Stuck in a decade-old legal limbo, hundreds of Syrian detainees in Lebanon experience for the first time the possible hope to be released from the country’s most infamous prisons: but just to be extradited to Syria, where many issues question their future safety. On top of that, a legal arm-wrestling between Lebanese and Syrian authorities concerning the ‘Islamist’ file could leave behind, among some culprits, dozens of innocent people, still waiting for trial
The liberation or the taking. Seven months have passed since that December 8, cut off the head of the lion-father, exiled the lion-son, spoliated his property, humiliated the memory of a dynasty. And then: borders reopened, exiles returned, amputated families reunited, old fears eradicated to make way for new fears; proved real the unimaginable allegations that for decades had declared the Assad regime as one of the most violent and repressive in history. Sednaya. Palestine Branch. Tadmor. Hama. Opened the prisons, burned the archives. Convinced the detainees to trust the gunmen who intimated to them to come out, not to be afraid. Recognized the unrecognizable men by families aged, in ten or twenty years, by an incalculable time. Unrecognizable the towns, the houses, and even the aged families, in their bewildered and lost eyes.
Among them were some of the Lebanese arrested and then declared missing during the 30-year Syrian occupation, kept alive only in the enduring memory of the mothers and children: brought back to Lebanon across a border that no one dared to imagine open and seemingly safe anymore, manned by the same authorities who, just a day earlier, had been firing on Sunni migrants to arrest them, and now carelessly stamp their passports, going in search of new communities – Syrian and Lebanese – who once felt secure under the protection of the old regime, and no longer do. For here, even liberation ends up being a sectarian affair.
And indeed, on the other side of the border, in the same Lebanese prisons that for years have persecuted Syrian refugees as such – branding dozens as Islamist terrorists for allegedly taking part in the 2011 uprisings, fabricating theft charges often driven by nothing more than racial hatred, and leaving the most unfortunate to rot in the legal limbo of endless trials – nearly 2,000 Syrians have been left behind: their lives archived. Both before and after December 8. But if until last fall Lebanese officials were merely insisting that they be returned to Syria – appealing to the cost of maintenance and the dramatic issue of prison congestion, 323 percent overcrowded – now that not only the detainees and their ever-remembering families, not matter how aged and unrecognizable, but also the government authorities finally have the same demands, the ‘urgent’ has become ‘complex’, and the ‘political necessity’ a so-called ‘legal issue’.
At the beginning of 2024, in fact, Lebanese authorities held security, political, and judicial meetings with the Assad regime to review the files of Syrian detainees sentenced in Lebanon, aiming to extradite some of them to Syria as part of a plan to reduce overcrowding in Lebanese prisons – and that in reality was aimed at granting a EU financial package of 1 billion euros to support its faltering economy and its security forces, based to conclude some ‘working arrangement’ with Frontex, the EU’s border agency, as Von del Leyen suggested, speculating on the skin of sea migrants. And proving to care about human rights only when borders’ security is not involved.
These discussions caused deep concern among the Syrian detainees there, who feared they would be subjected to torture and severe abuses after being handed over to the regime then ruling Syria: yet with the fall of Assad, the threat of deportation to a repressive regime no longer exists. At least not for the Sunni-majority community that has been targeted for years, and now largely finds in Al-Sharaa a legitimate representative. No matter how violent the ongoing Israeli bombardments, how deep their land occupation; no matter how bloody the inter-sectarian violence, the predictable door-to-door reprisals, how striking the poverty: as absurd as it may seem, from a prison cell where inmates have to take turns to sleep – due to the lack of space to lie down – and where they don’t die but are rather killed by suicide, starvation, and medical negligence, even this Syria resembles a dream of freedom.
A legal arm-wrestling
Highlighting its significance, Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa has committed to personally supervising the detainees’ case. However, although after his visit to post-liberation Syria, former Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati declared that the detainees would be transferred back – and the current Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam addressed the same issue during his trip to Damascus -, the Lebanese government is currently still awaiting an official visit from Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani. A delay that weighs on the shoulders of inmates who, in a sign of protest, on February 11, 2025 have declared for the prison of Roumieh an open-ended hunger strike to denounce their harsh detention conditions and to demand their repatriation to Syria.
