By Noemí Jabois
Damascus, Dec 19 (EFE).- The scene at the Mezzeh Air Base on the outskirts of Damascus perfectly sums up the first ten days after the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime: aircraft bombed by Israel abandoned on the runway, empty prisoner cells and even a pile of burned Captagon pills.
Until recently an important and secret military installation of the Bassad regime, the base is now guarded only by four rebels who chatter away at a checkpoint set up on the access road, almost oblivious of the importance of what they are protecting.
The runways are littered with the charred wreckage of aircraft bombed by Israel in recent days as part of a campaign to destroy weapons and military targets of the former regime, presumably to prevent them from falling into the hands of the insurgents who overthrew it.
“The units were not here, they are attacking helicopters and ammunition of the former regime (…) They are not attacking us, the targets are helicopters and fighter planes,” one of the guards told EFE.
The rebel said that when they arrived at the airbase after entering Damascus on Dec. 8, “everyone had fled”.
Some of Assad’s former soldiers even got rid of their weapons and rucksacks before leaving.
“We found weapons, but we handed them over to interested parties. Everything and every object from this place comes under our command,” he said.
He did not hide the fact that there have been some cases of civilian looting at the military airport, which is still full of intelligence documents, tanks, and transmission equipment.
“But we immediately found a solution by closing all the entrances,” he added.
In one of the sheds, full of missile casings, an official helicopter sits undisturbed, though those who recently stole its fuel did not even bother to remove the hose from the tank when they were finished.
Inside the buildings is a control room equipped with obsolete equipment marked with words in the Cyrillic alphabet, presumably provided by Russia, Assad’s ally.
In the cluttered officers’ quarters, military uniforms and belongings are strewn on the floor, while photographs of Assad and his father, former Syrian president Hafez, litter the corridors.
Behind the facade, the complex hid four prisons belonging to the former regime’s security services, which were accused of forcibly detaining tens of thousands of people during the conflict that began after the 2011 uprising.
One of them, in a basement, was for women, and its cells, with damp, peeling walls, still had the blankets the prisoners slept on, on the floor.
On the walls, they counted the days and wrote verses from the Koran in a kind of greenish mud.
“There were large numbers of men and women in the prison,” said another rebel stationed in Mezzeh.
According to him, regime forces ran a total of four prisons at the airbase, holding civilians, some of them opponents of the Assad regime, and “all of them” accused of baseless charges.
As in other areas, during their rapid advance from the northwest, the rebels released prisoners after arriving in Mezzeh.
“They used it as a warehouse for pills and as a prison, even though it is a military airport (…) It was more of an intelligence center because there were underground prisons,” the rebel said.
Inside the base, the rebels also found “thousands” of stored pills of the synthetic stimulant Captagon, which were exported to neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Like the secret detention centers, the drug factories were another of the open secrets associated with the Assad regime, but only exposed after his recent fall.
“It was immediately destroyed by the Directorate of Military Operations,” he said. EFE
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