When the Syrian authorities stopped Kawthar Tamim and her four children at a checkpoint outside the capital, Damascus, she knew she was in trouble.

It was November 2014, three years into a civil war that would last another decade. Back then, a woman in Syria did not need to be fighting alongside the rebels trying to overthrow the dictator Bashar al-Assad to be snatched up into his system of imprisonment and torture.

It was enough just to be suspected of being a rebel’s wife or child.

The Assad regime treated the families of its perceived enemies as leverage, according to former prisoners and war monitoring groups. Women were seized to use against their husbands, and children to use against their imprisoned mothers.

Tamim, then 34 and a mother of five, was the wife of a rebel fighter in hiding at the time. She remembered that snow was falling on the day that the authorities led her and her children, aged 2 to 14 at the time, underground into a prison.

It was run by the Fourth Armoured Division, an army unit that was closely linked to the Assad family. She was detained for six months.

Back home in the remote village of Afrin in northwestern Syria, she spoke to The New York Times recently. She lives there with her husband, the former rebel fighter, and the youngest of their children (they now have seven).

Tamim was one of several female former prisoners who connected with each other through a support group organised by the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison, Syria’s most notorious jail.

The women described being snatched up by the authorities, often without a formal accusation or proper trial, and disappearing for months or longer, with or without their children, into an abyss of physical and psychological torture.

Some said they were still struggling to rebuild their families and their lives.

On Tamim’s first day in detention, she said interrogators demanded to know where her husband was. When she refused to answer, they smashed her forehead against the table until blood trickled into her mouth.

Then they took her to a tiny, freezing cell, where her children were waiting. Tamim, like several other former prisoners, described being led to the cell past a labyrinth of torture devices: an electric chair, chains hanging from a ceiling. It was a not-so-subtle threat of what awaited her if she did not divulge the information they wanted.

The next day, she said, interrogators accused her of smuggling weapons and she was beaten until she passed out. Shaimaa, her eldest daughter, then 11, said she remembered hearing her mother’s screams and seeing her bruises.

The third day was worse.

After whipping Tamim with a green pipe, she said the interrogators forced her to watch as they beat her children. First came her son Baraa, 14. When he passed out, it was Shaimaa, who said the interrogators used the same pipe on her.

After that, Tamim said, she agreed to admit to anything. The violence stopped.

Her captivity continued for more than six months, mostly at Al Khatib, the Damascus prison of a military intelligence branch. After a few weeks, Tamim said, officials removed her three youngest children to a government-run orphanage, telling her that she would never see them again. Baraa was moved to the adjacent men’s prison.

As a recent Times investigation documented, al-Assad’s government forcibly separated hundreds of children from their parents and placed them in orphanages, many under false identities.

Children of detainees may be among those who ended up in the orphanages, their true identities unknown.

Some women described being detained and separated from their families even during the regime’s final months.

Sabah Harmoush, now 37, said she was detained in March last year, only nine months before al-Assad was ousted by rebels. Her husband and his brothers had joined the rebels.

Her children, aged 4 to 13, were detained with her, as was her mother-in-law, Houda Mohammed Ajami, 57.

The family was brought to the Mezzeh prison in Damascus. During interrogations, they were kicked, whipped and punched, Ajami said, adding that Harmoush suffered the harshest beatings.

After 20 days, her children were so hungry and so repulsed by prison food that they were chewing on their sneakers, and they were transferred to an orphanage, Harmoush said.

Her mother-in-law, who had been recovering from surgery when the family was detained, said she suffered a heart attack after that and was taken to a hospital. She and her daughter-in-law were transferred to another prison.

The beatings stopped and the two women were put on trial for terrorism.

Some women were imprisoned repeatedly.

Mayada Alshamali, 51, the wife of a rebel from the Damascus suburb of Douma, said she had been detained twice. The first time was in 2013 and lasted seven months. Six of her seven children were detained with her. Her other child, then 11, was held separately.

She was detained again in 2015 for two and a half years, separated from her 2-month-old child while she was still breastfeeding.

Several women described extremely harsh conditions in Al Khatib.

Iman al-Diab, now 40, said she spent two years there. She was detained in Damascus in 2014 after she became an anti-Assad political activist. Her husband, once a soldier in al-Assad’s army, had defected to the rebels and was imprisoned.Her three young children remained with her husband’s parents.

Al-Diab said she was held with dozens of other women in a single cell, so crowded they took turns standing and lying tightly huddled together, surviving. Six other women remained imprisoned with her while others came and went.

One of the women jailed with her, Azab, said that there had been no access to bathing facilities, constant fluorescent light and little sleep. She asked to be identified by only her first name for fear of retribution.

Women who were released or transferred left their underwear and pajamas behind for those who remained, al-Diab said. She and Azab said that they were among at least 15 women who joined a hunger strike.

Al-Diab said she was tied up, tortured by electric shocks and beaten so badly that she still winced when she recalled it. Their only salvation was sleep.

“We slept only to see our children in our dreams,” she said.

Azab said it took her a year after her release to locate her children, who were living with her former husband. The youngest did not recognise her.

New York Times News Service