Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steal. Today we're covering our usual topic,

financial crime, and in this case bribery, but in a really distressing context, prisons.

And not just any prison, but Sidenaya prison in Syria, which is referred to by Syrians as

the slaughterhouse. My guest is Omar al-Shogre. Omar is a Syrian refugee, a human rights activist,

and director of detainee affairs at the Syrian Emergency Task Force. He is also a survivor of

Sa'danaya prison, where he was locked up as a

teenager for protesting Bashar al-Assad's brutal domination of Syria. He's given testimony to

European war crimes investigators and before Congress. Omar, thank you for joining me.

Thank you very much for having me. Can you describe your experience with the Syrian government

initially? It ends with you in prison, as we know. But what led up to that? I've heard you

describe the early protests as having a party atmosphere. My first interaction with the regime is my

father. He was a retired officer.

I lived with him until I was 15 years old and I was taken to prison, taken away from my family.

When I enjoyed the first demonstration, it was among at that time the most joyful things I'd done in my life.

In addition to the joy of being in a concert of people dancing and saying beautiful

words, singing for freedom and liberty, I was actually being with my friends because all my friends

or my cousins, everybody I knew was in the demonstrations. And in addition to that, just the funny

fact is, it's like a party. If you you don't go to you're not the cool guy anymore

and i was in the age where i should be the cool guy 15 years old 16 years old and i was striving to be

a cool guy i was trying to get to have friends and demonstrations was very social context that actually

i appreciated so much because i was social I wanted to see more people

and that place was awesome for that. Your first experience with the protesters, how old were you then?

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