The race to rescue those trapped in Syria’s ‘human slaughterhouse’

Warning: Graphic content

Footage emerging from the liberation of Bashar al-Assad’s most notorious prisons has revealed that the Syrian dictator used underground cells and body-crushing iron presses to detain and torture thousands of civilians.

Syrian rescue teams were still trying desperately to reach prisoners trapped in the underground labyrinth of jails deep inside the city of Sednaya on Monday.

A man holds up two ropes tied in the shape of nooses, found in the infamous Sednaya military prison.Credit: AP

Fleeting video clips taken by the first civilians and rebels to arrive at the prison – known locally as “the human slaughterhouse” – begin to show the horrors of the Assad regime’s interrogation and detention, where mass hangings, torture and sexual abuse are said to have taken place.

One clip shows a large iron press that is believed to have been used to break bones and execute prisoners, while endless red rope used for unknown torture methods lies discarded on the floor.

Another video shot through a small metal hatch shows an emaciated prisoner shackled to a metal bed inside one of the prison’s dark, empty rooms.

Other inmates were filmed screaming as they forced their limbs through the metal bars of their high-walled cells, desperate to be freed.

One man was seen dragging his broken body along the prison floor after being left unable to walk.

The race to save the last of the inmates continues as CCTV appears to have shown people being held in dungeons as deep as 30 metres underground and locked behind heavy electronic doors.

The Syrian civil defence group – known as the White Helmets – said they had deployed five specialised emergency teams to release remaining prisoners, including “wall-breaching specialists, iron door-opening crews, trained dog units and medical responders”.

Rescuers have appealed to former soldiers and prison workers from the Assad regime to share the codes that release the electronic doors.

Nobody has been found in the search so far, the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and The Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) said later. It claimed the prison could be empty.

People peer into a chamber at Sednaya prison.Credit: Getty Images

The secretive security prison, some 30 kilometres north of Syria’s capital city, Damascus, became a central component of Assad’s system of terror and a potent symbol of the regime’s brutality.

The prison is split into two buildings, with the “red building” mainly holding civilians and the “white building” typically housing officers and soldiers from the Syrian military.

Amnesty International estimates that 20,000 people were being held inside the complex at its peak – detained in near silence and usually transferred after spending months, or even years, locked up elsewhere.

“Sednaya is the end of life – the end of humanity,” a former guard told the human rights group in a 2017 report.

Among the thousands of prisoners finally set free on Sunday, a tiny three-year-old waddled out of his mother’s cell.

Those liberated also included a pilot jailed in 1981 for refusing orders to bomb the city of Hama, and a teenager who had spent his entire life in Sednaya. He was filmed saying the only word he knew – halap (“to Aleppo”).

Survivors described being kept in darkness while the stone floors were coated in blood and sweat. Blankets and clothes were confiscated should inmates dare to talk or sleep “without permission”, and relatives were forced to torture each other or face execution.

“The scenes I saw cannot be erased from my memory even until death,” Safi al-Yassin, a 49-year-old who spent a year inside Sednaya, told Al Jazeera after he was released from another prison in Aleppo.

The blacksmith said the treatment inside the facility was “indescribable and unwritable”, adding that he could not shake the image of “an elderly man covered in blood who later passed away”.

Across Syria, more than 136,000 people were detained before the rebel offensive, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

A defector from the Syrian military known only as “Caesor” smuggled more than 53,000 haunting photographs out of the country in 2013, including 6700 images of bone-thin, battered corpses.

He said the photos documented clear evidence of widespread torture, rampant disease and mass starvation inside the regime’s prisons.

Sednaya became the facility that was feared the most. The site “effectively became a death camp” once the country descended into civil war, according to a 2022 report by ADMSP.

The group estimated that more than 30,000 people died there either by execution, torture, a lack of medical care or starvation between 2011 and 2013. At least 500 more lost their lives between 2018 and 2021.

The US State Department alleged in 2017 that there was a crematorium at the site to dispose of bodies.

An Amnesty report from the same year detailed a series of atrocities inside the facility, such as mass hangings after military trials that rarely lasted more than three minutes, forced starvation as one of their modes of abuse, psychological manipulation and rape.

One detainee named Sameer told the rights group: “The beating was so intense. It was as if you had a nail and you were trying again and again to beat it into a rock. It was impossible, but they just kept going. I was wishing they would just cut off my legs instead of beating them any more.”

Other survivors told The New York Times that they were stuffed into tyres while they were beaten and would wake up naked in a freezing hallway after passing out. Another said he watched a teenager take 21 days to die after having been doused with fuel and set alight by interrogators.

Across the now rebel-held country, Syria braces for information on whether the more than 100,000 unaccounted-for detainees are still alive after disappearing into the system years ago.

The Telegraph, London

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.