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2024-12-17 | WebClipping | 2024-12-17 | https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/hope-and-despair-at-assads-human-slaughterhouse/ | true |
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Hope and Despair at Assad's 'Human Slaughterhouse'
Crowning the top of a small hill, surrounded by the rocky outcroppings of the Anti-Lebanon mountain range about 20 miles north of Damascus, Sednaya Prison has attracted thousands of Syrians since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime on Dec. 8.
For more than half a century, many of the secrets of the regime’s inner workings remained impenetrable. Sednaya was one of the best kept.
A woman stands outside Sednaya Prison, looking toward the entrance. (Cian Ward)
“Until last Sunday, people could drive by the prison, but they could never take the road that goes off to our right,” our guide Labib explains. At the bend, an army checkpoint blocks the road leading to what Amnesty International once called the “human slaughterhouse.”
“For those who passed this checkpoint, there was never any possibility of coming out,” he says.
Now, a gigantic sign displays the flag of the revolution, on which is written in capital letters, “Free Syria.” At the entrance, bearded gunmen let people through with a lazy wave.
A few hours after Assad fled to Russia, the fighters of the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham entered the Sednaya complex. There was little struggle, as abandoned tanks littered the sides of the road. All those responsible for the horrors inside had already fled. The rebels freed several hundred prisoners, some of whom believed they were still under the yoke of Hafez al-Assad, the newly deposed dictator’s father, who died in 2000.
A freed inmate is guided out of Sednaya Prison by a group of men. (Cian Ward)
Scenes of jubilation showing the reunion of prisoners with their families have since flooded social media. Those who made the journey to Sednaya on Tuesday were dreaming of such a reunion. Very few were destined to find it.
It will probably never be known how many people passed through that one-way checkpoint in the 38 years since the prison was built. One document we found detailed that the prison was holding 5,539 prisoners in July 2020. Those on the ground claimed the real number was higher. One said there was space for 20,000 people. Others alleged thousands more were held in secret underground cells, a claim refuted by the Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the “White Helmets,” who took part in rescue efforts.
Every Syrian knew of Sednaya. A neighbor, a cousin or a brother: All those we spoke to before we arrived at the site itself knew someone who had been taken by the regime, someone who could still be waiting for their loved ones to rescue them.
A man points to a photo of his missing relative. (Cian Ward)
What is also certain is the scale of the complex: three floors across three vast wings, containing a labyrinthine network of dark corridors and barred rooms. Squeezing past the constant flow of people, we stumbled upon rows of cells with their heavy metal doors hanging open.
Shut off from the world, with no sunlight except a thin crack at the bottom of one wall, each cell became the universe for those detained in it, sometimes numbering in the dozens.
The belongings of those detainees are still sitting in the cells. Blankets, clothes and the detritus of the despairing are piled everywhere. Half-eaten bits of food, presumably abandoned at the moment of liberation, are scattered throughout. In one cell, hairbands and women’s clothes indicate who had been housed inside.
Inside a cell at Sednaya Prison, a pile of clothes and bedding have been left behind by liberated detainees. (Cian Ward)
Standing in the cell, alongside his wife, is Ahmad al-Muhamra. “I was a prisoner here once,” he says. “It was a life of misery.”
“There were so many of us in here that we would have to sleep on one arm and turn over periodically,” he says, recounting his imprisonment. “We had to sit in silence all the time. If the guards heard us speaking, they would drag us out and beat us. We had to cover our eyes when they opened the door or they would drag us out and torture us. We were prohibited from speaking to them, we could only communicate with them through signs.”
A cell at Sednaya Prison contains belongings left by detainees when they were liberated. (Cian Ward)
“We had to sit up straight all day. We couldn’t sleep, we couldn’t relax. Each room had a camera where they watched us constantly,” he adds.
He shows us his scars: on his chin from beatings, on his neck, on his wrists when he tried to kill himself. “There were several others who tried just like me. None of us could see a way out of here. I was terrified to continue living, I just wanted it all to stop.”
Ahmad was imprisoned with his brother in 2016. While he managed to get out, his brother wasn’t so fortunate. He paid someone from the Ministry of Justice 1 million Syrian pounds (around $2,000 at the time) for information on what happened to his brother, but they never managed to help him. He came back to Sednaya to look for him but, like so many others, he has had no luck.
Waji al-Said was one of the first fighters to enter the prison. He, too, is looking for his brother, Ali. A few years ago, he also tried to bribe the guards. “I sold my house and my farm, hoping to put together the money to get some information and get him out of there, but I didn’t get anything,” he laments, waving a rope with a hangman’s knot found in the prison.
“It was almost impossible to know if the person taken from you is in Sednaya,” says Labib. “You could try to bribe someone who worked in the prison, but if the regime learned that you are looking for a loved one, then they would torture or kill them.”
A group of men take photographs of papers they found on the ground, hoping to find the names of their missing loved ones. (Cian Ward)
In a corridor a little further on, a man lifts a manhole cover. There are several of them strewn across the floor amid the debris, which is constantly creaking under the weight of incessant passage. “I’m looking to see if there’s a tunnel underneath,” explains Ahmad Awad, whose brother disappeared in 2014.
