Inside Syria’s ‘slaughterhouse’ prison

As the brutal regime of Bashar-al-Assad finally disintegrates after decades in power, the liberation of Syria’s notorious torture prisons is now underway.

Over 100,000 people have died or been executed in Syrian prisons since the country’s descent into civil war in 2011, with around a third of all deaths taking place in Sednaya prison – a facility so deadly it has been nicknamed the ‘human slaughterhouse.’

The facility, infamous for its treatment of women, children, peaceful activists and military personnel alike, is estimated to have killed at least 30,000 people who opposed Assad’s regime.

Over the years, Sednaya became synonymous with Assad’s iron grip on Syria. Only around 6,000 detainees have ever been released from the prison, and to be sent there was widely considered a death sentence, with families left in the dark for years over the fate of their loved ones.

Most other prisoners are officially considered ‘missing’ because death certificates are rarely issued unless relatives pay an exorbitant bribe to guards – in what became a lucrative racket for guards for many years.

Sednaya Military Prison was nicknamed ‘the human slaughterhouse'(Picture: Anadolu)

Rescue teams are investigating hidden compounds found beneath the prison (Picture: Anadolu)

Mass killings

The facility was divided into two sections – a red building which housed civilians arrested since the rebellion began in 2011, and a white building which housed officers and soldiers held for their involvement in the protests.

Although executions were kept secret by the regime – with most deaths being officially recorded as ‘heart attacks’ – killings were signed off by the government at an executive level by high-ranking Syrian officials.

A 2015 report by Amnesty International revealed that prisoners were killed en masse in secret executions after being found guilty in mock trials overseen by prison guards.

Around 30,000 people were believed to be execuated at the facility (Picture: Anadolu)

Describing the process, the report says, ‘Before they are hanged, the victims are condemned to death in ‘trials’ at the Military Field Court located in the al-Qaboun neighbourhood of Damascus, which last between one and three minutes. 

‘On the day the prison authorities carry out the hangings, which they refer to as ‘the party’, they collect the victims from their cells in the afternoon. The listed detainees are told that they will be transferred to a civilian prison. Instead, they are brought to a cell in the basement of the red building, where they are severely beaten over the course of two or three hours.

‘In the middle of the night, they are blindfolded and transferred in delivery trucks or minibuses to the white building. There, they are taken into a room in the basement and hanged.

‘This takes place once or twice a week, and on each occasion, between 20 and 50 people are hanged to death. Throughout this process, the victims remain blindfolded. They are only told that they have been sentenced to death minutes before the executions are carried out; they are never told when their execution will be carried out; and they do not know how they will die until the nooses are placed around their necks. 

Rescue teams have been breaking down walls in order to free prisoners (Picture: Anadolu)

After the execution is carried out, the victims’ bodies are loaded into a truck, transferred to Tishreen Hospital for registration and buried in mass graves,’ the report adds.

According to Amnesty, the execution process was secret and was hidden even from guards. Instead, the killings were authorized by a panel of high-ranking government officials acting on behalf of Assad, and overseen by an ‘execution panel’ composed of military, prison and medical officers.

Torture

But although not all prisoners at Sednaya were executed, many of them were tortured to such an extent that they begged for death.

The Amnesty report claimed those held in the red building were ‘regularly tortured, usually through severe beatings and sexual violence. They are denied adequate food, water, medicine, medical care and sanitation, which has led to the rampant spread of infection and disease. Silence is enforced, even during torture sessions. Many detainees develop serious mental illnesses such as psychosis.’

Detainees were forced to rape and torture fellow inmates (Picture: Anadolu)

Detainees were tortured in such a way as to ‘inflict maximal physical and psychological suffering’, with the goal appearing to be to ‘humiliate, degrade, dehumanize and to destroy any sense of dignity or hope’.

One former prisoner told the BBC in 2017 that during his three years of imprisonment ‘They forced my cousin whom I loved so much to torture me, and they force me to torture him. Otherwise, we would both be executed.’

Another former prisoner told Amnesty that ‘a guard would ask everyone to take off all their clothes and go to the bathroom one by one. As we walked to the bathroom, they would select one of the boys, someone petite or young or fair. They would ask him to stand with his face to the door and close his eyes. They would then ask a bigger prisoner to rape him.’

Toddlers and young children were among those freed from the prison

Liberation

Following the regime change, groups of humanitarian ‘White Hats’ have entered the prison and have begun the process of freeing the inmates.

Video has begun to circulate online of rebels knocking through walls to access a labyrinthe network of tunnels below the prison, in which hundreds more prisoners are thought to be held in secret vaults.

Ahmed Ekzayes, White Helmets’ chief of programmes, told Metro: ‘We will start with Sednaya Prison, and continue with others. Knowing the torture that people undergo there makes me cry, just thinking about it.

‘You cannot imagine the levels of degradation. I don’t even know how to describe it. Just because these people are against Assad’s party.

‘People being rescued from the prison do not even know what century we live in. They are speaking in a different way. You cannot imagine the type of torture they have suffered.’

Some rebels were seen shooting the locks off the doors of the prison cells, while additional footage appears to show recently freed prisoners running down the streets of Damascus.

In 2022, Syrian human rights activist Diab Serriya said: ‘If a political transition ever occurs in Syria,we want Sednaya to be turned into a museum, like Auschwitz’.

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