With overthrow of Assad regime, Syrian Canadian recalls 20 years of ‘torment’ inside its prisons [Video]

WARNING: This story includes graphic descriptions of torture.

Nabil Hawara painfully remembers the endless cycle of torture that he endured in one of Syria’s most notorious prisons.

For 20 years, from 1975 to 1995, he says he lived in constant fear of death and torment — from being beaten with iron bars and whips each day to guards urinating in food bowls or jumping on his back, ultimately rupturing a lung.

Hawara, who didn’t know if he would ever make it out alive from the four walls of his cell in Tadmur Military Prison in Palmyra, in the deserts of eastern Syria, ultimately fled the country for Canada as a refugee.

The prison, which held mass executions and what Hawara calls an around-the-clock “torture program,” was mere metres away from a high school and a playground — and children were too afraid to say anything or even look at the facility. ISIS, militants fighting to establish an Islamist …