Syrian blogger Tal al-Mallouhi has been released 15 years after she was swept away into deposed president Bashar al-Assad's notorious prison system at the age of 19, her mother told AFP on Tuesday.
Mallouhi, now 33, was a blogger who wrote poetry and social commentary before she was detained in December 2009, just over a year before pro-democracy protests broke out across Syria.
In 2011, she was sentenced to five years in prison on charges of working with the CIA -- accusations her family insists are false. Her sentencing drew international condemnation at the time.
Authorities never released her after her sentence elapsed.
She was freed last week along with thousands of others during the 11-day lightning offensive led by Islamist rebels, who seized key cities before reaching Damascus and forcing Assad to flee.
"I was overwhelmed with an indescribable feeling, a great joy" after holding her daughter for the first time after she was freed, her mother Ahd al-Mallouhi told AFP.
But after more than a decade in Assad's notorious prison system, her daughter, like many others newly released, needs time just "to realise she got out, she's ok now and that the fear and terror is gone", she said.
At the core of the system of rule that Assad inherited from his father Hafez was a brutal complex of prisons and detention centres used to eliminate dissent by jailing those suspected of stepping out of the ruling Baath party's line.
"I used to see her for half an hour during visits, and our every word was watched," she told AFP.
She said the family needed time to heal, "to talk with each other again and open up".
Yet despite the challenges, she said she had faith the country was now headed towards better days.
The rebel takeover that freed Mallouhi and others came nearly 14 years after Syrian government forces cracked down on peaceful protesters, triggering a complex war that has left more than 500,000 dead and forced millions to flee.
Up to 100,000 of those killed died in government-run prisons, according to Britain-based monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
"Syria was freed first, then my daughter was released along with all the others," she said.
"Maybe if my daughter had been released alone, I would still fear for her, still be scared they could take her at any moment."
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