After 15 years in Assad's prisons, journalist Tal al-Mallohi opens up about the trauma, resilience, and her hopes for Syria's future.
This statement was originally published on cpj.org on 13 March 2025.
When Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was ousted from power last December, Syrian journalist Tal al-Mallohi was among the thousands who poured out of the country’s jails.
Mallohi was 18 when security police detained her in 2009 after posting on the then-popular Blogger platform poems and articles about Palestinian rights and other political issues. She spent 15 years behind bars – three times as long as her five-year sentence on state security charges in 2011. The fates of four other journalists whose cases are documented on CPJ’s prison census – Akram Raslan, Austin Tice, Fares Maamou, and Jihad As’ad Mohamed – remain unknown. CPJ is also investigating cases of missing journalists in Syria.
For years, CPJ’s research ranked Syria as one of the most dangerous places in the world for the press, with 145 journalists killed in the country between 2011 and 2025.
Al-Mallohi spoke to CPJ via a video call from her living room in the city of Homs about her 15 years behind bars, how she is coping with the way the world has changed, her family’s sacrifices to keep her alive, and what it means to be a journalist in post-Assad Syria. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CPJ texted Mohamad Al Asmar, the media relations officer at the Syrian Ministry of Information for comment on the fate of missing journalists in Syria and the government’s plans for media and journalism in the country, but did not receive any response.
What led to your arrest in 2009?
I was arrested on December 27, 2009, because I was writing and posting on my blog online. I always knew that the Syrian regime was against writing and thinking critically, especially online. Back then, you needed so many permissions to be able to post safely online, even the intelligence services would be involved to approve that you were loyal enough to the regime and thus eligible to write. The price of writing and sharing your opinion under the rule of the Syrian regime cost many people their lives or time in prison – everything was at stake. I was summoned for investigation many times when I first launched my blog, and even though my family and I were not living in Syria full time, the regime still insisted on questioning me every time I visited the country.
The series that caught the regime’s attention was “Letters to humans in the world,” as I had vaguely mentioned the al-Assad regime in one of my posts while discussing freedom of expression.
The specific article that got me imprisoned was the one I wrote about Hafez and Bashar al-Assad titled, “From the father’s train to the son’s station,” which discussed the undemocratic transition of the regime from father to son.
Because of those letters and that article, they [security police] summoned me about four times for questioning in Station 279, which is the external security branch in Syria. During one of the investigation sessions I was not allowed to leave, and it became clear to me that I was being arrested.
One of the main questions they kept asking me was how I managed to open the blog and get access to it knowing that it’s a blocked website in Syria. My answers to them were always inaccurate, I had to deny my knowledge of anything technical, and I had to tell them that I opened the blog’s website when I’m in Egypt, and that my only aim was to write about Palestine. You can’t but lie when you are in that situation, being questioned over and over again by the Syrian intelligence personnel. I was scared, so I told them what I thought they wanted to hear, about how it’s the Syrian regime that taught us that Palestine is the primary cause in the Arab world and that all our focus should be on it. They made fun of my answers, and they believed I was also communicating with the Syrian opposition in Cairo, so they arrested me.
After your arrest, what did they tell you? Did you have any idea what would happen next?
After the investigation, I was sent to Adra prison, an all-women prison located in Adra in the suburbs of Damascus. The accusations that the Syrian regime used against me were the pre-packaged accusations that the regime used to arrest any person who opposed it. I was accused of being an anti-regime operative, an Israeli spy, and a traitor to the country.
Since the first day, the regime did not show any intention of releasing me. In all the time I spent in prison and through all the shouting that happened in the first year during their interrogation sessions with me, which included a lot of psychological pressure and threats, the officers present always said to me, “Never dream of getting out of this jail. You will never be released.” During my first year in Adra prison I was always told “You will never see the sunlight again in your life” and it became clear to me throughout the first year and the years that followed, that my only hope for being released would be the toppling of the Syrian regime.
