“God, there is light” – TV team finds prisoner in Assad’s hellhole

In a locked cell and wrapped in a blanket, they found a prisoner who had been left behind and who had not noticed it days after the fall of Assad.

Man claimed: “I am a citizen”
The dramatic rescue occurred when Ward and a Syrian rebel opened a locked cell in an abandoned prison in Damascus and encountered the visibly weakened, distraught man. “I am a citizen,” he begged for mercy after his discovery.

Darkness, no water, no food
The man, a father from Homs, reported that he had been locked up without a window for three months. After his captors fled during the fall of Damascus, he endured days without food or water.

The CNN video shows him clinging to the arm of the journalist who eventually led him to freedom. When he saw daylight, he gasped and kept repeating, “O God, there is light.”

An end to countless torture prisons?
The man’s story is just one of many tragedies the Assad regime has inflicted on captured civilians over the years. Human rights organizations documented horrific torture, rape and mass executions in Assad’s prisons.

Particularly famous is Saidnaya Prison, which Amnesty International describes as a ‘slaughterhouse’ – up to 13,000 people are said to have been executed here between 2011 and 2015.

With the fall of the Assad regime last weekend, many relatives and rebels broke into detention centers to rescue survivors. The return to freedom and light remains a long, painful journey for many victims of the regime.