Former prisoner revisits Syrian airbase ordeal

The surrender of the Mazzeh air base outside Syrian capital Damascus by Bashar al-Assad's forces triggered a round of Israeli air strikes designed to prevent his former arsenal falling into the hands of Islamist rebels.

But it also allowed a Syrian former detainee to revisit the ordeal he suffered at the hand of Assad's ousted forces.

The president's long and brutal rule came to a sudden end last week, and on Wednesday young rebels were roaming Mazzeh, periodically firing an old Soviet-designed anti-aircraft gun into the sky.

Fighter jets and helicopters lay wrecked alongside the runway, some of them destroyed in an Israel strike, but the offices and workshops had been broken into by Assad's local foes.

A pile of drugs, apparently the much-abused psychostimulant captagon, had been hauled out of an air force building and set alight in an impromptu bonfire, which was still smouldering as AFP visited the site.

Mazzeh was not only an air base for jets and attack helicopters, but also served as an ad hoc detention centre run by Assad's air force intelligence wing.

On Wednesday, 40-year-old father-of-three Riad Hallak was combing through the shattered ruins of a lecture theatre that he said once held 225 detainees.

- Bound and beaten -

During the early days of Syria's 13-year civil war, Hallak was arrested in 2012 while attending a funeral for protesters shot dead by government security forces.

The tailor was bound, beaten and held for a month in a room designed to instruct air force pilots, before being transferred to another facility and detained for another two months and 13 days.

When the bearded rebel fighters at the gate heard his story, they allowed him back to the scene of his torment, to seek out evidence he hopes might help other families find missing loved ones.

The once ubiquitous portrait of Assad now lies in the dust, alongside the logo of the air force intelligence wing and a roll of barbed wire, incongruous among the damaged college-style desks.

Hallak tells of how for a month he only left the room twice a day to use the toilet in batches of three prisoners, who otherwise slept in heaps, packed together on the cold concrete steps.

Once, when there was an explosion outside, he and his fellow inmates celebrated in the hope that rebels were storming the base -- only to be mocked and threatened by a general and laughing soldiers.

"If anyone complained about the conditions, the general would tell us we were receiving five-star tourist treatment, and threaten to transfer us," Hallak told AFP at the base.

Since his detention, Hallak and his wife have had three young children and now the family can hope to live more freely in a Syria that has shed the half-century rule of the Assad clan.

But looking in vain for records he hopes will shed light on his ordeal and the fate of missing friends, he struggled, like many in Syria, to express how this feels.

"It's difficult to say," he said, looking prematurely old with his close-trimmed grey beard.

"There's no words. I can't speak."

- Captagon haul -

International monitors have raised concerns that allowing former miliary bases to fall under the sway of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebel group will lead to chemical weapons falling into the hands of extremists.

Israel has used this fear as a justification for stepped up air strikes, including one on Mazzeh.

But the most dangerous substance that AFP journalists saw was the haul of captagon.

Assad's government was notorious for producing the amphetamine-based drug in commercial qualities, flooding the lucrative Gulf market to bolster its wartime coffers.

The US government slapped sanctions on Syrian officials allegedly involved in the illicit trade, and Syria's neighbours have seized millions of pills in a losing battle to prevent its spread.

But on Wednesday the fighters paid little attention to the haul, which their comrades had apparently set alight, as they passed by on motorbikes or manned the gates of the complex.