By Suleiman al-Khalidi

Reuters

AMMAN: The young man was dangling upside down, white, foaming saliva dripping from his mouth. His groans sounded more bestial than human.
It was one of many fleeting images of human degradation I witnessed during four days as an unwilling guest of Syrian intelligence, when I was detained in Damascus after reporting on protests in Daraa.
Within minutes of my arrest I was inside a building of the intelligence services – known simply as the “Mukhabarat,” I caught sight of the man hanging by his feet as one of the jailers escorted me to the interrogation room for questioning.
“Look down,” the jailer shouted as I took in the scene.

Inside an interrogation room, they made me kneel and pulled what I could just make out as a car tire over my arms.
My reporting from Daraa, where protests against President Bashar Assad had broken out in March, had apparently not endeared me to my hosts, who accused me of being a spy.
The formal reason Syrian authorities gave Reuters for my detention was that I lacked the proper work permits.
“So, you cheap American agent!” the interrogator shouted.
“You have come to report destruction and mayhem. You animal, you are coming to insult Syria, you dog.”
From outside the room I could hear the rattling of chains and hysterical cries that echo in my mind to this day. My interrogators worked professionally and tirelessly to keep me on edge at every step of the questioning process over several days.

“Shut up, you bastard. You and your type are vultures who want to turn Syria into another Libya,” said another interrogator, who kept yelling: “Confess, liar!”
I was arrested on March 29 in Damascus as I went to meet someone in an old district of the capital. Two plain clothes security men approached me and told me not to resist as they held my arms and then marched me into a hairdresser’s until an ordinary-looking car came to take me to the Mukhabarat.
The questioning lasted eight hours until midnight on the first day. Mostly I was blindfolded, but the blindfold was removed for a few minutes.

That allowed me – despite orders to keep my head down so that my interrogators should remain out of view – to see a hooded man screaming in pain in front of me. When they told him to take down his pants, I could see his swollen genitals, tied tight with a plastic cable.
“I have nothing to tell, but I am neither a traitor nor an activist. I am just a trader,” said the man, who said he was from Idlib Province in the northwest of Syria.
To my horror, a masked man took a pair of wires from a household power socket and gave him electric shocks to the head.
“We will make you forget who you are,” one of them threatened as I was beaten for the sixth time on my face.
And yet humanity could appear at the unlikeliest moments.

At one point, the interrogator who was screaming at me that I was a dog took a call on his mobile phone. His tone became immediately warm and affectionate: “Of course, my dear, I’ll get you whatever you want,” he said, switching from professional torturer to indulgent father.
For long periods, I lay on a mattress in a windowless cell, lit by a small neon light, as cockroaches scurried around.
Occasional screams reminded me of where I was and what might happen. Then on the fourth day of detention, my hosts came to move me, putting me in a car that whisked me to what turned out to be the intelligence headquarters several blocks away in Damascus.

To my bewilderment an urbane man with an air of authority told me: “We are sending you back to Jordan.”
I realized later, from looking at pictures in the media, that this had been Major General Ali Mamluk, the director of Syrian State Security himself, a man whose subordinates hold thousands of Syrians in similar jails across the country.
Within hours I crossed the border and was back home, where I learned that Jordan’s royal family had worked for my release and spared me from a longer and more grueling fate.