According to official figures provided by Interior Minister Ahmad Hajjar, Syrians account for nearly 29 percent of the total number of detainees in Lebanon – in total reaching around 9,000 detainees. Justice Minister Adel Nassar furtherly added that among the Syrian detainees in Lebanon, 1,329 have been awaiting trial for years. Among those already convicted: 87 were found guilty of murder, 82 of terrorism-related crimes and the killings of Lebanese soldiers, 79 of theft, and 141 of other offenses, including drug trafficking and illegal entry into Lebanon.
The latest of many hunger strikes comes this time in the context of worsening humanitarian conditions in Lebanese prisons, where Syrian detainees face continuous violations of their fundamental rights, having been subjected to arbitrary detention for years without any official response to their demands, as it has been testified and documented by humanitarian organizations and lawyers. In a statement published by NGO Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) in February, accounts from detainees and their families revealed that many of those on hunger strike are suffering from a severe deterioration in their physical and psychical health, due to overcrowding, lack of medical and food supplies, spread of infectious diseases, and the denial of contact with the families – especially in the prison of Roumieh. Among them, the statement reveals, at least 190 Syrian inmates were detained for participating in the 2011 popular uprisings in Syria: defectors from the former Assad regime forces and refugees, imprisoned for more than a decade without having been granted fair trials. Many have in fact been subjected to unfair trials before Lebanese military courts or military investigative judges, based on confessions extracted through torture and threats: coerced confessions that led to them being charged with terrorism, resulting in severe prison sentences or indefinite pretrial detention.
One of them is Hassan Harba, 27 years old at the time of his arrest in 2015. Escaped from his hometown in the district of Homs, Al-Qusayr, and living selling dairy products as a refugee in Lebanon, he was arrested for being mistakenly identified as another person, Hassan Younes Harba, known as Abu Ali al-Wadi. On February 26 that year, he reached the General Security office in Baalbek to legalize his residency papers: the Lebanese authorities arrested him and sent him to the Lebanese military intelligence facility in Ablah, in the Beqaa Valley: there, under severe torture, Hassan Harba – the innocent one – was coerced into falsely admitting to that identity. This was despite evidence and records confirming that Abu Ali al-Wadi had died in fighting in Syria, and despite clear differences between Hassan Harba’s information and that of the wanted man. Still, the military court convicted the innocent Harba and sentenced him to life in prison. A terrorist, just for sharing a name with someone else.
In the name of Islamism
Lebanon and Syria are signatories to various extradition agreements, most notably the 1951 Judicial Agreement, which regulates legal cooperation in extradition and the implementation of judicial rulings, and following which the new Syrian authorities intend to request the repatriation of their citizens in the near future. The agreement’s outlined conditions for extradition foresee that not only must the crime be punishable in both states and carry a minimum one-year imprisonment sentence, but also that the convicted person is a national of the requesting state, and the judicial ruling upon him or her final: meaning that those awaiting trial are excluded. It also requires the convicted person’s consent and agreement from both states to carry out the transfer.
The extradition request must therefore originate from the individual’s country of citizenship, meaning Syria initiates it, and not Lebanon. Despite this, however, there have been reports of Lebanese authorities violating the agreement by handing over Syrian detainees to the Assad regime, often without adhering to the stipulated conditions – as many of these detainees have disappeared, faced torture, or been subjected to extrajudicial executions. It is after all known that, depending on the historical moment, both countries have overlooked the rules of agreement for their own interests. Additionally, despite not being signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention, Lebanon is bound by the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits the deportation of individuals to countries where their lives or freedom would be threatened. Yet, no deal currently exists for the transfer of convicted prisoners, and such an agreement would require coordination between the two countries’ Justice Ministries and eventual ratification by the Lebanese Parliament – leaving also the detainees’ file far from being a legal matter, but more so a political back and forth fueled by sectarian grudge and racism.
