Sayednaya prison, north of the Syrian capital Damascus, has become a symbol of the Assad clan’s inhumane abuses, especially since the country’s civil war broke out in 2011.
The prison complex was the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and enforced disappearances, symbolizing the atrocities committed by ousted President Bashar al-Assad.
When Syrian rebels entered Damascus early last month after toppling the Assad government, they announced they had captured Sayednaya and freed its prisoners.
Some people were imprisoned there since the 1980s.
According to the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons (ADMSP) of Sayednaya Prison, rebels freed more than 4,000 people.
Pictures of exhausted and emaciated prisoners, some of whom were helped by their comrades because they were too weak to leave their cells, were broadcast around the world.
Suddenly the workings of the infamous jail were revealed to everyone.
The foreign ministers of France and Germany, who are visiting to meet Syria’s new rulers, toured the facility on Friday along with members of Syria’s White Helmets emergency rescue group.
crematorium
The prison was built in the 1980s during the rule of Hafez al-Assad, father of ousted president Hafez al-Assad, and was initially intended to house political prisoners, including Islamist groups and Kurdish activists.
But over the years, Sayednaya became a symbol of brutal state control over the Syrian people.
In 2016, the UN Commission found that “the Syrian government has also committed crimes against humanity such as murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture, imprisonment, enforced disappearance and other inhumane acts”, particularly in Saydnaya.
The following year, Amnesty International documented thousands of executions there, calling it a policy of extermination in a report titled “Human Slaughterhouse”.
Shortly afterward, the United States revealed the existence of a crematorium inside Sayednaya in which the remains of thousands of executed prisoners were burned.
In 2022 the war monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that approximately 30,000 people were imprisoned in Sayednaya, where many were tortured, and only 6,000 were released.
salt morgue
ADMSP believes that more than 30,000 prisoners were hanged or died under torture or from lack of medical care or food between 2011 and 2018.
The group says former officials in Syria had set up salt chambers – rooms equipped with salt – for use as temporary morgues to make up for the lack of cold storage.
In 2022, ADMSP published a report describing these floating salt morgues for the first time.
It said the first such chamber dates back to 2013, one of the bloodiest years of the Syrian civil conflict.
Many prisoners are officially considered missing, with their families not receiving death certificates unless they pay exorbitant bribes.
foreign prisoner
After the fall of Damascus last month, thousands of relatives of the missing flocked to Sayednaya in the hope that they might find their loved ones hidden in underground chambers.
But Sayednaya is now empty, and White Helmets emergency workers have since announced the end of search operations there, as no more prisoners have been found.
Several foreigners also ended up in Syrian prisons, including Jordanian Osama Bashir Hassan al-Bataynah, who spent 38 years behind bars and was found “unconscious and suffering from memory loss,” the foreign ministry in Amman said last month. Was.
According to the Arab Organization for Human Rights in Jordan, 236 Jordanian citizens were held in Syrian prisons, the majority in Saidnaya.
Other freed foreigners included Suhail Hamawi of Lebanon, who returned home after being held in Syria for 33 years, including Sayednaya.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