I also know that sometimes the media’s attention to my case made the situation worse for me. The more the media spoke about me in that first year, the more intense the interrogation sessions became, verbal threats, physical threats, making sure to torture me psychologically by telling me that no one could have me released from the prison, that they would kill my family. But at times that media attention also protected me because this made them hesitant to physically hurt or kill me.
Was there any legal case against you?
I was originally sentenced to five years by the Supreme State Security court. The court explained that I have to serve this sentence for spying on the government, even though in Syria the sentencing or jail time for such an accusation is a lifetime in prison or even the death penalty. That’s when I understood that this whole sentence was a facade for what was happening, and they were manipulating the law and issuing an illegal sentence to keep me in jail.
When I served three years and nine months in prison, I was eligible to apply for an early release. The judiciary approved it, but Ali Mamlouk, then head of the national security branch, refused. He also sent a letter to the national security branch ordering them to keep me in jail “until further notice” – and what that meant was keep her in prison indefinitely.
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Can you tell us about your prison conditions?
I want to start by saying that any photos [of me] that were shared from inside the prison were taken by prison officers who were against the regime and were actively trying to help me but could not defect at that time. It was never the Syrian regime itself that leaked any photos or information about me. The Syrian regime wanted me to be invisible. At the same time, other officers were pushed by the regime to blackmail my parents and promise them to release me if they paid big amounts of money in return. All of these promises were lies.
I knew back then that the only way for me to be released was the fall of the Syrian regime, so what I did every day after my first year in prison was to sit on my bed and wait for the toppling of the Syrian regime. I honestly did not undergo any physical assaults or physical torture in jail, and while I understand how “lucky” and “privileged” I am compared to what other prisoners in other notorious Syrian prisons experienced, I was in a civil prison in Adra, and generally its conditions were different than Sednaya prison and others. In a civil prison if you bribe guards and officers, you can have access to basic needs and cook and eat and sleep and even have visitation rights. They always portrayed it as a “good prison” because it’s a civil prison that international organizations, specifically humanitarian ones, had access to. I also want to say that many people commented on how I looked after being released, considering the horrific situation in Syrian prisons. It’s important to clarify that I was in a civil jail where I had access to basic needs, I could even shower and take vitamins, that was my experience and I want to be transparent about it, but my experience does not reflect the reality of other Syrian prisons at all.
But in that prison, they also accused me of drug possession to prove to international organizations why I was still in jail when international entities like the International Red Cross tried to ask for information about my status.
The conditions varied, there were good guards and bad guards. Good guards often allowed me to hug and kiss my mother from behind the jail bars when it was “safe” and when their supervisors were not present.
I was still subjected to constant psychological torture. If you are not sentenced to a life in prison, yet you are not released, you sit and wait indefinitely and you start losing hope every day. That was to me the biggest psychological torture, trying to keep myself hopeful. I tried to write, I wrote every day, whenever I got access to a pencil and paper, but the officers always confiscated my writing and forbid me from buying pens. When I was released, I tried to retrieve my writings from the prison, but in vain. I could not find anything.
Were you ever optimistic about the possibility of your release?
Yes, I always had hope, and I held on to hope. If I hadn’t, I would honestly have died in that prison. I had hope that the revolution would topple the regime and that would be my only way out of jail.
What are you left with today after 15 years in prison?
Nightmares. I wake up at night sometimes and run to wake my father up and ask him if this is real, if I am really at home now. Some sentences will also haunt me forever, like what an investigator said to me during one of the investigation sessions in my first year in prison: “I can now bring your father, mother and siblings and kill them in front of you.”
The regime took away from me the feeling of belonging, but I am surrounded by a great support system and my family. Despite the bad dreams and fear, I am recovering. I enrolled in university to learn English and I hope to continue writing in time. I want to write about human rights, freedom, children’s rights, and about the children I met in jail who were born there before being taken away from their mothers once they turned five.
