Ex-imam Freed After 21 Years Describes Life in Assad's Prisons

Overview

Fouad Naal, a 52-year-old former imam, spent 21 years in Syria’s notorious Sednaya and Adra prisons after his 2004 arrest for issuing a fatwa against Syrians going to fight in Iraq. He says he was accused of plotting assassinations and coerced into confessing to secure his wife and daughter’s release. Naal was released on December 8, 2024 — the day President Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus for Moscow — a milestone he views as the end of five decades of Assad family rule and the start of Syria’s liberation.

Naal recounts harsh conditions in Sednaya, including withheld medicine and bans on group prayer, and describes a comparatively freer period after his 2012 transfer to Adra where prisoners could pray and receive weekly visits. He narrates how guards abandoned the prison on the morning of December 8, allowing inmates to break out, seize weapons and encounter soldiers who sided with them. Though physically fit from daily exercise, Naal says many former inmates suffer psychological wounds — sleeplessness, fear of closed spaces — and he has returned to Sednaya to press for accountability. He also credits the youth of Deraa, symbolised by Hamza al-Khatib, as the spark of the uprising, and reflects on Assad’s current exile in Russia, as reported by Al Jazeera