assad’s deserted palace, thousands are in the streets. Many more are searching the massive network of prisons that underpinned Assad’s repressive regime.

They're looking for loved ones, hoping they're still alive and, if not, that they might finally get closure.

Today, journalist Heidi Pett on the ground in Damascus, as the Syrian people reckon with what the future holds for their country now that Assad is gone.

It’s Thursday, December 19.

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RUBY:

Heidi, hello. It's great to have you back on the show.

HEIDI:

It's nice to be back.

RUBY:

So you're in Damascus right now and you've been there since just after Bashar al-Assad fled the country and the regime fell. Tell me what it's like to be in Syria at this moment of change.

HEIDI:

The energy in Damascus is kind of incredible because it's this real mix of elation, relief, but also a real sense of grief and anger. And all of that is kind of mixed together in the streets.

Audio Excerpt - Streets of Damascus

HEIDI:

There have been a number of large demonstrations and gatherings over the last week that I've been here.

Audio Excerpt - Streets of Damascus

HEIDI:

It's only just sinking in for many people here that, you know, more than 50 years of the Assad regime is over and that they can finally speak about what happened.

You know, for so many people talking about their father that was imprisoned or what happened to them in prison or that, you know, the bombing of their neighbourhoods by their own government, breathing a whisper of that would have got them detained and probably killed. And so, it's incredible to be somewhere where people are just so desperate and happy and relieved to be able to talk freely for the first time in decades.

RUBY:

Yeah, we're learning a lot of things that had been hidden, particularly about the prison system. There were rumours for a long time about the prisons being used by the regime, about torture and terror, but we didn't know the extent of what was actually happening until now. So tell me what's coming to light, what are we learning?

HEIDI:

So one of the first places that people went when the regime fell was this prison outside of Damascus called Sednaya. There is a huge network of prisons across the country. They're in the basements of laundromats, they're in every single, you know, courtroom, police station, underneath the radio and television building. The extent and the scale of the security state here is becoming clear. But Sednaya is one of the largest and most infamous of Assad's prisons.

Audio Excerpt - Hayat Tahrir al-Sham:

[Man speaking Arabic, freeing prisoners]

HEIDI:

When the HTS fighters swept through and they unlocked the doors of prisons all around the country, this rumour spread that there were secret underground cells. You know, there were these incredible scenes of people showing up, jack hammering, digging up the floors.

HEIDI:

And there was this real sense of this last expression of hope for families that people that they might not have seen in ten years may still somehow be alive.

Audio Excerpt - Woman:

[Speaking Arabic]

Audio Excerpt - Translator:

“She was there, she don’t have anybody to ask for him until now. Only she search the paper if she find anything for him.”

HEIDI:

So on Wednesday when I arrived here in Syria, Sednaya is one of the first places I went and families were still showing up. There were people camped outside, you know, sleeping in the prison grounds.

Audio Excerpt - Translator 1:

“She hope so, maybe here, maybe in another place. But she hope. She is not 100% he is here or where he is.”

HEIDI:

And over the course of about a day, it became clear that there were no underground cells. And a Syrian human rights activist who has done a great deal of work on this, gave this incredibly tearful, actually, interview on television where he said, he was like, I hate to break it to the families, but the more than 100,000 missing, they're not here. They're probably dead.

Audio Excerpt - Fadel Abdul Ghany interview:

[Speaking Arabic]

HEIDI:

But that hadn't stopped people from showing up, clutching onto the last straws of hope that someone's father, their brother, their, you know, their mother, their son, that there might be some scrap of information, basically, about what happened to them.

RUBY:

And, I mean, some people obviously would be able to get that information about their family members and maybe, you know, in the best possible scenarios, be reunited. But what about those who actually don't find anything in the prisons and will never have a body to bury? What does closure look like for them?

HEIDI:

So for many of the families, first they went to the prisons and they hoped that they would find their family members alive. And then news broke that a number of bodies from the prisons, mostly from Sednaya, had been brought to the main hospital in Damascus. The families who had been to the prisons and not found their loved ones alive there then came to the hospital hoping at least that they could identify them among the dead, and that that would be some form of closure, that at least they would have a body to bury. But there are 100,000 missing in Syria, and this main hospital in Damascus, they had 35 bodies.

Audio Excerpt - Heidi Pett:

“How many families have come through here hoping to identify their loved one who's missing?”

Audio Excerpt - Translator 2:

“Thousands.”

HEIDI:

One of the bodies that had been brought to this hospital was of a very famous Syrian activist. His name was Mazen Al Hamada and he was one of the first to speak out about what happened in Sednaya; the torture that he experienced; the torture that he saw and witnessed. He returned to Syria in 2020 and he immediately disappeared back into the detention apparatus until his body was found at the military hospital. And so, there was a funeral for him on Thursday, which became incredibly symbolic. It became a funeral for all the missing, all the people whose families don't have a body to bury and and maybe never will.

Audio Excerpt - Crowd:

[Chanting Mazen]

HEIDI:

You know, as his coffin was carried through the streets of Damascus, there was a huge crowd chanting his name and carrying photographs of him. But not just him. They were carrying photographs of other missing public figures, so other activists and writers, but also their own family members. And it became a real moment of collective grief and mourning, but also genuinely real happiness and relief.

This security apparatus and this repression of the Syrian people goes back to, you know, well before Bashar al-Assad. It goes back to his father, Hafez, and more than five decades. And so the sense that people have, as one person explained it to me, it's like we've been living underground and we have finally come up for air.

