Tyrant Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian death factory gives up its secrets
‘The worst atrocity of the 21st century’ was a former US diplomat’s description of the Assad regime’s brutally efficient punishment of opponents. How Sednaya prison became a mass-killing machine.
Inside Bashar al-Assad’s most-notorious death factory, the hangings had become routine. Once a month, around midnight, the guards at Sednaya 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.
In March 2023, the pace picked up dramatically, according to witnesses.
“They gathered 600 people and killed them in three days, about 200 each night,” said Abdel Moneim Al-Qaid, 37, a former rebel soldier arrested after handing himself in for what he thought was an amnesty deal.
That unreported mass killing, 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 those officials had miscalculated. In one of their first acts as they swept into Damascus on December 8, rebels stormed Sednaya prison and shot the locks off the doors, freeing the 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. The regime orchestrated the killing in a rarely seen bureaucratic manner. It kept meticulous records of the detainees’ transfer to the prison and other facilities, as well as court documents and death certificates of the 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 US ambassador-at-large for war crimes.
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 Sednaya, 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 Sednaya during the war included military deserters and defectors, rebel soldiers and peaceful activists. Former detainees interviewed for this report 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 the 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 such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and civil society organisations such as the Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre, the Syrian Emergency Task Force and the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison.
The world knew about Sednaya, but failed to stop the atrocities that took place inside.
“This prison is a symbol of shame for the whole world,” 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 who spent about a year in Sednaya.
When Abdel Moneim Al-Qaid visited the prison after liberation, it brought back memories of entering his cell for the first time.
Sednaya, known in official regime documents as the First Military Prison, was the largest of dozens of execution centres Assad set up to instil fear in Syrians and break the 2011 uprising and armed rebellion. “Lost in Sednaya” 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 Sednaya from the effects of 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.
“Sednaya 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. He was in Sednaya for four years.
Emad Al-Aqra spent eight years in prison after being arrested for speaking out in the media against the regime.
Othman Mohammed Al-Halbouni was arrested in 2011 for protesting against the Assad regime and spent more than eight years in prison, most of them in Sednaya. Ayman Rafiq Joumma spent about five years inside Assad’s jail hellhole.
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.
“Even though we know he ended up in Sednaya, 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, based on documents found after the fall of the Assad regime, that he was sent to Sednaya.
“We have to say, ‘May god have mercy on his soul’, but we always follow that with ‘whether he’s alive or dead’,” Kash said.
Built in the 1980s during the rule of Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, Sednaya 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 that year, huge throngs of Syrians surged into the streets 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 car 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 maths 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 of the rebels based in the south of the country. 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..k 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 at Mazzeh Air Base, where officers ordered him to sign a document confessing to killing government soldiers.
Refusing at first, Ibrahim 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 was not allowed to read.
“Maybe I signed my own execution order. I don’t know,” said Ibrahim, 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 40 other prisoners were driven to Sednaya.
There, the guards stripped and beat him. He was 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 dark. The toilet in the floor of the cell overflowed on to 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 regular cells.
Ibrahim spent five years in Sednaya, and could hear the regular executions from his cell.
What he experienced upon his arrival at Sednaya was a standard procedure, known among some former prisoners as the “welcome party”.
Some prisoners died during the initial beatings, which often involved being lashed with a plastic hosepipe 100 times on the legs. One detainee, a 35-year-old former rebel soldier named Bashar Mohammed Jamous, had his left foot amputated after the beating he received upon arrival at the prison.
The prisoners were forbidden from talking in anything more 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 unheated cells.
Prisoners said they were forced to drink their own urine, were sexually assaulted and constantly beaten by guards wielding metal rods and pipes. When they showered, one man recalled, the blood from the beatings would mix with the soap and water swirling on the floor.
The prisoners were often starved or deprived of 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 so a prisoner named Bassam Rahman drank from the toilet, causing him to die of disease days later.
His group started as 25 people, of whom eight survived. The others were bashed to death in front of them.
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 crew and assemble 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,” Nafieh said.
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.
They ran out of room at Najha. Nafieh and his crew were summoned to an empty plain 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 square metres to 40,000 between 2014 and 2019, according to satellite imagery. For years at Qutayfah, two to three trucks arrived weekly, sometimes bringing hundreds of bodies, some with nooses still around their necks.
Naifeh defected in 2017 and fled to Germany, where he later testified in a war crimes trial against a regime official, and before the US congress.
“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 plain 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 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.
Syrian authorities, scrambling to consolidate their fragile government, are 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 UN and independent investigators to visit sites like Sednaya, but has yet to decide what form the investigation will take, and whether international bodies will have any role.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Additional reporting: Hamza Bonduk, Ben Solomon and Belle Cushing
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