A man was lying on the cell floor bleeding profusely from a head wound when a prison guard turned to Moaz Al Safrawi and told him to treat it.
Moaz was terrified. Before he was incarcerated, he was a businessman with a degree in French literature, not a doctor. He had zero medical training.
He took up the needle and thread, and with no anaesthetic, started stitching up his fellow inmate's gaping wound.
"I said to the wounded man, 'Please forgive me, I'm scared, but I'm doing my best to treat you'," Moaz tells Foreign Correspondent.
To his surprise, his patient urged him to keep going, knowing the guards wouldn't take him to hospital and he'd likely bleed to death without treatment.
The injured man ended up surviving.
It was the moment Moaz realised he could help people during his time in Sednaya Prison, known as the "human slaughterhouse" for the tens of thousands of inmates detained, tortured and executed there.
Over time, the man who went behind bars as a businessman became "Doctor" Moaz, an accidental physician who survived one of Syria's most notorious hellholes.
Surviving the 'human slaughterhouse'
Moaz owes his survival to a remarkable misunderstanding.
Six years into Syria's civil war, which started when President Bashar al-Assad cracked down on opposition protesters in 2011 during the Arab Spring, Moaz was secretly supporting rebel fighters in the Damascus countryside when he was detained.
Sednaya is "the most dangerous place in the world," he says. "Wherever you look, death is in front of you."
When he arrived, a guard asked him what he did for a job.
In truth, Moaz owned several businesses: a car dealership, a grocery store and a part share in a medical clinic.
But educated and professional people didn't last long in Sednaya, where they were often targeted for execution or beaten so frequently they suffered fatal injuries, so Moaz lied, telling the guard he was a vegetable seller.
It wasn't long before his cover story was blown.
Two weeks into his incarceration, when his father, wife and son came to visit him in prison, his father mentioned the medical centre in casual conversation.
A guard who was listening turned to Moaz's seven-year-old son, Karim, and asked him what his father did.
"My father is a dentist," the boy replied.
"I was stunned," recalls Moaz. "The guard turned to me and said, 'You are a doctor?' Then he looked at my son and repeated his words. 'You told me your father is a doctor?' My son replied, 'Yes, a doctor.'
"At that moment I realised I was finished. I was certain to die."
Moaz was too terrified to contradict the guard. He had already lied about being a vegetable seller and knew he wouldn't be believed again.
"I looked at my son and said to myself, 'You killed your father, my son, and you don't know it. You killed your father without realising it'."
He started to think it might be the last time he'd see his family but he didn't allow himself to show it in front of them.
Back in his cell, he shook with fear as he explained his dilemma to a fellow inmate, a real doctor.
The doctor offered him a lifeline — he would teach Moaz medicine.
"The doctor started drawing the body systems on the cell wall and explained the uses of each system. The digestive system, the respiratory system and all the systems."
One by one, each doctor he met in his cell would teach him something new.
"I performed stitching and catheterisation tasks," he says. He even amputated a detainee's infected foot.
The guards found him useful. He was willing to treat patients with infectious diseases like tuberculosis and cholera when the real doctors were too scared.
Moaz tried to help everyone he could.
"The hardest part was walking through this place and seeing someone … letting them die," he says.
Inside the prison, he takes us to a cell used as a ward for cholera patients. "Some of the toughest moments I've ever experienced here," he says, lingering at the door.
All but one of the doctors who helped him died in prison, including some who were executed.
Moaz could hear the regular mass hangings from his cell, always wondering if he might be next.
"We are in the rooms above and when the [execution] table moves, it makes noise at night. That's how we know there are people getting killed," he says.
"We are waiting for our turn for them to take us … like chickens in a slaughterhouse, waiting our turn to be slaughtered."
Scars that will never heal
His torment in Sednaya is now over but it's still hard for Moaz's wife Soumaia to hear about it.
"It hurts me more than him," she says.
"I just hope that he forgets or miraculously gets out of this ordeal that he's still suffering from."
Moaz's liberation came soon after the swift fall of the Assad regime last year.
In late November, opposition rebels who had held Syria's northern province of Idlib started rapidly advancing south towards Damascus.
Assad had sustained the civil war with the backing of Russia and Iran, but they had become distracted by the war in Ukraine and conflict with Israel.
As the rebels came for the capital, the Assad regime, hollowed out and exhausted, collapsed without much of a fight. Syria's dictator fled to Moscow.
Gunmen entered the prison and shot the locks off the cell doors, setting Moaz and thousands of others free.
