Moadhamiyet al-Sham, Syria – In years past, the metallic pops of automatic gunfire outside the window would have meant something sinister.

Perhaps, an attack by the regime of Bashar al-Assad on the al-Khateeb family’s once-besieged hometown just south of Damascus.

It would have meant a call to action for al-Khateeb sisters Khijou, 52, and Samar, 45 – time to rescue and give first aid to the wounded, at the risk of their own lives.

But today, as I visit them, the gunfire is celebratory. The al-Khateeb sisters are happy, too.

It’s been one week since former Syrian President al-Assad was ousted after an offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

More than 50 years of al-Assad family dictatorship are now over.

In Khijou’s modest apartment, where she lives with her 20-year-old daughter Mayyasa, the women have already placed a huge green-and-black “Free Syria” flag on display in the living room, surrounded by flowers.

Next to the display is Mayyasa’s ring light, for filming makeup videos. Samar was there, too, visiting from her house in a nearby corner of Moadhamiyet al-Sham. Though Khijou is seven years older than Samar, the two women, kind-faced and serious, could be twins.

They serve trays of Turkish coffee, little biscuits and chocolate cakes. Outside the window, some unseen shooters fire off more automatic rounds into the air. The women are relaxed, chuckling.

But their joy is tinged with a numb pain.

Between them, they have spent more than three years of arbitrary detention in al-Assad’s prisons – already brutal for male prisoners, but a special flavour of terrible for women.

Khijou al-Khateeb was a 39-year-old mother of three and a nurse in 2011, when peaceful protests sprang up across Syria, demanding reform after years of brutal al-Assad repression.

She still doesn’t quite know what compelled her, in those early days, to go down into the streets and take part. “I always ask myself why I did it,” she says.

Khijou knew she could get in trouble with the regime, which began cracking down on the protests almost as soon as they began. Yet she decided to start covering the movement as a citizen journalist, through social media.

But she needed a pseudonym to protect herself and chose Amirat al-Hurriyeh: “Princess of Freedom”.

Knowing the risks, she went to demonstration after demonstration, taking pictures and sending them to news outlets. She also documented her coverage on Facebook.

The authorities soon caught on.

In May 2012, police arrested her and took her to the Military Intelligence Division, also known as Branch 215, a notorious prison in Damascus reportedly responsible for torture and thousands of extrajudicial killings.

Khijou remembers being the only woman there at the time; some guards secretly brought her food at night to help her cope, but she couldn’t eat.

She stayed there for 10 days, and though nobody tortured her physically, “the fear of what might happen tomorrow was difficult on its own”, she remembers.

Once free, she went straight back to citizen journalism and used her training as a nurse to help treat those injured in the war.

But the authorities learned to use this against her.

“Someone called me one day to come help an injured man in the street,” she remembers. There was no injured man: instead, there were police, who took her back to prison.

This time, she shared her cell with another woman, whose body was a frightening omen of the torture going on in the prison. “Her body was blue. Blue, blue, blue, all over,” Khijou recalls.

Still, they rarely opened up with one another. “We were scared of each other, we didn’t trust each other,” Khijou says.

The woman could be a plant, she feared – or, as could happen anyplace else in Syria at the time – she could inform on her to the authorities. “She was afraid of me and I was afraid of her,” Khijou recalls.

A few days later, in solitary confinement, Khijou learned of a woman in the next cell who was being held with her two young children, including a four-year-old boy.

“I wanted to see if I could get information from her – her name, how she was doing,” Khijou remembers. When her weekly ration of oranges came, she had an idea.

“I used my hijab pin and poked messages to her on the oranges, which I rolled under the cell wall to her.”

Khijou scratched a mark on the wall of her cell every day, and after 40 ticks, she was released.

In 2013, the Syrian regime began a punishing three-year siege of her hometown, Moadhamiyet al-Sham, limiting the entry of food supplies for thousands of remaining residents.

That August, the regime fired toxic sarin gas on Moadhamiyet al-Sham as part of a series of chemical attacks across rebel-held areas of the Damascus suburbs, killing hundreds of civilians.

Her 21-year-old son, Samir, suffered. “He was already sick (with asthma and chronic nerve issues) when the siege began, so he became very thin,” she says.

