In 1975, the Syrian regime of Hafez Assad invaded neighboring Lebanon under permission from the Nixon administration whose sinister Sate Dept Secretary, the war criminal Henry Kissinger, made the following deal with the Stalinist regime in Damascus less than a year earlier in 1974.
Per the Truce Agreement that followed the 1973 October War, Kissinger promised Assad that his regime could invade and seize Lebanon in exchange of which Assad would not contest Israel's sovereignty of the Syrian Golan Heights that Israel had seized during the war.
The Syrian invasion of Lebanon began in earnest during the 1974-1975 period as soon as the Assad-Kissinger deal was made: Syrian-sponsored militias and gangs (Al-Saiqa, Al-Asifa, etc.) began infiltrating into Lebanon across the lawless border and attack remote Christian villages with small scale massacres. The purpose was to trigger a reaction from the Lebanese Christians and thus plunge the country into chaos and civil unrest, which would in turn justify a Syrian invasion supposedly to preserve order and stability with the backing of the United States. Indeed, up until March 2003 the US State Department refused to label the Syrian occupation as an "occupation", preferring the neutral term of "presence" and using the formula of "Syria as a factor of stability" in Lebanon. It took September 11, 2001 and a reassessment of US policy for Secretary of State Colin Powell to use the term "occupation" for the first time in March 2003 because Syria was assisting Saddam Hussein in Iraq against the American invasion.
As 1974-1975 went by, and absent any reaction by the Lebanese government and army against the Syrian-Palestinian-Leftist alliance that was slowly coalescing, the Lebanese Christians began forming their own militias in self-defense. Because of the diseased sectarian structure of the Lebanese government, the latter could not use its army for fear it might splinter along sectarian lines, which it ultimately did in 1976 when a Sunni Muslim traitor lieutenant of the Lebanese Army by the name of Ahmad Khatib led a sedition (The Arab Army of Lebanon) against his own government and army and began attacking regular army barracks with the help of Palestinian guerilla groups led by Yasser Arafat's PLO and other affiliated Sunni Muslim and Druze militias.
For 30 long years (1975-2005) Assad (father Hafez, then son Bashar) maintained a tight grip on Lebanon, shelling various regions and cities during bursts of fighting with Lebanese militias (mostly Christian militias, but also Muslim, Druze and Palestinian militias, depending on the prevailing political circumstances), kidnapping people, assassinating political and religious leaders, journalists and foreign envoys and ambassadors. All of this with the blessing of successive US administrations whose sole concern was to protect Israel and its annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights. The US sacrificed interest-free and insignificant Lebanon and allied itself with a brutal Stalinist regime in order to shield Israel from a repeat of the October 1973 war in which Israel displayed serious vulnerabilities: Israel initially lost on both the Egyptian and Syrian fronts then recouped, but the psychological impact was huge.
Per the Kissinger-Assad 1974 deal, Assad faithfully did his part, earning him praise by successive US administration who repeatedly qualified Assad as an honorable and cunning man who kept his word. Every year, US presidents would meet with him in Geneva and/or have their secretaries of state visit him in Damascus. All of this while Syria was the inaugural member of the State Department's list of State Sponsors of Terrorism because Syria was behind a long list of terror attacks and assassinations in Lebanon and in Europe.
Not one "resistance" shot was ever fired from Syria soil by either regular Syrian troops or affiliated militias against Israel's occupation of the Golan which Israel subsequently annexed. In contrast, the Syrian regime incited, funded and armed a slew of "resistance" organizations in occupied Lebanon, beginning with the various Palestinian groups (PLO, PFLP, etc.) together with an incongruous assortment of Sunni Nasserists-Islamists-Fascists-Communists, etc. including the feudal barbarian Jumblatt family's fake Socialist militia, the Fascists of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, the Baath Party, the Communist Party etc.) into attacking Israel from Lebanese soil (but never from Syria soil) on the claim of "liberating" Palestine from South Lebanon and culminating today with Hezbollah's replacing the PLO in the premeditated torment of South Lebanon. Syria thus shielded itself from Israeli retaliations, while Lebanon took the brunt of Israeli retaliatory attacks. The tacit understanding between Israel and Syria was as follows: Syria did whatever it wanted in Lebanon, but could not fly its air force over Lebanese airspace; Syria's occupation army in Lebanon was forbidden from responding to Israel's retaliatory strikes against Lebanon; and Israel was allowed to strike at will inside Lebanon. Both sides agreed to use only Lebanon as their voodoo doll against one another, and refrained from direct confrontations between one another.
