A Syrian death factory gives up its secrets
Under the Assad regime, Saydnaya prison became a mass-killing machine; ‘a symbol of shame for the whole world.’
Inside Bashar al-Assad’s most-notorious death factory, the hangings had become routine.
Once a month, around midnight, the guards at Saydnaya Prison would call the names of the condemned, usually dozens at a time. They wrapped nooses around their necks, then dragged tables from beneath their feet with a scraping that echoed through the building. Those in nearby cells heard a gagging sound as the men choked to death.
Then, in mid-March of 2023, the pace picked up dramatically, according to six witnesses.
“They gathered 600 people and killed them in three days, about 200 each night,” said Abdel Moneim Al-Qaid, a 37-year-old former rebel soldier who was arrested after handing himself in for what he thought was an amnesty deal with the government.
The 2023 mass killing, previously unreported, came just as the Syrian president was poised to break out of his international isolation. After more than a decade of using bombing, torture, and chemical attacks to crush an internal insurrection, Assad was deep in talks with regional players that would lead Syria to rejoin the Arab League. Some Arab states and Western officials viewed the rebellion as a lost cause, and sought to embrace Assad and freeze the conflict.
The sudden collapse of the Assad regime late last year revealed just how badly the international community miscalculated. In one of their first acts as they swept into Damascus in the predawn darkness on Dec. 8, rebels stormed the prison and shot the locks off the doors, freeing the remaining prisoners and pulling back the veil on one of the worst examples of systematic state killing since World War II.
Inside the prison, a pair of concrete buildings ringed by razor wire on a mountainside near Damascus, Assad’s regime carried out industrial-scale torture and death that likely killed tens of thousands of people over more than a decade. The regime orchestrated the killing in a bureaucratic manner rarely seen in recent history. Assad’s security apparatus kept meticulous records of the detainees’ transfer to the prison and other facilities, court documents and death certificates of those executed.
“It’s the worst atrocity of the 21st century in terms of the number killed and the way a government was directly involved,” said Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes. “I do draw a line to the Nazis and to Soviet Russia in terms of the organised nature of state terror.”
Several former prisoners connected the March massacre to purported reforms Assad decreed later that year as a part of its push to regain international acceptance. Later in 2023 Assad abolished the military field court that sent many detainees to Saydnaya, and commuted death sentences for some prisoners. Former detainees and war crimes experts believe the regime may have been getting in one last mass killing before those moves slowed the machinery of death.
The fact that the survivors are now able to speak openly, allowing their names and faces to be published, shows how the collapse of the regime has transformed Syrian society. The men who ended up in Saydnaya during the war included military deserters and defectors, rebel soldiers and peaceful activists. The former detainees interviewed for this article also included a nuclear scientist and an engineer who was arrested simply for being Facebook friends with another man who was critical of the regime.
Their testimony exposes full extent of the torture and killing inside the prison after years in which information about the abuses emerged in reports by United Nations investigators, rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and civil society organisations such as the Syrian Justice and Accountability Center, the Syrian Emergency Task Force and the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison.
In other words, the world knew about Saydnaya, but failed to stop the atrocities that took place inside.
“This prison is a symbol of shame for the whole world. Not just for Syria,” said Emad Al-Aqra, a professor now working on prisoner rehabilitation and transitional justice in Syria, who was jailed in 2011 for speaking on TV against the regime and spent about a year in Saydnaya.
This account is based on interviews with 21 former Saydnaya detainees, two former regime officials involved in the killings and nearly a dozen Syrian and international war-crimes experts, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of Assad regime documents found in the prison and other Syrian security facilities. Wall Street Journal reporters also visited the prison three times in an effort to document evidence of the atrocities.
Saydnaya, known in official regime documents as the “First Military Prison,” was the largest of dozens of execution centres that Assad’s regime set up in an attempt to instil fear in the Syrian population and break the 2011 uprising and armed rebellion against his rule.
The public’s name for the prison — “Saydnaya,” after the small mountain town where it is located — became a synonym in Syria over the last 14 years for the regime’s abduction and killing of its own citizens. “Lost in Saydnaya” became a way of saying someone was arrested and never seen again.
In addition to the many thousands killed in organised executions, former detainees and war crimes experts say perhaps an equal number of people died in Saydnaya from torture and extreme conditions, including beatings with pipes and rods, along with starvation, thirst and disease.
Held in lice-ridden, steel-walled cells with a single slot for a window, prisoners were forbidden from looking guards in the eyes, or they would risk incurring a beating so severe it would leave them bleeding out on the floor.
“Saydnaya was a nightmare. It was one big massacre. Almost everyone who went in didn’t come out,” said Ali Ahmed Al-Zuwara, a farmer from rural Damascus who was arrested at the age of 25 for dodging military service in 2020.
