About thirty kilometers from Damascus, in the suburbs of the Christian town of Saydnaya, was the worst prison of the Assad regime, where mass killings were perpetrated during the dictatorship.
In the excellent film “The Ghosts” by Jonathan Millet, the hero played by Adam Bessa evokes the systematic acts of torture committed in the Saydnaya prison, in Syria. As is often the case, fiction, however documented, always falls short of reality so as not to frighten the viewer. The prison complex located north of Damascus concentrates the worst of the atrocities committed by the Assads in Syria, especially since the start of the civil war in 2011.
In 2014, a former military police photographer, exfiltrated under the pseudonym “César”, bore witness to the horror, exposing 55,000 gruesome photographs of bodies tortured and tortured in the regime’s prisons from 2011 to 2013. His job was to take photos of the corpses for the Ministry of Defense. “I saw horrible photos of the bodies of people who had been tortured,” he says: “deep wounds, marks of burns and strangulation. Eyes popped out of their sockets. Battered children and women. »
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Human Rights Watch (HRW) spoke in 2012 of an “archipelago of torture”: “use of electricity”, “sexual assault and humiliation”, “pulling out nails” and “mock executions”. According to the NGO, there were 27 detention centers managed by the regime’s intelligence agencies, the “mukhabarat”. Besides military bases, stadiums, schools and hospitals are used for the same purposes. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), at least 100,000 people have died under torture or because of the terrible conditions of detention in the regime’s prisons. Half a million people have been in these jails since 2011, according to the Observatory.
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A crematorium to hide the human toll
In February 2017, Amnesty International accused the regime of having hanged some 13,000 people from 2011 to 2015 in Saydnaya prison alone near Damascus. These hangings are in addition to the 17,700 people killed in the regime’s jails that Amnesty had already recorded. The report is based on interviews with 84 witnesses, including guards, detainees and judges. Most of the victims were civilians.
In May of the same year, the United States exhibited photos showing the use of a “crematorium” at Saydnaya prison, used to destroy the remains of thousands of slain prisoners. In these photos dated April 2017, April 2016, January 2015 and August 2013 “declassified” by the American government, we saw buildings, one of which is captioned “main prison” and the other “probable crematorium”. On another photo, a caption “melted snow on part of the roof” attests, according to the Americans, to the existence of a “crematorium installed by the Syrian regime”.
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Deprivation of light, food, rape, physical and psychological torture sessions, survivor Omar al-Shogre explained to the BBC what he had endured when he was a teenager. “They trained my cousin to torture me and I had to torture him too, otherwise we would both be executed,” he testified. Add to this horror, the spread of Covid-19 in the regime’s prisons, where inmates were crowded into cramped cells and often deprived of medical care.
Since Monday, Syrian White Helmets have been carrying out intense searches for detainees trapped in underground dungeons at Saydnaya prison. Because the worst secrets of this place of horror have perhaps not yet been revealed.