Why did Syria NOT sponsor any "resistance" activity from its own soil (like the one it backed from Lebanese soil) against Israel's annexation of its Golan is evidence that the point of its occupation of Lebanon was to destabilize the country and not pacify it, and that the "liberation" of Palestine was just a slogan used by Syrian propaganda. What is more striking is that Syria's support of "resistance" militias in Lebanon served to incite Israel into aggressing Lebanon and give it the pretexts it needed to invade and occupy Lebanese territory. The Syrians were mad at Lebanon for not joining the wars against Israel in 1967 and 1973 and not losing territory like Syria and Egypt did. In fact, up to its 1978 invasion of south Lebanon, Israel never seized or occupied any Lebanese territory, so no "liberation" of Lebanese soil was actually needed. And when in 1978, Israel carried out its first invasion (Operation Litani), it quickly withdrew but struck an alliance with the Christian towns and villages along the border that had been isolated and separated from the central government by Ahmad Khatib's seditious Arab Army of Lebanon. That strip of south Lebanon that became a forced ally of Israel became the "occupation" pretext upon which Hezbollah - beginning in 1982, after the eviction of the PLO by the Israeli 1982 invasion - would later claim its legitimacy as a resistance movement. In other words, the dissident anti-Lebanese-State political and military movements and organizations, led by the Sunni Muslims of Lebanon (who felt kinship with the Sunni Muslim Palestinians), caused the very Israeli occupation of the south that they and Hezbollah claimed to be fighting.
I will not go further into the rest of a very complicated Lebanese War that began in 1974 and that has yet to conclude. The recent (2024) fall of the Assad regime in Damascus in the hands of former Sunni Al-Qaeda terrorists has opened the archives and records of the brutality of Assad against his own people, particularly during the 2011-2024 Syrian civil war. The West and the world rightfully expressed outrage at what Assad had done to his own people before and during those years.
But my own question is why did that same West and international community decide to ignore the same exactions, abuses, killings, shellings, assassinations and massacres it carried out during Lebanon's thirty long years under the Syrian occupation, even though the Lebanese continued to demand justice for what Assad was doing in Lebanon. No one listened. The reply was always, "Syria's 'presence' is a factor of stability in Lebanon". Several Lebanese human rights organizations spent years documenting Syria's abuses. One of them was "Support for Lebanese Detained Arbitrarily" (SOLIDA) which undertook to record the testimonials of the few Lebanese prisoners who were released from Syria after their abduction and torture.
Below is one such testimony translated from Arabic into English. There are an estimated 17,000 Lebanese citizens who were abducted in Lebanon and illegally transferred to Syria during the 1975-2005 period and whose whereabouts remain unknown. The numbers of those who returned is puny in comparison to that number and I do not have those numbers. The testimony below is from 2004.
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Lebanon’s Golgotha in the Prisons of
Syria:
The Testimony of a Former Lebanese Detainee
From the archives of the Syrian War Against Lebanon (1975-2005), the
testimony of one among thousands of Lebanese citizens who were arbitrarily
detained in Lebanon by Syrian Intelligence and transferred to, and incarcerated
in, the notorious prisons of the Assad regime.
April 12, 2004 – Reporter News
I am a Lebanese
citizen from Beirut who was imprisoned in 1991 by the Syrian occupation army. I
spent five years at the Syrian prison of Mazze. This testimony is intended for
the Lebanese, Arab, and international public opinions so that they are aware of
the suffering of the Lebanese under the Syrian occupation: brutal repression
and unparalleled terror, not unlike those of the Nazi concentration camps and
fascist terror.
I would like this
testimony to make its way into the hands of Lebanese, Arab, and international
media, and of embassies and non-governmental organizations in order to prompt
them to campaign for the release of hundreds of Lebanese prisoners who suffer
daily in the prisons of Syria for no other reason than having called for the
freedom, independence, and sovereignty for Lebanon.
I would also like
for the leaders of the free world to read this testimony and use it to take
action for the liberation of Lebanese detainees in Syria, and most importantly
to bring an end to the Syrian occupation that suffocates Lebanon and its
unfortunate people who reel under the rule of collaborators working for Syria
against their own people.