RUBY:

After the break, the drug operations that funded the Assad regime.

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RUBY:

So Heidi, you're in Damascus right now and it's been less than two weeks since Bashar al-Assad fled and now the rebels who overthrew his government, they're picking through the remains of the regime. We know that the terrors of the prison system are being revealed, but what else are we learning about Syria under Bashar al-Assad?

HEIDI:

So, in recent years, Syria has actually been described as a narco state, which you would ordinarily think of as places in South and Central America that have relied on, you know, the cocaine and now increasingly the fentanyl trade. But Syria actually was an enormous producer and exporter of a drug called Captagon. It's an amphetamine. It's very popular across the Middle East. It's sometimes used by fighters to, sort of, keep them awake and focused in battle, but it's also used as a party drug. So I went to a factory where this drug was being produced just outside Damascus, just in the, you know, in the hills outside Duma. It used to be a potato chip factory. It's called Captain Corn and there's this jingle, you know, all the kids know this jingle for Captain Corn, and it was turned into a drug production facility. And so when I got there the smell was just incredible because the regime had set fire to the factory just before they left. But what was particularly interesting is the evidence of how they were transported and secretly exported around the Middle East. So, in this particular factory, one of the main ways was the pills had been disguised inside parts for generators. There were also fake fruits filled with pills as well. You know, these pills inside Syria, they're very cheap, but in places like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, they go for $25 US dollars a pill. And, you know, just in this one factory that we saw that it would be making millions for the regime.

RUBY:

Right. So, Heidi, what's going to happen to all of these factories, to this entire, kind of, clandestine operation that the regime ran now and all of the drugs that have been left behind?

HEIDI:

Well, at the moment, and this is the huge challenge for Syria and, you know, for the new government of Syria is that the advance by HTS and the other associated rebel groups happened so quickly. You know, the soldiers from the regime just melted away. I mean, on the drive in from Beirut to Damascus, there was no border control. You know, I have no Syrian stamp in my passport because there was nobody at the border. And by the side of the road there is just discarded army uniforms where people, soldiers, had clearly taken them off, changed into civilian clothes and fled. So what's happened is that either local fighters from groups like Jaysh al Islam or other rebel groups or fighters from HTS are now taking up, you know, these kind of positions and beginning to guard these facilities and make some attempt to secure them.

RUBY:

Yeah and it sounds like HTS itself was taken by surprise at how quick their success was. So, what have they been doing for the last, sort of, week or so? How are they preparing to govern?

HEIDI:

One of the first big challenges actually will be the economy here. Syria has been under sanctions for an incredibly long time in an attempt to, you know, to put pressure on the regime. It's now being governed by HTS who, they're still a proscribed terrorist organisation. You know, the UK, the EU and the US, all still designate it as a terrorist organisation. What's interesting is that the UK and the US have publicly said in the last few days that they have had meetings with HTS, which you would ordinarily not with a terrorist organisation. You know, that they have also said it's too early to start talking about lifting sanctions. There's been a very concerted effort by HTS, and particularly by its leader, Jolani, to reassure the international community that, yes, HTS had its roots in Al Qaeda but they split from them a very long time ago, that they intend to form a sort of civil government. But it's not just the international community that is waiting to see what will happen here. There is a sense of trepidation, you know, from some minorities, from Alawites, from Christians, waiting to see whether these assurances that they've received from HTS will be borne out. But time will tell over the next couple of months, really, about exactly how they govern.

RUBY:

It sounds like a country, kind of, holding its breath, waiting to see if this change will bring stability and a chance to put the trauma of the Assad regime behind it.

HEIDI:

Yeah. And I mean, you know, that's one of the things that one of the people that I met at Mazen's funeral, Mahmoud, he's, you know, one of these old political activists and writers who, you know, they've been around the block. They've experienced the false promise of Bashar, the son. You know, when he first came to power he said that he was going to make changes, he was going to open things up. That turned out to be a lie. He turned out to be more brutal than his father.

Mahmoud said to me, while, you know, we're incredibly happy right now and we deserve, as well, time to be happy, there is this push back, in fact, by some Syrians of this kind of finger wagging by the international community of like, oh, this may not actually be the good news story we think it is and we have to remember that, you know, these rebels, their roots in Al Qaida and everything. And there is a bit of a sense from some Syrians of like, can we just have five minutes to celebrate the fact that a five decade regime that imprisoned, you know, tortured, forcibly disappeared, murdered and buried in mass graves our friends and family members, can we just have five minutes, please, to celebrate the fact that that has ended?

But, Mahmoud, he was very keen to impress upon me that the thing you have to understand is that we are only half the way there and the next 12 months will be critical.

RUBY:

Heidi, thank you so much for your time.

HEIDI:

Thanks for having me.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today...

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has unveiled his mid-year budget update showing Australia is expected to slip deeper into deficit over the next four years due to growing spending and falling tax.

The expected deficit for the current financial year 2024/25, is $26.9 billion, which is set to widen to $31.7 billion by the financial year 2027/28.

And,

New York prosecutors say Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting United Health Group CEO Brian Thompson, has been charged with murder.

Mangione was indicted on 11 counts, including first-degree murder and murder as a crime of terrorism. The indictment accusing Mangione of murdering Thompson with the intent to "influence the policy of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion".

Mangione is being held on gun charges in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested last week.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, thanks for listening.

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