Justice For The Silenced: The Syrian Women Reclaiming The Voices Of Female Prisoners 

In the soft, golden light of a Damascus morning, Zeina Kanawati sits at her parents’ kitchen table, the rich aroma of Syrian coffee filling the air. For a fleeting moment, she allows herself the illusion that everything – the exile, the war, the years of watching Syria unravel from afar – had been nothing but a nightmare. But the steady hum of power cuts and the unsettling crunch of rubble underfoot on the street below quickly shatter the fantasy. Syria might have rid itself of President Bashar al-Assad, but the scars of his brutal regime are indelible and haunting.

Zeina hadn’t planned to return. Fourteen years earlier, she had left, unaware that it would be for good. A journalist and activist, she had attracted too much attention. Though she used a fake name, as so many did, news of her real identity was exposed while she was in Prague, leaving her with no choice but to stay away. Since then, she has lived in Berlin, raising two children on her own, working remotely to support Syrian women who have been displaced, imprisoned, or silenced by the regime.

And then, on 8 December 2024, Assad’s government collapsed in the wake of a rapid rebel advance and the unthinkable happened: the regime that had ruled with an iron fist had fled. “It felt absurd,” she tells Service95. “The regime had been there for 50 years. We thought it would never end. It was a moment of euphoria but also terror. What happens next?” With the regime’s fall, Zeina, who now works at Women for Women International (an organisation supporting Syrian women survivors of war to rebuild their lives) returned – first to see her parents, then to meet the women she had been supporting remotely for years, ready to confront the harsh new reality of a nation in flux.

One woman she has been helping to seek justice for was arrested while walking in the street with her eight-year-old son – the authorities detained her and left him behind. Thousands of women were been imprisoned by the Syrian regime, locked in squalid, overcrowded cells where starvation and disease were rife. A 2022 study on detention conditions found torture to be routine with beatings, electric shocks, even nail-pulling. Sexual violence was a weapon of control, with rape, forced pregnancy and sexual slavery inflicted by guards and interrogators, according to the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights. The true scale of the abuse was impossible to verify, as independent monitors were barred from the prisons.

The fates of at least 112,000 people who have been detained and disappeared in Syria since 2011 remain unknown, and at least 15,393 are documented to have died under torture. In the days following Assad’s fall, thousands of prisoners poured out of his merciless detention system, while families combed through the wreckage of intelligence offices, frantically searching for the names of the missing. But for many Syrian women, Assad’s downfall was not just the end of a dictatorship, it marked the beginning of a fierce battle for justice as many survivors remained silent, burdened by shame and the trauma of their experiences. 

Nour Jazairi, a lawyer arrested in 2014, knows this all too well. She was seized from her office on charges of supporting terrorists, held in one of the regime’s most feared prisons, Branch 215, and tortured into signing false confessions. When she was finally released, the freedom she expected was sadly nowhere to be found. Instead, she found herself trapped in a different kind of prison – one built on whispers and suspicion. “People asked: ‘What did they do to you in there?’ As if they already knew the answer,” she says. Since then, Nour has committed herself to helping other women who’ve survived the same horrors, helping to set up programmes in education, psychosocial support and employment. “You cannot talk about the conditions of detention without imagining its horror,” she says. “People think detention is just about physical torture, but the mere fact of being stripped away from your family and your freedom is already an immense brutality.”

Her experience remains seared in her memory: “When they first opened the door to my cell, I looked inside and saw 18 women in that tiny space. I thought: That’s 18 stories, 18 lifetimes. I told myself I’ll spend my time listening to each of their stories, one by one.” This profound empathy for her fellow detainees shaped her mission – turning her suffering into a driving force for change. For Nour, the stories of the women she met in detention are not just scars of the past but a call to action – demanding that their voices finally be heard and given the support they deserve.

In many ways, Syria mirrors the silenced suffering Nour endured behind bars – a nation trapped in limbo, haunted by the remnants of years of destruction. Though Assad is gone, his legacy remains in the rubble of the streets and in the collective memory of those who lived in fear under his rule. Western sanctions imposed during the war still choke the economy. In the capital, Damascus, Zeina was struck by the overwhelming poverty: “What was he even president of? Everything was broken, filthy, abandoned.”

Yet, amid the desolation, there is hope. Women who once suffered in secrecy, forced to operate in the shadows, can now meet in the open, pushing for justice and change. “For years, I had nightmares about being arrested at the border,” says Zeina. “But this time, I crossed. I went home. If my parents are ill, I can now just book a ticket and go. This is my kind of justice, a personal one.” While she knows the road ahead is long, the first step –“toppling the regime”– has been taken. Now, she says, “comes the hard part: building something better”. And the task ahead is daunting. Fourteen years of war and economic collapse have left Syria in ruins – entire neighbourhoods are ghost towns and electricity is now a luxury. The new government has inherited a country on its knees.

While Zeina struggles to see progress with “proper steps of transitional justice” from the new government, grassroots groups are giving her a reason to believe change is possible. She returned home expecting to feel only despair, and yet, as she spoke to the women who had endured so much, she felt glimmers of hope. “They are still working. Still pushing. Still demanding. They are not waiting for someone to save them. These women survived the worst of Assad’s prisons.”

Nour is one of many women who are establishing support networks for former prisoners. Others are organising education programmes, helping those who lost years to detention catch up. “As activists, we continue documenting cases, gathering statistics and searching for detainees alongside their families,” she says. “But even months after the regime’s collapse, no one is actively addressing this issue.”

Zeina, too, has no illusions about the road ahead. She knows that change will be slow, but surrender is not an option. “I was in despair for so many moments,” she says. “I felt like I just wanted to let go of this. It’s too heavy, too much, but I can’t. I feel it’s part of the purpose of my life. I have witnessed this whole war and it’s unfair to look at it taking part of my life, without trying to gain back what was taken from me. Suddenly, everything we have been working to create over the past 14 years is not shattered in the wind.”

The Assad regime’s prisons may have opened, but the truth remains buried beneath layers of fear and forgetfulness. Like tens of thousands of Syrians, Nour and Zeina are left piecing together fragments of the past, seeking answers that may never come. Justice is not only about retribution – it’s about allowing Syria to heal and move forward without the past weighing it down. And healing requires more than justice. For Syria to rebuild, its women – those who endured imprisonment and kept families together through the darkest times – must be empowered to heal, learn and lead. Without truth, accountability and the education of women, Syria will remain trapped in its past. The world cannot look away.