The reader will
forgive me for not using my name since I still live in Lebanon and do not want
to be the target of reprisals or another detention or even be “skinned alive”,
a threat I received from the head of the Syrian Intelligence Services
(Mukhabarat) in Lebanon, Major-General Ghazi Kanaan, before my release.
My ordeal began one
day as I was driving to work in my own car. As I parked in front of my office,
a group of Kalashnikov-wielding men in civilian clothes surrounded me and said:
“Don’t move. We are Syrian Mukhabarat. You are our prisoner.” The group’s leader
had barely finished these words, and two of the men approached me quickly,
covered my head with a black bag, and handcuffed me before throwing me in the
trunk of their car and speeding away.
I was wondering
what they could possibly want from a man like me, a two-year veteran of the
Lebanese army who no longer was involved with the military. My only affiliation
was with a local association working for the development of my native region
and the improvement of its standard of living. As for my political opinions, I
opposed the Syrian occupation of my country like most of my fellow Lebanese. I
was as well an activist in the movement of General Michel Aoun in both regions
of North and South Metn.
The answer to my
question soon came when the car stopped and the armed men took me out of the
trunk and pushed me, handcuffed and with the bag over my head, down a long
stairway that led into a humid and moldy underground dungeon. I could smell the
ocean, and I concluded that I must be at the Hotel Beau Rivage prison that I
have heard so much about and which the Syrians had converted into their primary
prison in Beirut and the headquarters of their Mukhabarat services under the
orders of Colonel Rustom Ghazaleh and his aides.
The hitting,
kicking, and insults did not stop from the moment they removed me from the
trunk of the car and until I was shoved into a tiny cell – 1.5 meters long by
80 cm wide (4.9 by 2.7 ft). They kept on hurling Lebanese swearwords at me but
with a Syrian accent: “We’re going to fuck the greatest of the Lebanese. We
will walk over the Lebanese with our boots. Who do you think you are, you
motherfuckers, to oppose us?” and other similar hair-raising insults.
They then threw me
in the dark cell that was really like a tomb. Two hours later, the door opened
and a couple of bullies came in, placed the bag again over my head, and pushed
me into the narrow passage between the cells, then again up the stairs and into
an interrogation room. There, they sat me in a special interrogation chair made
of metal and resumed the swearing and cussing, but this time it was directed at
prominent Lebanese figures that included, among others, the Maronite Patriarch
whom they called a senile idiot. In fact, they did not spare a single Lebanese
Christian leader, saying: “You motherfuckers do not want the Syrians?… We will
take care of you. By God we will skin you alive…”
Suddenly the room
fell silent, as some higher-ranking people walked into the room. I knew that
the newcomers were high-ranking because the bullies addressed them with “Sidna”
(Sir, or Lord).
The guards took my
clothes off (they actually tore them off) without removing the bag off my head
or the handcuffs from my wrists. Then they poured very cold water on me,
punched me, and hit me with clubs to the point where I lost track of the count
of blows. Blood was pouring out of my nose and mouth, while the dirty black bag
over my head prevented me from seeing where the blows were coming from: I was
like a cat in a bag.
They showered me
with questions accusing me of spying on the Syrian army for Israel and every
time I denied the spying charges they would fly into a rage and the blows
multiplied. They would repeatedly interrogate me then take me back to the cell
till I lost any sense of time and place. It was only when my guards and
investigators informed me that I will be transferred to Anjar (headquarters of
the Syrian Mukhabarat in Lebanon) for additional investigations after the
preliminary 3-day phase of the investigation at the Beau Rivage compound that I
realized that this circus had lasted for three days.
They put me in a
truck with eight others from different regions of Lebanon. Our heads were
covered with bags and our hands and feet were cuffed. It was extremely cold and
Beirut was under a heavy downpour. By the time we arrived at Dahr El Baydar
(the mountain pass on the highway to Damascus) we were shivering from the cold
which made our wounds hurt even more.
We arrived at the
central prison of Anjar in the Bekaa Valley where all the Lebanese prisoners
converge from the South, Beirut, and the North of Lebanon before being
transferred to prisons across the border in Syria.
The prison at Anjar
was originally a stable that was confiscated by the Syrians when they invaded
Lebanon: they transformed it into a penitentiary without making any changes to
it except for the room where the horses were shoed which they converted it into
a torture room decorating it with the most horrible and dreadful instruments of
torture. Anjar’s penitentiary is not very big because, as I mentioned earlier,
it is a gathering place for detainees who are then either released and on their
way home, or are transferred to the horrific prisons of Syria across the
border.