After the 2011 Syrian revolution, in fact, the Lebanese state – described by lawyers of the so-called Islamists as being dominated by a military court under Hezbollah’s hegemony – worked to silence any dissenting voices opposed to the Assad regime under the charge of ‘terrorism’. A number of those, though, were indeed Islamists who have murdered innocent Lebanese civilians, destroyed civil infrastructure, and killed soldiers of the Lebanese Army: a crime punishable by death, and considered an act of terrorism by both states. It will be enough to mention the Beirut car bombing of August 2013, that killed 27 people and injured 200, and the Tripoli mosques’ attack of the same month, with other 42 victims and hundreds of wounded; the attack against the Iranian embassy of November of the same year, where 23 people were left dead and 160 wounded; the two suicide bombings in Burj el-Barajneh, south of Beirut, of November 2015, that killed 43 people and injured 200; that against the Christian villagers of al‑Qaa, near the Syrian border in the Beqaa Valley, that left 5 dead and around 30 wounded in June 2016; and the Arsal frontline clashes of 2014, resulting in 60 jihadists and 19 Lebanese soldiers killed, and multiple kidnappings.
Just as the Lebanese government defines terrorism crimes as “acts of violence against a state that can spread terror in a country,” interviewed by NOW about the definition of such a slippery and politicized term, too often used to persecute innocents, Mohammed Taha al-Ahmed – Assistant Foreign Minister for Arab Affairs in Syria – stated that “terrorism is known to all governments, and I think it is no different. A terrorist is anyone who attacks the security, safety, or blood of any human being.” A statement so obvious that it clashes with the firm positions of the Lebanese government which, through its Minister of Justice, declared that it firmly refuses to release those charged with rape, attacks against Lebanese soldiers, and terrorism.
Therefore, not only leaving behind 190 Islamists – 25 of whom sentenced to death – rebels, revolutionaries, dissidents or terrorists, however you might call them -, the agreement, if reached, would sentence to eternal disappearance in the depths of the Lebanese prison system all the political prisoners, criminals of opinion, who fourteen or ten or thirty years ago exposed themselves along the same lines as groups that the alternation of political powers would later classify as terrorist. Yet whose instigators are now in power.
That is why Mohammed al-Ahmed believes that “all Syrian detainees must be returned, regardless of their charges, whether for terrorism, drugs, or the like”: those who both Lebanon and Assad have persecuted for years are now the ones the authorities claim to protect. However, he added, “those who deserve accountability must be held accountable.”
“The detainees will be retried on the charges against them in Syrian courts. They will not be released immediately, but will be retried according to Syrian laws, in front of judges nominated by our Minister of Justice. We are ready to receive all Syrian prisoners from all countries willing to do so. We will retry them and bring them to justice. It is not right to receive them and release them, knowing that some of them are accused of crimes,” al-Ahmed stated, claiming that they received databases of all Syrian detainees in official Lebanese prisons. “However, there are a number of those who have been kidnapped by militias such as Hezbollah,” he continued, without providing further details.
As expected, to prove his point, al-Ahmed highlighted the serious issue of overcrowded and inadequate Lebanese prisons that do not meet basic standards, especially in terms of capacity. “In Syria, we prepared prisons to meet those standards,” he claimed. But to my question about the number of prisoners currently detained inside Syrian prisons, about their capacity and how many of Assad’s detention centers are being used by the current government, his answer was simply: “I don’t know.”
Given the relatively low number of Syrian prisoners eligible for legal extradition to Syria, doubts arise regarding the true intent behind this challenging proposal. While the Ministry of Interior reports approximately 2,500 Syrian detainees, human rights advocates estimate the number to be between 1700-1900 prisoners, that al-Ahmed confirmed to reach 1,900. However, less than 20% of these detainees actually serve sentences. This detail is crucial because, as underlined before, Lebanese law stipulates that only sentenced individuals can be extradited. Consequently, the pool of Syrian prisoners eligible for extradition appears to be limited to 200-300 individuals even before meeting all extradition criteria. It’s challenging to envision how such a small number would alleviate the overcrowding in Lebanese prisons, a key rationale cited for the plan.
The cases of Abu Sham and Omar Hamid
It is hard to say whether Abu Sham will be among them. Father of three and pastry chef, if he wasn’t in prison right now, he would be with his family teaching music to his children, he told me from Roumieh’s detention center, the biggest of Lebanon, where he has been detained since 2014: built to accommodate about 1,050 prisoners, and currently hosting 3,700, sleeping on top of each other.
Escaped the brutalities of the Assad regime in 2013, he found refuge in a camp of Arsal, like many Syrians: turned refugees in the matter of a night, without having the time to collect his belongings, to say goodbye to Damascus, his beloved city. To my question about the reason for his imprisonment, he replied: “I am in prison because I opposed the criminal regime of Bashar al-Assad.” Nothing more.
