DAMASCUS, Syria — Languishing in a dungeon cell of Syria's then-ruler Bashar Assad, an unknown prisoner scrawled a verse of Arabic poetry on his cell wall — an expression of pain and love amid his torment.
''My country, even if it oppresses me, is dear. My people, even if uncharitable to me, are generous,'' he wrote. It's a well-known verse, composed 800 years ago by a poet defying a tyrannical caliph.
As you walk through the cold, dark cells of Assad's prisons, the graffiti on the walls cry out. They plead to God and yearn for loved ones. Often mysterious, they preserve fragments of what anonymous men were thinking as they faced torture and death.
''Trust no one, not even your brother,'' someone darkly warns on a cell wall in Damascus' notorious Palestine Branch detention facility.
''Oh Lord, bring relief,'' groans another.
Since 2011, tens of thousands of Syrians vanished inside the network of prisons and detention facilities run by Assad's security forces as they tried to crush his opposition. Inmates went for years without contact with the outside world, living in overcrowded, windowless cells where their cellmates died around them. Torture and beatings were inflicted daily. Mass executions were frequent.
Most inmates would have fully expected to die. They had no reason to believe anyone would ever see the messages they scratched into the walls except future prisoners.
One wrote a single word in Arabic, ''ashtaqtilak'' — ''I miss you'' — a love letter that could never be sent to a beloved whose name only the writer need know.