The Anjar
penitentiary is under the personal direction of the head of the Syrian
Mukhabarat in Lebanon, General Ghazi Kanaan, and his deputy, Major Adnan
Balloul nicknamed “the ferocious beast”. They are both assisted by the chief of
the Anjar prison guards, Lieutenant Sleiman Salameh, who leads the throng of
Alawi investigators always thirsting for Lebanese blood.
At Anjar they lined
us up against a wall and took the bags off ours heads so that General Ghazi
Kanaan can see our faces up close. In effect, he got close to us and every time
he looked into a face he would ask: “Who is this one?”, and a Mukhabarat agent
would answer with a list of names in hand: “This is so-and-so.”
Kanaan inspected us
for about fifteen minutes then made this political speech: “Anyone who says
anything against Syria will be skinned alive (the expression “to skin alive” is
one the Syrians use frequently.) We will presently send you to Syria where we will
continue our investigation and I advise you to tell all in order to shorten
your suffering. Otherwise, you will never see your families again in Lebanon…”
Kanaan said many
things, but I do not remember all of the things he said since it happened a
while ago. I remember, though, that one of the detainees tried to answer but a
Syrian Mukhabarat officer hit him repeatedly with his rifle butt. Then they
replaced the bags over our heads and put us back on the truck that took us to
Syria.
“Whoever enters it
is doomed, and whoever leaves it is reborn.” That is the slogan inscribed at
Mazze prison and in the investigation centers of the Palestinian branches of
the Syrian military intelligence services. This prison is the reception center
for the Lebanese. Thousands of them have entered it but have disappeared without
a trace.
There were nine of
us from different regions of Lebanon to leave the truck. They took the bags off
our heads and put us in line one behind the other. We were received by the
Syrian Colonel Mounir Abrass, the head of intelligence in the Palestine
Section. Around him were some twenty soldiers with batons and whips who were
staring at us with eyes full of hate as if we were long time enemies or Israeli
soldiers. When the truck and its escort car left, Abrass’s men stood around us
and immediately began to beat us, shouting insults like: “we are going to fuck
your dignity and humiliate you. We will step with our boots on the greatest of
the Lebanese …”, followed by a stream of swearing that displayed a deep hatred
for all that is Lebanese, as if the Lebanese were insects that needed to be
eliminated for the glory and survival of Syria…
The beating session
ended and we were assembled in the courtyard bleeding from all over. It was
night and the cold was unbearable in Damascus. I will never forget that night.
We appealed to all the saints and prophets imploring their mercy but to no avail.
Ferocious wolves show more compassion towards their victims than the Syrian
guards. A few moments later, they drenched us with very cold water. Maybe they
wanted to wash us, I do not know. But after spending years at Mazze I came to
know that that was the reception accorded to all the new detainees, especially
when it is a large group like ours.
Then they replaced
the bags over our heads to lead us to the solitary cells located 40 meters
(approx. 44 yards) under the ground and measuring 80 cm (2.7 ft) wide by 180 cm
(5.9 ft) long. The detainee cannot fully stand up. The doors were made out of
steel and they gave us what they called “food” through a slot that the guards
opened from outside.
It was the head of
the Palestine Section, Colonel Mezher Fares and his group who led my
investigation. Every day they took me from my cell to the investigation area
with my head covered with the black bag. Once in the investigation room they
removed the bag off my head and I found Fares in a chair, either smoking a
cigar or sipping coffee with guards around him. He would usually start off with
an abundant stream of swears directed at the Lebanese, accusing us of
collaborating with Israel. Then, and without any warning, the blows would start
pouring down.
There are no words
to describe how much I suffered in that Syrian prison:
- They whipped me with what is called a
“bull’s tail” whip, which is a terrible instrument of torture.
- They pulled off my fingernails and
toenails.
- They hit me in on my genital area and
inserted sharp objects in my anus.
- They gave me electric shocks on my nose,
ears, and throat.
- They burned me with cigars and
cigarettes.
- They put me in the “German chair” (A
metal chair with moving parts that cause an extreme extension of the
spinal column, which leads to quasi-asphyxiation and sometimes fracture of
the vertebrae and paralysis of the lower limbs)
- They hung me on a tire
- They hung me to a hoist for nine days
with my head covered.
- They put salt on my wounds and I
screamed and suffered till I lost consciousness. I would regain
consciousness when they would wake me up with a spray of cold water, and
then to start beating me again.
