Muhammad al-Attar, an Iraqi religious scholar, remembers the darkness of his captivity in 2014 under the Islamic State (IS) group. Arrested at his Mosul perfume shop and imprisoned for rejecting allegiance to the extremists, Attar hid his tears beneath a prison blanket to avoid unsettling the younger detainees around him.
As Kurdistan 24 reports, “They would have broken down if they saw me cry,” said Attar, who endured torture and shared a packed cell with 148 other men at Mosul's notorious Ahdath prison.
The IS group, also known as ISIS, seized swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014, declaring a brutal caliphate that enforced rigid codes of conduct: executing homosexuals, amputating the hands of thieves, and imprisoning supposed “informants” or “apostates,” many of whom never emerged from the militants' jails.
Preserving the Past, Looking for Justice
Attar’s experience is part of a haunting archive of over 500 survivor testimonies curated by the ISIS Prisons Museum, an online platform launched by Syrian journalist Amer Matar and a dedicated team of journalists and human rights advocates.
Since 2017, they have collected these stories, now displayed in a virtual format and featured in a physical exhibition at UNESCO headquarters in Paris until Nov. 14.
Matar, 38, was motivated by personal tragedy.
“IS abducted my brother in 2013,” he revealed. Following the military defeat of IS in 2019, Matar and his team accessed former prisons in Syria and Iraq, discovering thousands of documents and prisoners’ etched messages.
Among the discoveries were names, Koranic verses, and poignant song lyrics inscribed inside a football stadium-turned-prison in Raqa, Syria.
In solitary cells, they found desperate survival strategies, like exercise routines scratched in English.
“Messages into the Future”
Reflecting on his own time in a government prison during the Syrian civil war, Matar recalled inscribing his name on a wall, fearing he might never be released. “These are messages into the future so that people can find someone,” he explained.
The project team has meticulously documented around 100 prison sites and 30 mass graves, capturing 3D footage and digitizing over 70,000 IS-related documents.
This archive serves not just as a historical record but as a resource for legal cases. “We want legal teams to know that we exist,” said Robin Yassin-Kassab, the English editor for the site, emphasizing the potential for prosecuting IS crimes.
Stories of Survival and Loss
Younes Qays, a Mosul-based journalist involved in the project, described the emotional toll of recording such atrocities, including the harrowing account of a Yezidi woman raped repeatedly in ISIS captivity.
Despite these challenges, the project aims to bring justice and hope to victims’ families.
Although Matar has yet to find his own brother, he remains determined.
By next year, he hopes to launch “Jawab” (Arabic for “Answer”), a new initiative to assist others in discovering the fates of missing loved ones, continuing a mission driven by grief but anchored in the hope of remembrance and accountability.
