Immersed in Bashar al-Assad’s “human slaughterhouse”: his victims recount the horror

In a cold corridor on the first floor of Sednaya central prison, located 30 kilometers north of Damascus, Mouaz lifts a tire, before dropping it in disgust. “ Every day the jailers threw this tire in the hallway. When he stopped driving in front of a cell, they entered it and killed two to three people “, he explains. A ritual put in place by the guards of the prison in which the 39-year-old man was locked up for seven years. Forged by horror, his gaze reddened by torture, died out in suffering.

With his arms alongside his skeletal body, the survivor of the Baathist crushing machine stands with difficulty in the middle of the decrepit walls, as if he were seized by an abysmal vertigo. For a week, this hellish theater of Bashar al-Assad’s reign has remained unscathed. The smell of death is unbearable. It took him a few days before he agreed to set foot in Sednaya again. With his wife…