She made sure to take pictures of her son’s emaciated body at the time, in case someday they became useful for finding justice. “He was so, so skinny,” she remembers. They would be the last photos she took of Samir.

“I still have them on my laptop,” she says as she heads to a back room of her apartment to fish out the machine.

Khijou steps out of the room in search of the laptop and Samar begins to talk.

“My first arrest was in 2013,” she remembers.

At the time, she was an employee at a pharmaceutical company. Authorities arrested Samar alongside her husband, her elderly mother, her then-11-year-old son Muhammad, and her then-10-year-old niece Fatimeh.

She refers to the incident as a kidnapping.

“That night, they put us in a car and put bags over our heads so we wouldn’t see anything. They took us to a house, we didn’t know where,” she recalls.

They stayed there for about a month, or a month and a half, she figures.

Samar would later learn the group kidnapping was part of an attempt at a “swap”. In exchange for Samar and her family’s freedom, the authorities wanted information on a man thought to have been murdered by someone from Samar’s hometown.

She still doesn’t know exactly why they targeted her and her family.

“I didn’t know anything about the dead man, nor did anybody else,” she says.

Both Samar and her 75-year-old mother, who suffered from diabetes and couldn’t bring her medicine, were beaten in that abandoned house, while guards allegedly brought prisoners into one room of the house every now and then, forcing young Muhammad to beat them with a stick.

All she could muster to comfort the children was to urge them to “not be scared.”

I hear a knock at the front door and Muhammad, now 22, walks in wearing a puffer jacket.

Muhammad tells us he’s still affected by the fear he endured during that time, as a little boy. “My mom would tell us it was OK, that we’d be going home soon,” he says.

When the family was freed, they had no IDs or belongings and had to find their way home alone.

For Muhammad, his future was destroyed.

“I stopped going to school. I hated everyone,” he said.

Muhammad never returned to his studies.

It’s become colder in the room as the afternoon wears on; Khijou hands out thick fleece blankets.

Samar says her second arrest came in 2015.

The police took both her and her husband, a school security guard, on “terrorism” charges. Like Khijou before her, Samar was taken to Branch 215 this time.

“They ordered me to tell my husband to ‘confess’, or else I would have to strip,” she recalls.

Samar’s husband had nothing to confess. Samar pauses for a long moment before resuming her story.

“They took me to another room and hit me with green plastic tubing,” she continues.

Samar was four months pregnant at the time, she says.

One day in Branch 215, the guards decided to beat her stomach.

“When I got back to the cell, I started to bleed. So a doctor came to give me medicine, but they decided to put me in a car and take me to a hospital.”

There, they terminated the pregnancy as she lay surrounded by security officers who ordered her not to look up at their faces.

“‘You’re just a terrorist, that’s all,’ they told me,” she says.

She was later transferred to Adra, a civilian prison with comparatively better treatment, where she stayed for three years on a “terrorism” charge.

She’s still in touch with her cellmates from that time, whose phone numbers she recorded with needle and thread in hidden parts of her clothing so the guards wouldn’t see.

I think of her some days later when, in a nearby neighbourhood, someone shows me a huge wall display in his living room of mementos and embroidered flags that were stitched by women trapped in Adra Prison.

About half an hour away from the sisters is Damascus Hospital, where the pain of families like the al-Khateebs is on display.

On the hospital’s outer walls are hundreds of homemade posters of missing prisoners – mostly men – who were lost years ago.

Just one is a woman, Khaldiyeh Alloush, her face pixelated and blurry under black hair and a 1990s-style headband.

Syrian rights defenders have long documented mass abuses against the arbitrarily detained.

The Sednaya military prison outside Damascus was dubbed a “human slaughterhouse” by Amnesty International.

More than 100,000 people are thought to have disappeared in al-Assad’s prisons since 2011, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, though more will likely come to light as workers unearth vast unmarked graves.

The true number of women and girls like Khijou – who says “investigators” threatened to rape her and Samar, who lost her baby – may never be known.

A 2021 report by the United Kingdom-based group Synergy for Justice, for which researchers interviewed 80 Syrian female former detainees, found that 81 percent of the women and girls witnessed torture.