The hundreds who walked free in December represented a tiny minority among the many thousands of Syrians who went missing during the war. Some 160,123 Syrians were forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime throughout the war according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a respected watchdog group.
Some of the families of the missing still hold out hope that their relatives are alive. Others have begun a strange kind of mourning, in which they have begun to accept that their loved ones are dead, while lacking answers about how or when they died, let alone being able to bury them.
“Even though we know he ended up in Saydnaya, we don’t know what happened to him. We never received a body,” said Dina Kash, whose husband, Ammar Daraa, a wholesale distributor, was arrested and disappeared at the age of 46 in 2013. The family confirmed in December that he was sent to Saydnaya from documents found in an intelligence headquarters after the fall of the regime.
“We have to say, ‘May god have mercy on his soul,’ but we always follow that with ‘whether he’s alive or dead.’” Built in the 1980s during the rule of Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, the First Military Prison in Saydnaya and the vast security state it represented passed on to the son when he assumed power in 2000.
In the spring of 2011, revolution swept the Middle East. After protests ousted the longtime presidents of Tunisia and Egypt in January, huge throngs of Syrians surged into the street to call for greater political freedom.
When the uprising began, Mohammed Abdel Rahman Ibrahim, a 26-year-old with thick glasses and a soft voice, was tutoring students using his degree in advanced mathematics. He was still living with his parents in a concrete house on the southern fringe of Damascus in a neighbourhood of auto mechanics and delivery drivers.
That summer he was conscripted into Assad’s army and sent to guard an air base in northern Syria used by government warplanes to drop bombs on rebel positions in nearby Aleppo.
Unable to stomach the regime’s violence, he defected in January 2013, joining an opposition brigade near Damascus, but grew exhausted and quit fighting after a few months. Fleeing to an area of southern Syria held by the opposition, he spent four years teaching math and working in a corner shop, living in a kind of internal exile, unable to go home to Damascus without fear of arrest.
In 2018, the government offered an amnesty, supposedly guaranteed by Russia, to some rebels in the south. Tired of living in fear of crossing government checkpoints, Ibrahim decided to take the deal.
He arranged to turn himself into a military police headquarters in Damascus. When he arrived, he handed his ID and a copy of the amnesty papers to an officer.
“F — you, who gave you this?” the officer said, tossing the papers on the floor. After four days of questioning, he was blindfolded and taken to Syria’s air force Intelligence headquarters in Mazzeh Airbase. Officers told him to sign a document confessing to killing government soldiers.
After he refused at first, he was beaten with batons, then hung from the ceiling by the wrists with his hands bound behind his back. After lowering him to the floor, the officers threatened his sister and mother. “We can bring them here and rape them in front of you,” said one.
Less than an hour into the torture session, Ibrahim relented. He later signed and fingerprinted the confession, which he wasn’t allowed to read.
“Maybe I signed my own execution order. I don’t know,” said Ibrahim, who is now 40.
“You’ll never see the sun again,” an intelligence officer told him before he was shoved in the back of a truck. On an April morning in 2019, he and around 40 other prisoners were driven up a mountain to Saydnaya.
There, the guards stripped him naked and shoved his body into a rubber tire so they could beat his extremities. He was then placed with seven other men in a concrete cell barely large enough to hold all of them even if they stood side-by-side.
Bruised, bleeding, naked and shivering from the cold, the men held each other for warmth in the pitch dark. The toilet in the floor of the cell overflowed onto their feet and ankles.
“I’m gonna die before the morning,” one of the men sobbed.
All of the men in Ibrahim’s cell survived until the next morning, when the guards opened the door, handed them grey uniforms, and then led them upstairs to prison’s regular cells.
What Ibrahim experienced upon his arrival at Saydnaya was a standard procedure, known among some former prisoners as the “welcome party.” It was a ritual designed to psychologically break them and prepare them for life in a facility that deprived them of their personhood, they said.
Some prisoners died during the initial beating, which often involved being lashed with a green plastic hosepipe 100 times on the legs, several former detainees said. One detainee interviewed for this article, a 35-year-old former rebel soldier named Bashar Mohammed Jamous, had to have his left foot amputated after the beating he received upon arrival at the prison.
The initial beating was also an introduction to life inside the facility where they were denied the most basic aspects of personhood. They were forbidden from talking in any voice louder than a whisper. They were deprived of shoes. They were denied books, pens, and paper.
Mountain winds whipped through the prison for most of the year. The men shivered in their paper-thin uniforms and cells that lacked heating.
Prisoners said they were forced to drink their own urine, sexually assaulted, and constantly beaten by guards wielding metal rods and green plastic pipes. When they showered, one man recalled, the blood from the beatings would mix with the soap and water swirling on the floor.
