Footage has shown prisoners being freed from Syria’s most notorious military prison, Saydnaya, after rebels took control of the country.
Video verified by AFP showed Syrians rushing to see if their relatives were among those released from Saydnaya, where thousands of opposition supporters are said to have been tortured and executed under the Assad regime.
Among those released in the photo were women, including a mother with a young child, who appeared to leave their cell as insurgents tried to break the locks on other cells with dozens more women, in a clip submitted by the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and The Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP).
“He (Assad) has fallen. Don’t be afraid,” says a voice on the video, apparently trying to reassure the women that they were now safe.
As rebel forces have swept across Syria, they have freed prisoners from government prisons as they went.
Throughout the civil war, which began in 2011, government forces held hundreds of thousands of people in internment camps, where human rights groups say torture was common.
On Saturday, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) said it had freed more than 3,500 prisoners from the Homs military prison when the group took over the city.
Entering the capital hours later early Sunday, HTS announced an “end to the era of tyranny in Saydnaya prison,” which has become a byword for the darkest abuses of the Assad era.
In a 2022 report, ADMSP Saydnaya said “actually became a death camp” after the start of the civil war.
It is estimated that more than 30,000 prisoners had either been executed or died as a result of torture, lack of medical care or starvation between 2011 and 2018. Citing accounts from the few released prisoners, at least another 500 prisoners had been executed between 2018 and 2021. stood there.
In 2017 Amnesty International described Saydnaya as a “human slaughterhouse”in a report that claimed executions had been authorized at the highest levels of the Assad government.
The government at the time dismissed Amnesty’s claims as “baseless” and “without truth” and insisted that all executions in Syria followed due process.
Video cited by Reuters showed rebels shooting the lock outside Saydnaya prison’s gate and using more gunfire to open locked doors leading to cells. Men poured out into the corridors.
ADMSPOther footage, which the Reuters news agency says was taken on the streets of Damascus, appears to show recently freed prisoners running down the street.
In it, a passer-by is asked what happened.
“We overthrew the regime,” they reply, eliciting an excited laugh from the former prisoner.
Of all the symbols of the Assad regime’s repressive nature, the network of prisons in which those who expressed any form of dissent disappeared cast the longest and darkest shadow.
In Saydnaya, torture, sexual assault and mass execution were the fate of thousands. Many never resurfaced, and their families often did not know for years whether they were alive or dead.
One of those who survived the ordeal, Omar al-Shogre, told the BBC on Sunday about what he endured during three years of imprisonment as a teenager.
“I know the pain, I know the loneliness and also the hopelessness you feel because the world let you suffer and did nothing about it,” he said.
“They forced my cousin, whom I loved so much, to torture me, and they are forcing me to torture him. Otherwise, we would both be executed.”
ADMSPA Syrian human rights network estimates that more than 130,000 people have been detained in these conditions since 2011. But the history of these deliberately intimidating institutions goes back much further.
Even in neighboring Lebanon, the fear of disappearing into a Syrian dungeon was pervasive during the many years Damascus was the dominant foreign power.
The deep hatred of the Assad regime – both father and son – that simmered beneath the surface in Syria was largely due to this industrial mechanism of torture, death and humiliation aimed at scaring the population into submission.
For that reason, rebel factions in their blitz through Syria that toppled President Assad, in every city they captured, made sure to go to the central prison in each of them and release the thousands held there.
The image of these people emerging into the light from a darkness that had covered some for decades will be one of the defining images of the downfall of the Assad dynasty