On the side of a road in Sednaya, about an hour north of the Syrian capital Damascus, sit the gates to hell. They are marked only by a nondescript checkpoint, no different to any of the others that litter the roads of Syria. Except, unlike all those others, this checkpoint is one-way. It is a valve. Many of those who passed it never came back.
Past this checkpoint, on top of a low hill, sits Sednaya prison, nicknamed the “human slaughterhouse”, a grim monument to the sadism of the recently toppled Assad regime. It is a building designed for the sole purpose of stripping away the humanity of those unfortunate souls condemned to enter its gates. Across three expansive wings sit rows and rows of cells. In each room remain the discarded belongings of countless nameless prisoners. Each cell could contain up to 80 persons, forced to sleep on their sides from lack of space. Without windows, they were entirely cut off from the world. The four walls of the chamber were the edges of the world. Very little information would ever get inside.
Now daylight can be let in. With the defeat of Bashar al-Assad’s government by Sunni Islamist forces, the guards are gone and the prison doors open. But there is a deeper reckoning to take place here, between the legacy of the Assad regime and the inmates wronged. For now, ignorance and confusion still reign. I heard reports that when they were released, several prisoners believed they were being liberated by the forces of Saddam Hussein – and that Bashar’s father, Hafez, who died in 2000, still ruled Syria.
Life in Sednaya was a living nightmare. According to one former prisoner, Ahmad, who was imprisoned here in 2017, inmates were monitored constantly with cameras in each cell, and forced to sit in silence under threat of violence. Detainees were required to cover their eyes when the guards opened the door. They were not allowed to look at or speak to the guards. Any tiny infringement would result in gruesome torture. Since its liberation, thousands are flocking to the prison in a grim pilgrimage to search for loved ones who disappeared under the regime. Ahmad was imprisoned with his brother. He managed to get out of the prison alive. His brother may not have been so fortunate. Ahmad came to the prison determined to find out.
Official papers litter the grounds of the complex and people grab them by the handful, looking for some meaningful sign of loved ones before quickly discarding them in frustration. Others huddle in groups flipping through logbooks containing the names of the detainees, hoping to find someone they recognise. “They took him near Mujtahid hospital in Damascus, on 19 April 2013,” Amal told me of her lost relative. “He was a nurse, he would treat anyone, both regime and opposition. They stole him from me under the accusation that he was abetting terrorism. He was just doing his job.” Each individual in the crowd of thousands has a similar story.
Rumours have been circulating about secret underground cells that may still contain living prisoners. People are increasingly desperate to find them, terrified those inside are slowly dying, left abandoned by their tormentors, waiting to be rescued. The official search for these sections has ceased, and as of yet little evidence of their existence has been uncovered. Regardless, desperate relatives won’t give up their last hope, however desperate. Individuals bang objects on the prison’s floors and walls, hoping to hear a hollow echo that may denote a hidden chamber. At the back of the prison, a small cavity was discovered containing the metal frame of a bed. Rescuers began to dig up the floor of the cell but found nothing further.
On the grounds around the prison, families are camped out, some for five days now, waiting for the discovery which they are certain is inevitable. Even those who found no answers at Sednaya pledged to continue their search. “They took my son Tariq on January 17, 2013,” says Teghrid, “He was still in school, only 18… I have not found anything here,” she whispers, clutching a pile of dirty papers. “But I cannot give up yet. I will look elsewhere as well, he may still be out there somewhere.”
At Mujtahid Hospital, in central Damascus, victims unearthed at Sednaya are being treated. Amid the maze of corridors sit rooms with doors slightly ajar, where one could catch a glimpse of limp hand, or some other grim visage as you passed. The morgue is full of bodies. In fact, it is overflowing; 35 new cadavers arrived on Wednesday (11 December) alone, a doctor told me. Extra rooms had been requisitioned to store them. Those running the hospital have been posting photographs of corpses’ faces onto Telegram, all nameless, identified only by the number that each had been assigned by the medical team. The scenes were chaotic on Wednesday as families rushed through the dimly lit corridors, hoping to find the bodies of their loved ones. Teghrid was among them, continuing her search.
Ahmad also came to the hospital with his wife to look for his brother, Ayman. He had disappeared on 3 March, 2012 (like many of those I spoke to, he knew the exact day he disappeared). “We will keep searching until we know what happened to him. Our mother was killed, his son and his wife, only his daughter is left. Sharouq, she is 15, she lives with us now. We are looking for her father… I just ask for my brother, I just want him back, dead or alive.”
