Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System

By Jaber Baker and Ugur Ümit Üngör.

An estimated 300,000 people have been detained or have died in prison since the Syrian uprising broke out. Syrians can be arrested for liking a post on Facebook or for the political activities of a distant relative. They are imprisoned without trial, and tortured and starved, often to death.

This book is the first to expose the worst prisons in the Middle East, if not the world. In previous years it had been too dangerous to undertake research on this subject, but the enormous numbers of Syrians taking refuge in neighbouring countries and Europe has allowed unprecedented access to their stories.

Based on interviews with both the victims and perpetrators, survivors’ memoirs and notes, as well as leaked regime archives, leaked photos, and leaked intelligence files, the book is a testament of the internment and imprisonment system in Syria under the rule of the Assads, father and son (1970-2020).

Jaber Baker is a novelist, documentary filmmaker, human rights activist, and the senior Syria researcher at the Center for Media and Cultural Freedom – Samir Kasir Eyes (Skeyes).  He has published several novels in Arabic, including 601: The Divine Trials (2017) and Bab al-Faradis – The Lost Messages of Ghaylan al-Dimashqi (2020). Co-writer of the collective novel: Three Generations Under the President’s Bridge. (2023).

Uğur Ümit Üngör is professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies. His main area of interest is the history and sociology of mass violence, with a particular focus on the modern and contemporary Middle East.  He has published books and articles on various aspects and cases of mass violence and genocide, including The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (Oxford University Press, 2020), and the forthcoming Assad’s Militias and Mass Violence in Syria (Cambridge University Press, 2024).