The exploration of this vast prison built in the mid-1980s made it possible to free hundreds of men, women, and also children held in ultra-secure underground jails for several days.
Images of joy mixed with fear. Since the night of Saturday December 7 to Sunday December 8, the Syrian rebels who ousted the dictator Bashar al-Assad have been working to liberate the regime's prisons, including that of Saydnaya, perched on the heights a few dozen kilometers north of Damascus. A few hours after the capture of the capital on Sunday, rebels led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group opened the doors of this vast penitentiary center. Her Exploration allowed rebels and rescue teams to free hundreds of people, including many women, sometimes accompanied by young children. “In the cells, there are kids born from rape”assured France 24 journalist Wassim Nasr, specialist in the Middle East.
This vast underground complex, five basements deep, was known as the most infamous torture center of Bashar al-Assad's government. On social networks, numerous videos show cells being opened on the fly, revealing detainees who are visibly in poor health and who do not seem to dare believe in their release. According to the Association of Detainees and Missing of Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP)all the prisoners were released Monday, December 9 at the end of the afternoon.
For many families, these releases represent new hope of finding loved ones arrested and disappeared in the regime's jails. After the announcement of the capture of the prison, hundreds of people flocked to the building, as evidenced by images shared on the social network X. In another video, an inmate struggles to believe that she is really free.
Inside the prison, the rebels were confronted with the maze of cells, including underground rooms Monday morning, saccording to sources shared by The Guardianand by journalist Wassim Nasr on X. “There are three missing people in my family. They told us there were four levels underground and people were suffocating inside, but we don't know where that is”testified to the British newspaper Ahmad al-Shnein, a Syrian looking for detainees.
The authorities of the province of Damascus have asked former soldiers and prison employees of the Bashar al-Assad regime to provide rebel forces with the codes of the underground electronic doors of “the red wing”an underground section where inmates were “almost died of suffocation” due to lack of air, reported the BBC. For their part, the White Helmets, these first aid volunteers from the Syrian civil defenseannounced on X having deployed “five specialized emergency teams” into the prison to investigate possible hidden underground cells.
In the chaos of the escape, registers containing names and details of prisoners were taken by families searching for relatives, the journalist reported Qouteiba Yassine in a video on X. According to The Guardianseveral human rights NGOs have issued this warning: without a register, the fate of the 136,000 people arrested by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and potentially detained until his fall, risks never be known.
The inauguration of this sinister prison dates back to the end of the 1980s, when Syria was ruled with an iron fist by Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, who handed him the reins upon his death in 2000. The establishment opened in 1987, with a particularity: it was intended for the detention of civilian political prisoners, but also military prisoners, in particular soldiers deemed disloyal to the regime. The prison was officially placed under the control of the Syrian Ministry of Defense, in conjunction with the intelligence services.
From 2011, and the outbreak of the civil war in the country, the prison designed to accommodate 5,000 people saw its population explode, reaching up to 10,000, or even 20,000 inmates at certain times, according to a report of Amnesty International published in February 2017. “Saydnaya prison was a tool to maintain power, a tool of terror”explained Monday on RFI Majd al-Dik, Syrian opponent who took refuge in France.
Over the years, the secrecy and rumors of extreme violence surrounding Saydnaya Prison have pushed NGOs to investigate this complex made up of two buildings, one shaped like an “L” and the other built like a star with three branches, nicknamed “the Mercedes wheel” by guards and detainees, reports Amnesty. Between 2011 and 2015, several dozen executions by hanging were carried out there every week, generally at night and out of sight. The frantic pace and the large number of killings led the NGO to qualify the prison “human slaughterhouse”.
Former prisoners report seeing group hanging rooms there, as well as rooms filled with salt, nicknamed “the salt rooms”in which many corpses were stored before being buried in mass graves in the suburbs of Damascus, ADMSP reported in 2022 (available PDF).
Based on testimonies from survivors, but also from guards, Amnesty International and the NGO Forensic Architecture published in 2017 an interactive site allowing you to “visit” in three dimensions the prison, where it was common to find up to nine prisoners in a cell of barely four square meters. In 2022, despite commitments made by Bashar al-Assad against torture, the UN pointed out (link a PDF) that this practice remained “systematic (…) notably in Saydnaya prison and in several places of detention managed by the Syrian intelligence services”.
In total, according to the ADMSP, more than 30,000 Saydnaya prisoners died or were executed during their detention. In one of the videos shared online in recent hours, a member of the Association of Independent Doctors, a Syrian NGO, struggles to hide his emotions as he walks the corridors. “This prison alone justifies twenty revolutions”we hear him say, facing empty cells for the first time in thirty-seven years.