Regularly, crowds gather around a new crack discovered in a wall or in the ground. Rumors circulate based on testimonies from former inmates. There are said to be several hundred prisoners still locked away in secret basements, although rescue workers have found no evidence of them.
Ahmad has believed this ever since he discovered the hell of Sednaya with his own eyes. “Guantanamo [Bay] is nothing compared to this. It is impossible that those who were ruling Syria are human beings,” he says, shaking his head in annoyance, as cries are heard in the courtyard next door.
A man holds up a list with the names of senior officers working in the prison. On several other occasions, men call out names in front of an attentive crowd, though it’s difficult to distinguish whether the names are those of prisoners or Sednaya officers.
A man shouts out the names of senior officers written on a register found inside Sednaya Prison. (Aubin Eymard)
Each time, the crowd grows agitated. Then, just a few minutes later, the atmosphere subsides. In the liberated prison, feelings overlap. Between hope and despair, everyone is searching for truth and justice.
It’s impossible for us to collect the testimony of a loved one who disappeared without immediately being surrounded by dozens of other people asking us to take pictures of their missing relatives. After decades of enforced silence, they all want to cry out their distress to anyone who will listen.
Almost everyone. A woman in a pink veil is calmly rummaging through a notebook filled with names written in pen. Taghrid hesitates at first to give us her name, before agreeing. “Even if Bashar is gone, we’re not safe, people could be following us,” she says, her gaze shifting.
Nevertheless, she shares the exact day her son Tariq disappeared. “It was the 17th of January 2013,” she tells us. “He had just finished his exams, he was walking home with a friend, and he never came home. Neither did the friend, they are both still missing.”
“They were still in school,” she mumbles while clutching a pad of crumpled papers, official documents detailing the names of those stolen by the Assad regime from their loved ones.
As we thank her for her testimony and turn to enter the building itself, a stream of people follow, begging us to photograph pictures of their loved ones. They hope that if we share their information with the world, they might have a chance. We stop for a while to take their photographs, but people keep coming and soon we have to move on. We cannot help them all.
In Sednaya, documents such as those Taghrid held would have been some of the regime’s most closely guarded secrets. Now, they litter the floors of the complex like a carpet of horrors, muddied underfoot by the thousands who have poured in to look for their lost loved ones, whipped into the air as confetti among the passing crowds.
Small groups gather around logbooks, frantically tearing through the pages, photographing them to share with those who have not been able to make the journey. Each individual is searching for a name; some search for several.
At one point, a group of young men find a locked door. In unison, they begin to furiously kick, and after a few blows, the hinges buckle and the wood splinters. They pour into the room, hoping to find a clue in their desperate search.
They don’t. In a few moments, they have torn the room apart, but find only manifests, logbooks and inventories. “Look,” one man mutters, placing his finger on a scribbled entry in the inventory. “An order for 5,000 kilos of flour.”
“This is useless for us,” he says, as they quickly file out of the room to continue their search elsewhere. Yet it is in these mundane papers that the sophistication of terror is clear.
After the liberation of Auschwitz, Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil and the sadism of the Nazi bureaucracy that was required to facilitate such depravities. Sednaya is perhaps the darkest monument to the depravity of the Assad regime, but it is not the only one. The Assad family operated a whole network of prisons across Syria for 54 years. Eight are known publicly. Many more may likely exist. How many are simply unknown?
In the image of their Russian political benefactors, the Assad family have remade what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called the “Gulag Archipelago,” a network of bloody islands, cut off from the world, where the regime is free to terrorize and destroy its own people at will.
At Sednaya, many express fear that those still held in that secret network were abandoned by their tormentors, left to die a slow death, never knowing about the seismic events that caused their abandonment. Rumors are also swirling of secret prisons located in unknown places.
One Syrian woman from Sweida told us: “When I studied at Damascus University, students used to hear strange sounds in the laboratory in the basement. They claimed they came from a jinni. After Assad’s fall, it was revealed there was a prison beneath the basement. Those were the sounds of detainees being tortured.”
She was sent this news on Facebook. We have not been able to verify this information, but it is one of many similar rumors circulating in Syria.
With the fall of Assad, the country is experiencing the forces of hope and despair. At Sednaya, although official rescue efforts have now ceased, with little evidence uncovered about the mysterious floors supposedly existing underneath the prison, the search continues.
One young boy circles the prison’s bakery, banging a long pole on the ground and hoping to find a hollow ring, which could denote a possible chamber underneath. At the back of the prison, searchers, who had unearthed a small underground cell containing a bed frame, attempt to dig underneath it but find nothing.
At what point will they give up? At what point can you give up on the hope of finding your lost loved ones? Many have held onto that hope for years, some for decades. What more are a few days?
Additional reporting by Labib Sanadiki.
“Spotlight” is a newsletter about underreported cultural trends and news from around the world, emailed to subscribers twice a week. Sign up here.
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