In Syria, rebels liberate Sednaya prison from Assad’s sadistic grip

Old women and young girls wept as Syrian rebels liberated the Saydnaya Prison where thousands of Assad regime opponents were locked up, tortured and killed | WATCH

The Sedanya military prison has been liberated by rebels.

As Syrian rebels moved into the capital, Damascus, there was one building more than any other in their sights.

Saydnaya Prison, the infamous “human slaughterhouse” was where thousands of regime opponents had been locked up, tortured and killed from the earliest days of the 2011 uprising to the long brutal years of civil war.

Rebels filmed themselves as they entered Saydnaya, nestled incongruously in the hills north of Damascus.

Bashar al-Assad’s guards had only recently fled. “There are still women in the cells,” one rebel shouted as they entered the control room where screens showed surveillance camera footage of them breaking down cell doors and telling prisoners they were free.

“Don’t be scared, we are revolutionaries,” one called out. From one cell a blinking toddler emerged. He appeared to have been born in captivity.

Old women and young girls streamed out, some of them weeping, others looking dazed. Some screamed in fear, suspecting a ruse or that their moment had come to be led away for execution or torture. “Everyone to her home now,” ordered one rebel commander, though some struggled to believe him. “He’s gone, Bashar al-Assad is gone,” another explained. “You are free now, everyone go home.”

There seemed no end to the prisoners. Some held up fingers to show how long they had been imprisoned, others shouted the years. From the male wing, a group of freed prisoners, weeping, explained that this was the day they had been slated for execution.

One man from the neighbourhood of the prison filmed the scenes from his window. “There are still more coming out,” he said, incredulously. “How many people did that bastard jail?”

The reckoning will take time. In 2021, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that at least 100,000 people had been executed or killed in Assad’s prison network in the first ten years of the uprising. Of those, 30,000 perished in Saydnaya alone. For much of that period, the world was well aware of what was happening. The horrors of Assad’s gulag first emerged from a trove of photographs smuggled out by a regime defector codenamed Caesar in 2013.

The 6,786 victims that the photographs depicted were detainees of five intelligence agency branches in Assad’s sprawling torture network, whose dead bodies Caesar saw after they were sent to military hospitals in Damascus.

Caesar, a member of a military police forensic photography unit, smuggled more than 50,000 images from Assad’s prisons, testifying to the US Congress about what he had witnessed. In 2019 Congress passed into law the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, sanctioning Syrian leaders and committing the US to support international prosecution of those accused of human rights abuses. It was signed into law by the then president, Donald Trump.

For relatives of those depicted in Caesar’s smuggled photographs, these were painful confirmations of their worst fears. Thousands more with loved ones “disappeared” by the regime have spent another decade in the dark until cell doors were sprung open by the anti-Assad forces.

In Hama, a grey-bearded man stumbled from his cell to report his long-forgotten name and recount the decades he had spent in prison. He was arrested and incarcerated as a young teenager.

In Damascus, a veterinary student walked out of jail and into the glare of the cameras, where he stood trembling under a cloak, unable even to give his name.

Later, relatives saw his image in a video shared on social media. The student had disappeared 13 years ago, in the first blaze of the Syrian uprising. The video clip was the first evidence his family had seen that he was still alive.

Many of those released were jailed long before the 2011 uprising. Tal al-Mallohi, a young woman, was arrested in 2009 for a blog post. Raged Altatary, a military pilot, was jailed for 43 years after refusing orders to fire on protesters during the 1982 Hama rebellion. The massacre of between 10,000 and 25,000 people took place under orders from Assad’s father, Hafiz.

Surviving veterans of that uprising often warned their younger counterparts that the 2011 rebellion would go the same way and that Bashar al- Assad’s apparently mild demeanour hid a ruthlessness like his father’s.

The Times