“I was living in one of the camps in Arsal with my family, and men in military uniform we knew were linked to Hezbollah, entered our camp. They took us all, me and my relatives and friends, with charges of terrorism. The accusation was directed specifically at me in the name of violations they said I committed against Syrian refugees in Arsal, for belonging to an armed gang inside Syria – the Damascus Military Council, which is not even on the international list of terrorist organizations.”
From father and pastry chef, to political dissident, to refugee. And finally, an invisible prisoner. What is impressive is not only the short time – a handful of years – for which the epic of a life ends up in the archives of a prison: as much as the number of lives subjected to the same upheaval for a decision made in the middle of the night, hastily: let’s leave. The hope that they will be safe, and that exile will last only a few months, as so many displaced people in history have thought. With the difference that to the porous border between the two countries was to be added the progressively more impassable ones of countless checkpoints, military bodies roughly asking for documents, handcuffs and police cars that take you to an unknown place, and which you then recognize; of prison gates, tiny cells, nonexistent windows. Of the interrogation time that you can’t make go by any faster.
“In Roumieh, I was subjected to a lot of torture,” confessed Abu Sham. “Deprived of water and food for two days, beaten with a stick all over my body, sometimes with electricity. He urinated on me, the interrogator. It was brutal. He would hit my face with his shoe and say ‘you are fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad because you are a terrorist’, that everyone who fought the regime of Assad is a terrorist and me, my children, my mother and father must have died.”
The limit of acceptance and of dignity. The boundary of a charge that can arbitrarily sanction your life imprisonment.
“I am now deprived of treatment and medicine, and the prison is full of locusts, scorpions, and all kinds of insects. Only a month ago, a prisoner committed suicide because he was denied medication. His health had deteriorated, and for that reason, he killed himself. But nothing has changed so far. Despite the loss of more than ten Syrian detainees this year, no one seems to care. We are dying slowly and in silence here.”
In 2023 alone, 23 inmates have died – or one should rather say: they have been killed – because of medical negligence and the state’s inability to treat patients, as well as their families’ inability to secure treatment expenses. As if the state was the disease, and each crisis a symptom. “Sometimes we seek to collect donations from people, but it is roughly impossible to cover them all,” said Lebanese lawyer Mohammad Sablouh, already interviewed by NOW on the issue of food shortage and risk of famine inside Lebanon’s detention centres. “In large prisons like Roumieh,” Sablouh explained, “there is no hospital for emergency cases, nor special equipment for emergencies. Many have died from a heart attack due to the prison administration’s inability to transfer the patients to the closest hospital, as routine procedures usually take a long time.” Furthermore, doctors and nurses are regularly on strike due to low salaries.
On these and other matters, in September 2024, the Internal Security Forces’ riot squad subdued a riot at Lebanon’s largest penitentiary, in a general uprising during which prisoners took several guards hostage, decrying the alleged neglect causing the death of a fellow inmate, Omar Hamid. The deceased prisoner had been sentenced to death for an Islamic State bombing that killed two Lebanese officers.
“The prisoner Omar Hamid died as a result of the negligence of the prison administration and the lack of medical care,” Sablouh commented back then. “Instead of admitting that the internal security forces are wrong and working to rectify the problem years ago, they justified the existence of riot control forces with the argument of kidnapping prisoners and officers, but the reality came out with the lie of the prison administration to cover up their failure to care for prisoners,” he continued, calling for a transparent investigation to reveal the truth, and demanding judicial accounting. In a previous interview for Zaman al-Wsl, Sablouh noted that “the hospital is only five minutes away from the prison of Roumieh.”
It would have therefore been more effective to place the incident of the death of inmate Omar Hamid, on August 31, 2024, due to a heart attack in his cell at Roumieh prison, under the title of ‘medical negligence’ for the lack of an on-duty doctor and a field hospital in the prison, instead of using it to open the file for a general global amnesty for detained Islamists.
“Of course, my point is not to diminish the role of the security services in the Roumieh prison, who rushed to ensure safety to prevent a state of riot from developing due to some prisoners following Hamid’s death, nor certainly in defense of a prisoner sentenced to death for involvement in the murder of two soldiers,” Sablouh declared, “but rather to urge the relevant ministries. Specifically, the Ministries of Health and Interior should work to find a solution to the health crisis in Roumieh prison by creating a field hospital and sending a doctor to serve daily in the prison from government hospitals.”