“Every time they opened the door they beat you,” said Ibrahim. The prisoners were often starved or cut off from drinking water. A single cup of rice would be given to a cell full of men for a day’s rations. The lack of food emaciated their bodies. In one incident, the guards shut off the water for 17 days straight and so a prisoner named Bassam Rahman drank from the toilet, causing him to die of disease days later, recalled a cellmate, Mahmoud Omar Warde, 34.
“We started as 25 people. At the end only eight were left,” said Warde, who now lives in the town of Afrin in northern Syria. “Everyone who was killed died in front of us in the cell,” mostly from the beatings, he said.
In the summer of 2011 as Assad moved to crush the uprising against him, a Damascus municipal worker named Muhammad Afif Naifeh was in his office when a group of security officials showed up. They asked him to put together a team of men and bring them to a graveyard in the countryside just south of Damascus.
At the designated location, a cemetery in the town of Najha, the security men brought a refrigerator truck with 10 bodies and ordered the workers to bury the corpses. Nafieh’s body shook.
“I didn’t ask questions,” he said.
Over the following weeks, the security men came again and again, asking for more workers, more burials, always at night. At one of these sessions, an officer from air force Intelligence handed Naifeh a list of the bodies. The corpses weren’t named, but instead numbered. The document also listed where they had come from: usually a branch of military intelligence, or a military hospital.
“That’s when I realised they’d died under torture,” said Nafieh. Over the following months, the body count grew larger. Nafieh’s team of workers brought in a bulldozer and other equipment to dig ever larger graves. The refrigerator trucks kept arriving with bodies, some of them bruised from beatings, others with marks around their necks, many of them tagged with numbers. Sometimes the bodies were in body bags, sometimes they were uncovered, according to Nafieh and a second former official involved in the burials, Youssef Obeid, who drove a bulldozer at the site.
Inside the government’s secretive system of military hospitals and morgues, the bodies — from Saydnaya and other security installations — were piling up, government documents show. A military-intelligence cable from December 2012 recovered by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability complained of “bad smells from decomposing bodies in their buildings.
By the next year, the security agencies ran out of room at the cemetery in Najha. Nafieh and his crew of workers were summoned instead to an empty plane on the northern outskirts of Damascus. There, near the town of Qutayfah, they were instructed to keep digging graves for an ever larger number of bodies.
The mass grave at Qutayfah, the largest among many used by the regime to dump the corpses from the mass killings, expanded from 19,000 to 40,000 square meters between 2014 and 2019, according to an analysis of satellite imagery from the German Aerospace Center carried out for a war crimes trial of a Syrian official in Germany. The graves were between 120 meters long and three to five meters wide, and the area in use for burials increased from 19,000 to 40,000 square meters.
During that period, trucks arrived at the site and trenches were dug, satellite images reviewed by the Journal show.
For years at Qutayfah, two to three trucks would come bringing bodies each week, sometimes bringing hundreds of bodies. Some of the bodies had marks around their necks. Others had nooses still hanging from their necks, which he later identified as being from Saydnaya, said Naifeh.
Naifeh defected in 2017 and fled to Germany where he later testified in a war crimes trial against a regime official, and before the U.S. congress. For years he kept his identity a secret, “It damaged me emotionally and physically,” he said. “I’ve had nightmares ever since I got to Germany.” Today, the mass grave is a muddy plane on the side of a highway in an area adjacent to several military bases. At the four corners of the site sit four abandoned Russian military communications trucks, the Russian-language manuals for the equipment spilling out of the doors.
Now led by Islamist former rebels who pushed Assad from power, Syria remains a troubled country. Among the array of challenges facing the new government in Damascus is the question of how to investigate the abuses of the former regime and how to help families search for missing loved ones who disappeared into the regime’s prisons.
The Syrian authorities, scrambling to consolidate their fragile government, are now faced with difficult choices about how to proceed with such an investigation.
A full accounting of Assad’s atrocities would be expensive and technically complex. Mass graves would have to be exhumed. DNA samples would have to be taken, witnesses located, suspects arrested. An investigation could also be politically fraught, raising questions for the former rebels about whether they would allow an accounting of their own human rights record during the war.
The new government has promised a committee to investigate old regime war crimes and has allowed U.N. and independent investigators to visit sites like Saydnaya, but has yet to decide what form the investigation will take, and whether international bodies will have any role.
Mohammed Ibrahim, the former math teacher, visited the prison as a free man for the first time in February. He walked through the building, pointing out his old cell and the room where the initial torture session took place.
“I can hear the screams. I can hear the sound of the beatings,” he said. “It’s as if all the scenes are happening in front of me now.” At the same time, he said, visiting the prison helped him understand. “I was scared to sleep for the first few days after I came out. I thought it was all a dream and I would wake up back in Saydnaya,” he said. “Now I know it’s really over.”
The Wall Street Journal
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