"I went from hell to heaven — by seeing my family. One can't describe it", says Moaz, tearing up after watching a video of him being reuinted with his family.
"God helped me get out of Sednaya. It's a sweet thing that I'm done with prison. I'm freed from the humiliation of torment and oppression."
He might be free but Moaz has returned permanently scarred, both physically and psychologically, from the beatings he endured.
He says his fractured finger is welded in place, he has an injury to his knee, and he was hit badly in the groin with a bottle.
"This is the hardest thing I've experienced in prison. I'm sterile after this beating."
Renewal and revenge in the new Syria
While Moaz's story of survival is unique, so many Syrians have a story of a brother, or an uncle, who was harassed, detained or killed by the Assad regime.
They now owe their lives to a coalition of rebels led by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, or HTS, and its leader Ahmed Al Sharaa, who were responsible for toppling Assad.
One of them is Saleh, Moaz's former cellmate and patient.
In a small room in a Damascus home, Moaz carefully inserts a needle into Saleh's arm to attach an IV drip.
"Today I'm not qualified as a doctor because I don't have a medical degree, but I'm helping my fellow prisoners," he says.
With no work and no income since he was liberated, Saleh relies on the generosity of others to survive.
"Ninety-nine per cent of ex-Sednaya prisoners today don't have the money to pay for a doctor, so they come to me," Moaz says.
Despite the clear hardship of life after Sednaya, both men have faith in the new government led by Al Sharaa, a former Al Qaeda commander, who appointed himself Syria's interim president in January and announced a transitional government in March.
"When we came out of prison, we were surprised to find the country in ruins. There was nothing left. We'd go to hospitals and there was nothing. Nothing left in the country," Saleh says.
"We hope, God willing, our government will not fail us anymore. It's a new start."
But Syria's path forward is not so clear.
The country is economically crippled, in part due to the devastation wrought by the fighting, but also due to heavy sanctions imposed by Western countries and the UN on the former regime and on the new president's now-disbanded militia, HTS.
Despite insisting they have dropped their jihadi roots, Al Shaara and his men are still formally listed as terrorists, an international pariah status that obstructs foreign investment and ensures that the cost of living continues to soar.
The threat of revenge and retribution also lingers.
Former president and dictator Bashar al-Assad is from the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam making up about 10 per cent of the population.
The new president is from the Sunni majority, comprising more than 70 per cent of the population.
In the weeks and months after the Assad regime fell, alarming reports of scores being settled and revenge killings by Sunnis against Alawites seeped into Syrian society fuelled by social media posts.
The yearning for justice after the horrors of decades of Assad family rule is palpable, yet unrealised.
In the first week of March, all hell broke loose up the Syrian coast north of Damascus.
Pro-Assad gunmen who had fled to the coast — a predominantly Alawite area — launched ambushes on the new government security forces, killing more than 200.
Shockingly, pro-government gunmen then went house to house in Alawite areas killing more than 600 men, women, children and disarmed fighters, according to estimates from the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
Some were made to crawl before they were shot.
It's not yet clear exactly who the pro-government gunmen were, although it's believed many were from non-HTS factions who are now aligned with the government.
Others may simply have been ordinary armed civilians.
It was the first real threat to President Al Sharaa's power.
To get sanctions lifted he needs to convince the world that Syria is a safe, inclusive country, and on that count the massacres were an enormous setback.
The risk of sliding back into violence
Moaz is deeply concerned about the violence.
"It's sad because we are all first and foremost Syrian," he says.
"We are Syrian people and we do not wish harm to anyone, nor do we wish harm to any human being."
Nevertheless, he and a group of ex-Sednaya prisoners volunteered to join the government forces in the battle against the Assad regime remnants.
"The brothers who are with us, they want to lend a helping hand to the state that freed them," he says.
"I won't pick up a weapon, but I would be willing to provide medical services with what I learned in Sednaya prison," he says
He has no sympathy for those opposed to Syria's new leaders.
"Those who want to mess with the country's security and stability deserve whatever happens to them," he says.
"Anyone who tries to tamper with the country's security will be doomed."
Syria's new president faces a dilemma.
Fealty is keeping him in power, but it might also be his undoing if he can't get control of the violent factions who helped elevate him.
"Ahmed Al Sharaa took over the country when it was sick. He's making things better, and he's working," Moaz says.
"But it needs patience, it requires patience, it requires time."
After 54 years of brutal Assad family dictatorship and a lightning-quick liberation, time might be one thing Syria doesn't have.
Watch Renewal and Revenge tonight on Foreign Correspondent at 8pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