But what happened that Saturday afternoon in the Roumieh prison does not set a precedent, the lawyer recalled. “Ten years ago, a prisoner died from a heart attack at his arrival at Dahr El-Bashek hospital, which is a ten-minute walk from the prison and a five-minute drive far. The prisoner was supposed to be released a month after his date of death after serving his 15-year sentence in Roumieh, but he died due to the delay in the arrival of the ambulance, according to the prisoners’ accounts. A statement issued by the security forces confirmed that the ambulance team arrived three minutes later to transfer him to Dahr El-Bashek, but he died immediately upon arrival. If the roots of this unresolved problem were addressed in all Lebanese prisons,” he continued, “we would not witness another fatal incident. And who knows how many other similar incidents happen every day, but they are kept secret or passed off under the guise of other issues.”
Hamid, 37 years old at the time of death, who had been sentenced to death for allegedly killing the Lebanese army major Pierre Bechealani and his first assistant Ibrahim Zahraman on the outskirts of the city of Arsal in early February 2013, was awaiting a hearing after having accepted the appeal. Sablouh recounts that his cellmates reported that he was transferred, about a week before, to the same hospital in Dahr al-Bashek after feeling symptoms of a heart attack. However, the doctors issued a report stating that he was in good health and there were no objections to returning him to his cell. And that is what happened. However, he died a week later.
Regarding the dissemination of news that individuals affiliated with a terrorist organization allegedly stormed the Roumieh prison, Sablouh stated that this is “a gossip that has nothing to do with reality and aims to conceal the truth about the death of the inmate Hamid from public opinion and to portray what happened as a ‘terrorist act’. This is what justified the deployment of riot police to surround the prison and defend it by force from the inside,” he commented.
It is therefore essential, beyond mere political issues regarding the extradition of Syrian detainees and the threat of diplomatic and economic actions against Lebanon if these are not granted, to focus on the reality of Lebanese prisons, where 9,000 detainees – certainly not only Syrians – suffer daily violence and repression. And to ask: why is there no equipped emergency room for cases in Roumieh prison and in all Lebanese prisons? What prevents a doctor working in a state hospital from being sent to prison for daily shifts? Why neglect a person’s dignity and life, even if sentenced to death? “A detainee serving their sentence, regardless of the charges, enjoys all their rights, and no individual has the right to neglect their health status when suffering from a heart attack or other emergency,” firmly stated Sablouh.
When the negligence of the prison system killed Omar Hamid, there seemed no prospect of a future for a Syrian sentenced to death on terrorism charges. As soon as news of the fall of the Assad regime reached Syrians around the world – including those detained in Lebanon who had access to information – something changed: a light went on. Bright for the first few weeks, increasingly dim as the months passed, amid sectarian violence and the ongoing advance of the Israeli occupation. Yet far brighter than any prison’s hole.
“When the regime fell, I was in my prison cell and heard the news on TV,” said Abu Sham, seven months later, from the same cell. “I felt very happy, as we were all waiting for the victory of the Syrian revolution to be released, because we knew the reason for our arrest was clearly our mere support for the revolution. My family and I felt a joy that I cannot describe. I spoke to my daughter and she literally said to me, ‘Dad, it’s time for you to get out of prison. I am waiting for you now. Will you finally teach me some music?’. I cried as a baby, as many around me, as they all heard from their families. I can’t meet all the prisoners in Roumieh. But I can say without any doubts that this feeling we are sharing is indescribable.”
That was not the moment to explore legal issues related to extradition: Abu Sham, like 1,328 others, is still awaiting a final verdict, which would exclude him from the terms of the agreement. Nor the moment to imagine what standards of dignity a limping, newly formed government can guarantee in the same prisons where a fifty-year-old regime has perpetuated unspeakable violence. Nor was it the moment to imagine what future holds for his daughter, for the music she wants to learn. Not now, not with him, who just witnessed a companion committing suicide for not being able to afford basic medicine. What is clear is that there is no reason why Abu Sham would prefer another day in Roumieh, rather than any Syria.