Fifteen percent were forced to watch a loved one undergo torture or were tortured in front of a loved one.

Nearly one-third of them saw someone die or be killed.

But female detainees often face social stigma after their release due to shame surrounding sexual violence against some of them in prison.

There are women who just hide the fact that they were detained to avoid the possibility of being shamed.

“There are some people, even now, who don’t know I was a detainee,” Samar says matter-of-factly.

“I was too scared to talk about it.”

Khijou comes back into the living room with her laptop.

“Here he is,” she says.

The picture of her son, Samir, is grim. In it, he’s still alive but his limbs are skeletal. He is starving from al-Assad’s siege over Moadhamiyet al-Sham in 2013.

Samir’s ribs jut out from his skin, his bony elbow bent painfully.

Three days later, Syrian officers allegedly kidnapped him after Khijou sent him for medical evacuation with a United Nations convoy. He never came back.

“They took him to the Air Force Intelligence branch, that’s what we were told at the time,” she recalls.

Samir would be 32 years old today, Khijou says – if, by some slim chance, he managed to survive all those years of prison. Other than that, “we don’t know anything”, she says.

Perhaps he went to some other prison, she figures, maybe Sednaya. She is calm and composed at this possibility, a civilian journalist simply pointing out another injustice around her, the years of heartbreak seemingly calcified into the fact of Samir’s likely death.

The chance that he’s still among the survivors becomes slimmer by the day.

Today, Khijou shares his picture and name on social media in the hopes that someone, somewhere, might have information.

Khijou’s other son, Muhammad, who shares a name with his 22-year-old cousin, is also gone. He fled to Germany a year ago through Europe’s forests, the thought of al-Assad’s fall a distant dream.

Khijou supported him in taking the journey, fearing he, too, might get arrested at a regime checkpoint someday and never return.

He’s now stuck in a refugee camp, unable to work or study.

In Khijou’s profile picture on WhatsApp, pictures of the two young men are copy-pasted together side by side, looking so similar – Samir’s clean-shaven portrait from before 2013 next to Muhammad’s more up-to-date beard and moustache, posing in front of a wintry skyline in Germany.

It’s not clear yet what justice might look like for families like the al-Khateebs.

Legal justice for Syrian prison survivors has been limited. In 2022, a German court in Koblenz convicted Anwar Raslan, former head of investigations at the notorious General Intelligence Directorate’s Branch 251 in Damascus, of crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to life in prison.

That case was successful because Germany has implemented “universal jurisdiction”, meaning the country’s legal system can prosecute crimes against humanity and other serious cases no matter where the crimes happened.

“So that is still an option, of course, if any perpetrators are found in a country that implements universal jurisdiction,” explains international criminal lawyer Nadine Kheshen.

Inside Syria, things might be different.

As of now, it’s been less than a month since the fall of the al-Assad regime, so it isn’t yet clear how the justice system could play out for prison victims and their families.

“It’s still not clear how the judicial and legal system will look, at least in the transitional period,” says Obai Kurd Ali, a Syrian lawyer and specialist in international human rights law at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

“People are still trying to understand the new system.”

Most important, for survivors like the al-Khateeb sisters and others, is documenting what happened to them in the hopes of future accountability, Kurd Ali says.

The sisters say they are willing to speak to lawyers and hope to someday “file a lawsuit” over what happened to them in prison.

Khijou says she simply isn’t ready to forgive the people who imprisoned her and her family.

“As female detainees, as mothers of detainees, as wives of detainees, we have no forgiveness,” she says, matter-of-factly.

Behind her is the laptop with images of her son Samir’s starved, skeletal body.

His absence still stings.

Khijou’s husband, named Muhammad, now suffers severe depression.

“It’s been two years now that he hasn’t been able to leave the house. He sits with us at home, but quiet. Silent. He doesn’t speak,” Khijou says.

The elder Muhammad is with us, apparently, in the house, as we drink our sweet tea.

But he remains hidden somewhere in the freezing apartment, beyond a series of closed doors, past Mayyasa’s ring light for her makeup videos, and Khijou’s industrial sewing machine.

For now, the family have their quiet anger.