The investigation
period lasted for 150 days that I spent in solitary confinement in my cell – or
“tomb” as the detainees would call it. I would eat what they gave me with my
hands like the animals we see in movies. I did not know what I was given to eat
but I was able to identify breadcrumbs and some olives.
Sometimes, in a
state of exhaustion, I would sleep for long hours and I would defecate and
urinate in my raggedy clothes.
I will never forget
the chief of the Mazze prison, Captain Bassam Hassan who weighed 150 kilos (330
pounds). He would pounce on me like a beast to beat what was left of my body. I
learned later from old prisoners that they (the Syrians) learned sophisticated
methods of torture from movies they watched.
Many Lebanese
prisoners died at Mazze under the torture inflicted by captain Bassam Hassan
and his hangmen who numbered 14 and amomg whom I recall Salah Zoghbi, Abdel
Razzaq Halabi, Bassam Mustapha, Hissam Succar, and Muhammad Mufleh, in addition
to a number of assistants and soldiers whom we called “the guards”.
Finally, they
forced me to sign a written statement whose contents I did not know.
Then I was allowed
to take a bath. They shaved my head and gave me clothes similar to a Syrian
soldiers’ uniform. Later, one of the guards told me: “We gave you a new name
which will be your name until you get out of here. Be careful not to use your
real name in front of other prisoners. You must completely forget it, otherwise
we will send you back to the tomb, understood?”
Swapping my name
for another meant that I did not exist for the Syrian authorities and that I
never entered a Syrian prison. It is actually the case for all Lebanese
prisoners in Syrian jails whose parents search in vain for information about
them because they do not exist on the lists of detainees. The Syrian
authorities have to be forced to reveal their true names.
I was then
transferred to a bigger cell with a number of young Lebanese and Jordanian men,
all accused of threatening Syrian security! We were approximately 25 prisoners
and the subterranean cell was no larger than 12 square meters (39 sq ft). In
the summer we suffocated from the heat and humidity, and in winter we shivered
from the cold. And from time to time, they remembered us with a torture session
so we do not forget where we are.
Nighttime at Mazze
is a terrifying experience, so horrific that no horror movie can match it:
Absolute silence punctuated with gut-wrenching screams and howls of pain that
take one’s breath away as the electric torture sessions or other civilized
methods employed by the Syrian Mukhabarat. After an occasional pause, the cries
and howls would resume even more terrifying than before, and on through the
night! My God, we asked ourselves, will this night ever end? During those
moments, Moslem prisoners would quietly utter the Allah Akbar (God is Great)
chant while the Christians among us would pray to the Holy Virgin even more
quietly! My God! Will this night ever end?
I later learned
that my parents tried to reach the prison after bribing a Syrian officer and
locating my whereabouts. They reported to the prison gate but the warden Bassam
Hassan constantly refused to admit to the presence of Lebanese detainees all
the while trying, with his assistants, to extort money from the detainees’
parents with the collaboration of Syrian Mukhabarat agents in Lebanon, starting
with Ghazi Kanaan, Rustom Ghazaleh, and Adnan Balloul.
There were about
150 Lebanese detainees at Mazze, yet our jailers refused to admit to the
presence of a single Lebanese. They even forced us to talk with a Syrian accent
to eliminate any trace of us.
There were no
medical services in the Syrian prisons and no judicial process for most of the
detainees. As for the court that heard
the cases of some of the Lebanese, it was the “Third Field Court of the Syrian
Expeditionary Force occupying Lebanon”, which means that the Syrian Army in
fact applied Martial Law on the Lebanese even as the collaborator regime in
Beirut claimed to be a sovereign government! What a shame!
Our daily diet
consisted of potatoes, olives, ground wheat and cauliflower. We spent the time
crying, exchanging stories from the country and listening to new stories
brought in by the new detainees as we dressed their injuries with water and
pieces of fabric ripped from the uniforms left behind by the released
detainees. We were handled by Syrian army deserters who were serving their
prison sentence in one of the wings of the Mazze compound. We called them the
Deserters.
As to those who
were deathly ill they were sent to Al-Muassat Hospital located close to the
prison and where the Military Police stood guard. One time, one of the
detainees died among us from severe torture because he was accused of
collaborating with the Lebanese Forces. After an electric torture session, they
sent him back to solitary confinement. But realizing that he was dying they
brought him back to us in the large cell as he was turning blue and drooling,
with blood oozing out of his ears and nose. We told the jailers that he was
dying and that there was nothing we could do for him, and they replied: “Let
him die. May God never bring him back to life! May God take you all as well!”
