ISIS Prisons Museum: Documenting the horrors of Islamic State detention centers

In October, the 'ISIS Prison Museum' website went live online, offering virtual visits to former jihadist detention centers. The project is also holding its first exhibition at the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris until November 14, 2023, which includes virtual reality tours.

The 'ISIS Prison Museum' is the result of work by a team of journalists, filmmakers, and human rights activists in Syria and Iraq who, since 2017, have documented 100 prison sites and conducted interviews with more than 500 survivors. Syrian journalist Amer Matar, 38, is the director of the ISIS Prisons Museum. "IS abducted my brother in 2013, and we started to look for him," he said, according to Al-Monitor. Matar has not found his brother.

After U.S.-backed forces began expelling jihadists from parts of Syria and Iraq in 2017, Matar and his team gained access to several former IS prisons. They decided to film the former prison sites and archive all the material within them before they disappeared. The team managed to capture 3D photos of around 50 former Islamic State prisons and 30 mass graves before their features were erased. They also converted more than 70,000 documents belonging to the Islamic State into a digital archive.

Inside the football stadium in the Syrian city of Raqqa, the team found prisoner names and Qur'anic verses etched into the walls. They found detainee scratchings on the walls, including lyrics from a 1996 television drama about peace prevailing. Inside one solitary cell, they discovered exercise instructions to keep fit written in English. Matar said, "I too would write my name on the wall because I didn't know if I'd get out or if they'd kill me," as reported by Al-Monitor.

The website publishes numerous narratives about life within the walls of these detention centers, including stories like that of Muhammad Al-Attar. Al-Attar, a respected community leader and religious scholar with a PhD in Islamic Sharia, was jailed after refusing to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State and was subjected to torture. In June 2014, Daesh extremists arrested Al-Attar, then 37, at his perfume shop in Mosul, Iraq, after overrunning the city.

In his group cell at Mosul's Ahdath prison, which held at least 148 detainees, Al-Attar described the conditions, saying, "There was nothing left but to weep." He added, "When I felt that I wanted to cry, I would put my head under a blanket so that no one would see me crying." Al-Attar explained that he could not bear the thought of the younger men seeing him cry. "I could not bear to be seen by the young men who were the age of my children crying; I was the oldest among them and I feared they would collapse," he stated.

The story of Al-Attar is one of more than 500 testimonies collected by the team since 2017. These testimonies are included in the online archive called 'The ISIS Prison Museum,' which aims to document human rights abuses during and after the period of the terrorist organization. "This is the goal of the project: to document what happened to human rights in Iraq and Syria during and after the period of the terrorist organization," said 30-year-old journalist from Mosul, Younes Qais, who is responsible for collecting data in Iraq.

Qais added, "Many of the people of the city of Mosul were subjected to the most heinous crimes and the most heinous methods of torture inside ISIS prisons." He recounted being particularly shocked by the tale of a Yazidi woman who was raped 11 times in IS captivity. "To hear and see the crimes inflicted on my people was really tough," he said.

The Islamic State (Daesh) controlled vast areas in Syria and neighboring Iraq and announced the establishment of the so-called "Islamic Caliphate" in 2014. The group implemented its brutal interpretation of religion and imposed its extremist interpretation of Sharia on the populations in the areas it controlled. They banned smoking, alcohol, and all forms of entertainment. The Islamic State mandated head-to-toe coverings (niqab) for women and the growing of beards for men. Daesh threw perceived informants or "apostates" into prison or makeshift jails, many of whom never returned, and deliberately arrested and disappeared anyone suspected of rejecting their control.

The Islamic State cut off the hands of thieves and spread terror through horrific methods of killing, including slaughter, beheading, crucifixion, and stoning. They publicly executed homosexuals. Many former Daesh prisons were originally "houses, hospitals, government buildings, schools, or commercial shops," and they soon began to "change their features with the return of people to them" and work on restoring them.

Robin Yassin-Kassab, the website's English editor, said the project aimed to "gather information and cross-reference it" so it could be used in court. He added, "We want legal teams around the world to know that we exist so that they can come and ask us for evidence." Matar and his team hope that the documentation can aid in bringing perpetrators to justice.

Within the coming year, Matar hopes to launch a sister website called 'Jawab' ("Answer" in Arabic) to help others find out what happened to their loved ones. He has not found his brother.

Sources: Al-Monitor, Arab News, France 24, Al-Arab

This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq