Illustration photo by Jaimee Lee Haddad/L'Orient Today
A man with an automatic rifle gets down on one knee and lifts the barrel. He fires once at the heavy-duty lock, which he had been knocking away at, and it finally breaks. He pulls the bolt back and opens the door and dozens of men burst out, their arms raised in exaltation. Some run, some limp, some can't walk at all.
Outside their windowless cell, the hallway is full of men who are hugging and weeping, and many who are speechless, wide-eyed and confused, asking why they have been freed. The man filming the video — verified by L’Orient Today — tells them that Bashar al-Assad has left Syria. In Sednaya Military Prison, where the guards enforced near-total silence, where prisoners shared their stories in darkness and in whispers, the halls now echo with praise.
Out on the street, streams of men are running, leaving behind what was known as 'The Slaughterhouse.' Over the years, countless testimonies from former detainees and officials have been gathered by human rights groups, describing routine beatings, rape, people being left with only toilet water to drink, told to kill their fellow inmates or be killed themselves, and guards killing prisoners and leaving the bodies among their cellmates.
However, the images of Sednaya, located 30 kilometers north of Damascus, are some of the first ever seen. They come as Syrian opposition forces have swept through most of the country, toppling the over-50-year rule of the Assad family with seemingly little resistance from Syrian forces.
The prison, established in 1987 by Bashar’s father, founder of the regime and former president Hafez al-Assad, has three wings and two detention centers. One is known as the White Building, which mostly held Syrian army personnel accused of violating military law, and the other is known as the Red Building, which, since the 2011 revolution, held mostly civilians.
A 2017 Amnesty International report estimated that in the first four years of the Syrian Civil War, up to 13,000 people were killed in extrajudicial hangings at Sednaya alone, killings that, according to a Washington Post article, dramatically increased in around 2017 amid Assad's campaign to “clear the deck” of political detainees. In 2022, the Association of Detainees and the Missing of Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) released a report estimating that around 30,500 people had been killed at Sednaya since 2011, either by execution, torture, or neglect.
It's from the Red Building that most of the prison's horror stories emerge, and according to detainees and officers' testimonies, the Red Building also extends several levels underground. When Syrian rebels took control of the prison, they entered what appears to be a central security office. A row of screens displays footage from dozens of CCTV cameras, still running live. Most show empty cells or are blacked out, but in some, prisoners can still be seen sitting or pacing in their cells.
Videos from inside the prison show rebel fighters bent over a blueprint, trying to figure out how to access the rumored underground cells and reach these remaining prisoners. From the outside, people are breaking down walls with metal pipes and stones. In one video verified by L’Orient Today, a man makes a hole just wide enough to stick his head in and yell "Anyone? Is anyone here?" Reports circulated all day Monday that there could be hundreds, maybe thousands still trapped inside.
Shortly after midnight, the White Helmets, Syria's civil defense teams, who had been searching Sednaya with specialized teams and dog units, announced "the conclusion of search operations for possible remaining detainees ... The search did not uncover any unopened or hidden areas within the facility." However, White Helmets director Raed al-Saleh told Al Jazeera on Dec. 9 that rescue teams had discovered an unknown number of bodies in the prison's crematorium.
On Dec. 8, 2024, the day Sednaya's doors were broken open, a video aired on Al Jazeera of four men, their arms around each other's shoulders. They'd just barely survived; two of them were meant to be executed that morning, along with 54 other detainees.
Sednaya is believed to have at one point held up to 20,000 people in overcrowded cells — sometimes 15 people in a room of less than four square meters — a number that fluctuated with the waves of arrests and executions that were sometimes carried out on a daily basis, Saleh said. Reports came out in 2017 that the Syrian government had built a crematorium at Sednaya and satellite imagery from 2018 showed courtyards littered with bodies. Those not condemned to death by hanging were condemned to death through torture, disease, malnutrition and regular beatings.
As mentioned in the testimonies of many Syrians both from outside and within prison walls, the mass detentions under the Assad government often involved entire families being put behind bars. Another Post article from the day Sednaya was captured features testimony from a woman whose sister Rania's husband had been arrested by military intelligence. They soon returned and also arrested Rania — a dentist and Syria’s two-time national chess champion — and her six children, ages two to 14.
People walk as the search for prisoners at Sednaya prison takes place, after rebels seized the capital and announced that they have ousted President Bashar al-Assad in Sednaya, Syria, Dec. 9, 2024. (Credit: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters)
Like Rania’s sister, thousands of Syrians still have no news of their loved ones, and the roads leading up to Sednaya are packed with cars rushing to the prison, hoping to see a familiar but long-lost face. Soon the cars would be left behind, with people finishing the journey by foot, desperate for answers. By August 2024, according to a report from the Syrian Network for Human Rights, over 96,000 of all those who had been detained by the Assad regime since 2011 were still missing and unaccounted for, including almost 6,000 women and over 2,000 children.
In a video verified by The Guardian, a man opens the door to a prison cell holding more than a dozen women and girls. They hang back. They think that if they leave, Assad's men will capture them again and they will be punished. Toddlers, likely born while their mothers were imprisoned, stand in the cell doorways, about to see the outside world for the first time.