We tried to
resuscitate him by massaging him and wiping his face with water, but he soon
started to pant and in one last burst and virtually unconscious, he looked at
us and gave us a sad smile and died. We started yelling for our jailers for
help. When we told them that he had died, they started insulting us and then
came in and took him to Al-Muassat Hospital, but it was already too late. We
later learned that he joined the long list of Lebanese buried in mass graves
near the prison where the Syrian Special Forces stood guard to prevent anyone
from getting near without special permission.
The ordeal at Mazze
prison pales in comparison to the prisons at Sabeh-Bahrat in Damascus, of the
Syrian Air Force Intelligence Services, or that of Palmyra where starving dogs
are used to terrorize the prisoners and where death row inmates are impaled.
Snakes and rats are used during torture sessions, in addition to other
hair-raising methods of horror movie vintage.
Among the stories
of Mazze, where I spent five years of my life, is the story of the former
Lebanese Member of Parliament, the late Dr. Farid Serhal, who was imprisoned in
1989 after being kidnapped by the Syrians. In addition to light beatings, they
forced him to clean the toilets and mop the floors in order to humiliate him
because he was once a candidate for the Presidency in Lebanon. They called him
“the dog”.
As for Butros
Khawand (Phalange Party member who was kidnapped in the early 1990s), he was at
Wing 601 in Mazze. He had become skin and bones because of humiliation and
torture.
I will never forget
the torture inflicted by the Syrian jailers on a young Lebanese soldier they
accused of having fought against the Syrian occupation: They crucified him on a
big wooden cross – because he was Christian, said Captain Bassam Hassan – then
they forced him to run in a circle while beating him like a horse, then they
hoisted up his cross and left him out in the sun for nine days. He was bleeding
from his mouth, ears and everywhere else.
When Bassel Assad
(son of Syrian president Hafez Assad) died, our torturers attacked us like
furious bulls. They beat us and left us without food for one whole week because
they thought we were happy for his death!
After spending five
years in prison without a sentence like all the Lebanese detainees here, and in
response to friendly interventions, they decided to let me go. They transported
me in a truck to Anjar where I was made to sit on the floor waiting for General
Ghazi Kanaan who told me upon his arrival: “I hope you learned your lesson and
I warn you that next time I will grind your flesh and bones, and you and those
who support you must know that you will always live under our boots and no
matter what you do, your destiny is Syria.”
Then they
transferred me to Anjar prison where Adnan Dalloul and his jailers received me
with a flurry of goodbye blows while waiting to deliver me to the Lebanese
intelligence services that are under their control. And again, as if all the
torture of the past five years was not enough for them, they savagely beat me.
I will never forget the chief of the torturers at Anjar, Captain Sleiman
Salameh. All those who went through this prison agree that he is the most
brutal man on earth.
The collaborator
Lebanese intelligence services took custody of me at ten in the evening. The
head of the Investigations Service at the Lebanese Defense Ministry’s holding
center, Imad Kaakur, immediately beat me under pretense of carrying out an
investigation. I told him: “Five years of torture in Syria are not enough? What
more do you want from me? I forgot how to speak Lebanese. I even forgot the
names of my parents. What more do you want from me?”
My words were
useless because he wanted to hit me and draw up a written investigation
statement in order to present it to his superior, collaborator Jamil Es-Sayyed.
They forced me to put my fingerprint on a blank piece of paper, then
transferred me to the Military Police prison at Noura Palace where I spent
three days before the intervention of a collaborator Lebanese politician who
told them: “Five years in Syria are enough to discipline him. What else do you
want? He is no more than a shadow of a man…”
And just like that,
I was freed.
I would like to
point out that Hussein Tlaiss, the escaped prisoner from the Lebanese prison of
Rumieh and who is accused of the murder of the French Military Attaché in
Hazmieh (Beirut suburb), of the assassination attempt on the late President
Camille Chamoun, and of dozens of car bombings in East-Beirut, is one of the
main investigators at Mazze and the one in charge of the Lebanese prisoners. He
enlisted in the Syrian Mukhabarat – Lebanon Section – and is in charge of the
execution of major Syrian security operations in Lebanon. It is said that he is
behind many crimes. He lives with his family in Damascus in the Abu Remmaneh
neighborhood under an assumed name.