People wander aimlessly through the rooms, many wearing masks to protect against the smell, others with mouths agape, unable to process what they are seeing. They step over corpses and lift the tarpaulins that provide the last shred of dignity to the dead. Most find nothing, just more nameless faces. Then, at one point, a cry rings out – “Allahu Akbar!” – followed quickly by a chorus of sound. Wails, shouts and screams all intermingle. Someone has been found. The body is carried to the back in a cardboard box, where a crowd gathers. He had been dead for two months, and was taken from his mother only eight months ago. He would never have known how close he was to liberation.
The worst of the horrors were contained in the morgue’s freezer. There was no light inside, so phone torches shone in on what looked to be the body of a child; the body of a man whose head had been smashed to pieces; a bag of bones. Nobody knows how many corpses are contained within.
Many of the bodies showed clear signs of torture. Assad’s prison network was a manufactory of ways to inflict suffering. In a small room on the far side of Sednaya contained a room that is alleged to be a “human press”, an inconspicuous-seeming contraption composed of two large metal plates sitting on heavy-duty screws which could be slowly turned to bring the two plates together, supposedly squeezing the victim inside. Some of those at the hospital had suffered torture at the hands of Assad’s henchmen. Muhammed was 80 years old when he was taken to the notorious Branch 227, a prison of Assad’s feared Military Intelligence Directorate. He was stopped at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Damascus, where he was insulted and forced to pay 100,000 Syrian Lira. He went to the office of the security services to complain. He didn’t leave that building for two harrowing months.
“They would beat us constantly,” he testifies, taking off his hat to point to the scars that criss-cross his head. “They beat me with a plastic tube that was the thickness of three hands.” As he is speaking, another woman, Khadija, listens nearby. “I spent time at Branch 227 as well,” she interjects. “I was there for four months. They would put us in barrels of water, and place live electrical wires inside with us.” Both Khadija and Muhammed came here to search for family members taken by the regime.
Amid the chaos rush the white figures of the hospital’s overworked medical team. Masked, hooded, cloaked in Hazmat suits, they fight to bring order to the anarchy. They have been tasked with categorising and identifying the victims in the hope that families can finally have peace. “We take their dental print, then we check for secondary identifiers, like tattoos or surgery scars”, says Dr Yasser Al Kassem, the assistant head of the hospital’s forensic science department, “then this information is logged and processed. Searching families are then requested to fill in a similar form to see if there is a match in identifiers… We also request from the families a photo of their loved one, preferably with a clear smile as it is easier for us to identify them.” This identifying process is used because victims now bear what looks like a grin, as their decaying skin pulls their cheeks taught.
The team are doing their best to preserve the bodies, but they appear to be losing the race. “We are trying our best,” says Al Kassem, “but we don’t have the capacity. The corpses are already decaying at an advanced pace, indicating their mistreatment; it is clear they had not been fed properly before their death.” Another young doctor takes a moment from the frenzy of her work to speak. “It is also clear that they are disease-ridden, tuberculosis and cholera most likely. We now believe they were moved to a separate section of the jail and abandoned to die,” she says, before rushing off. “We are preparing to receive hundreds of bodies in the coming days,” Kassem continues, “not just from the prisons, but also the many mass graves that are beginning to be uncovered. A lot of them will only be bones, which will make our job of identification much harder.”
On Friday (13 December), Syria celebrated its first day of rest and prayer since the fall of Bashar al-Assad. The country’s new ruler, Mohammed al-Jolani, called on the Syrian people to “to take to the streets and express their joy”, although he urged them to refrain from shooting in the air. Thousands packed the streets of Damascus’s old town, crowding around the Ummayad mosque, hoping to find a space inside to pray. At a ful (fava bean) stand, some men joked that little more than a week ago, half of them would have been mukhabarat agents: these stalls were their favoured place to look for victims. Now, for the first time in their lives, they can eat and share jokes without fear.
“I dreamt of this day my whole life,” Abdulrahman beams, “now I am living it. This is a new Syria. Our country is our responsibility now. We are responsible for rebuilding our home. We cannot be allowed to fail.” Syrians deserve to live in peace. But their cities remain bombed-out husks. Their families have been mutilated. The Assad family ruled the country for over 50 years. In that time they were free to terrorise and liquidate their own people at will. Syria was to a large extent a closed society, and we cannot yet grasp the untold suffering. There are over 50 years of atrocities to be unearthed. Sednaya is only the beginning.
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