A man praying inside a liberated cell in Sednaya prison, in the suburbs of Damascus, Syria. Photo / Daniel Berehulak, The New York Times
Amnesty International described it as a “human slaughterhouse,” where, other rights groups say, tens of thousands of people were detained, tortured and killed during the 13-year civil war.
As the Assad regime in Syria crumbled over the weekend, the conquering rebels threw open the gates to the prisons where the Government had detained tens of thousands of its people, torturing and killing them on an industrial scale.
Throngs of Syrians rushed to the facilities to search for loved ones who had disappeared into the prison system during the 13-year civil war. No prison is more infamous than Saydnaya, just north of the capital, Damascus.
Even before the civil war, Saydnaya was known for widespread torture and abuse. But during the conflict, it became a site of depravity and violence, used to commit some of the worst atrocities of Bashar Assad’s rule when he was President.
Human rights groups say tens of thousands of people were detained in Saydnaya. They were tortured, beaten and deprived of food, water, medicine and basic sanitation. Thousands were executed in mass hangings after sham trials. One group estimated that more than 30,000 detainees were killed there.
In most cases, the families of prisoners were given no information about their fate.
The prison, built in 1987 on a hill north of Damascus, was a military prison that housed political prisoners.
As The New York Times has reported, it was the most notorious prison in a brutal system that was the Government’s main weapon against the civilian opposition. Amnesty International described Saydnaya as a “human slaughterhouse”.
According to a report by a group representing prisoners, it was protected by hundreds of guards and soldiers and surrounded by a ring of minefields.
The prison held an estimated 1500 inmates in 2007, but its population surged to as many as 20,000 people at once after Syria’s civil war began, according to a 2017 report by Amnesty International.
Before the civil war began, in 2011, a majority of Saydnaya’s inmates were Islamists, who had been encouraged by the Syrian Government to join an offshoot of al-Qaida that was fighting the United States in Iraq. Once they returned home, Assad jailed them to prevent them from threatening his rule.
As anti-government protests spread across Syria in early 2011, the Government released many of those jihadis and began imprisoning thousands of protesters, activists, journalists, doctors, aid workers, students and other Syrians. Many were sent to Saydnaya.
The prison was the last place detainees were often dumped after long periods in other detention centres.
The Amnesty report and a separate investigation by the United Nations found that Syrian authorities had deliberately exterminated detainees at Saydnaya after torturing and housing them in appalling conditions. The UN investigators determined that such acts could amount to crimes against humanity.
The detainees were sexually assaulted, beaten on the genitals and forced to beat, rape or even kill one another, according to rights groups and a Times investigation. In 2017, the United States accused the Syrian Government of using a crematory to hide mass murders in Saydnaya, listing methods of physical torture such as beatings, stabbings, sexual assault, electric shocks and cutting off ears and genitals.
The few who won release, often through family connections or bribes, described detainees left to die of untreated wounds and illnesses in filthy, overcrowded cells. Prisoners were given just seconds to use latrines, so were often forced to relieve themselves in the cells, which lacked toilets. Meals usually consisted of a few mouthfuls of spoiled food. Many people developed serious infections, diseases and mental illnesses.
The conditions were similar at many prisons across the system. But at Saydnaya, treatment could be especially sadistic, according to ex-inmates.
Prisoners were not allowed to look at the guards, talk or make any noise, even during torture. They could be punished by being denied water or forced to sleep naked, without blankets, in freezing cold.
Every morning, guards collected the bodies of those who had died overnight and took them to a military hospital, where their deaths were recorded as cases of heart or respiratory failure, according to the Amnesty report. Then, they were trucked to mass graves outside Damascus.
Loved ones outside the prison often never knew their fates.
According to former officials cited in the Amnesty report, detainees at Saydnaya were routinely tortured into giving confessions. Then they were taken to military field courts, where they were convicted after trials that lasted two or three minutes.
Every week and often twice a week, according to the report, guards pulled groups of up to 50 people from their cells, telling them they were being transferred to civilian prisons. Instead, they were blindfolded, beaten severely in the prison’s basement and then taken to another building, where they were hanged in the middle of the night, the report said.
Prison officials called the mass hangings “the party”.
From 2011 to 2015, Amnesty found, 5000 to 13,000 people, most of them civilians, were put to death in this way. The group did not have direct evidence of executions after 2015, but because detainees were still being transferred to Saydnaya and sham trials still being held, it was likely the executions continued.
Some 2000 prisoners emerged from Saydnaya on Sunday, according to Fadel Abdul Ghany, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which has rigorously monitored Assad’s labyrinth of prisons. But the rest of the approximately 11,000 detainees who he said were being held there when the Government was overthrown were nowhere to be found.
“Where are the remaining prisoners?” Abdul Ghany said. “They have been killed.”
Still, in the confusion, different groups had different estimates of the numbers, and many Syrians held out hope that their disappeared relatives could still be found. Journalists, armed fighters and civilians, including children, roamed the prison, looking for signs of them.
“Seizing the city is a joy – we are joyous,” said one rebel fighter, Mohammad Bakir. “But the real victory will be when I find my family.” He had not heard from his mother, brother and cousin since they disappeared in 2012 after protesting against the Government.
Videos sent to the Times by a group of doctors visiting Saydnaya showed crowding and the dire conditions inside. Numbered cells, each of which appear to have held a dozen or more people, were littered with debris, clothing and belongings.
The White Helmets, a volunteer civil defence organisation in Syria, said it had helped to release about 20,000 to 25,000 people from Saydnaya, but noted that thousands more prisoners remained unaccounted for.
The group sent specialised teams to Saydnaya looking for secret cells that might hold more prisoners, based on reports that it has hidden elements. But around midnight, the group said it had not found evidence of hidden rooms.
The Association of Detainees & the Missing in Saydnaya Prison said that it had obtained a document showing there had been about 4300 detainees as of October 28 and that approximately that number had already walked free. In a statement, it said there was “no truth to the presence of detainees trapped underground”.
On Monday in Aleppo, a vehicle dropped off one former prisoner from Saydnaya, his face gaunt and his legs and body weakened by years of detention. Two relatives helped him stand. A small band of musicians beat drums to celebrate his survival.
The man was soon thronged by people holding their cellphones up to his face. They were showing him photographs of detainees, hoping he might have news.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Vivian Yee
Photographs by: Daniel Berehulak/
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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