Beirut:

Saidnaya prison, north of the Syrian capital Damascus, has become a symbol of the Assad family’s inhumane abuses, especially since the country’s civil war began in 2011.

The prison complex was the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and enforced disappearances, epitomizing the atrocities of ousted President Bashar al-Assad.

When Syrian rebels swept into Damascus early last month after a lightning advance that toppled the Assad regime, they announced they had captured Saydnaya and freed its prisoners.

Some had been incarcerated there since the 1980s.

According to the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons (ADMSP) of Saidnaya Prison, the rebels freed more than 4,000 people.

Images of poor and emaciated prisoners, some of whom helped their comrades because they were unable to leave their cells, were circulated around the world.

Suddenly, the workings of the infamous prison were exposed.

The foreign ministers of France and Germany — to meet with Syria’s new rulers — visited the facility Friday along with members of Syria’s White Helmets emergency rescue group.

Crematorium

The prison was built in the 1980s under the ousted president’s father, Hafez al-Assad, and was initially intended for political prisoners, including members of Islamist groups and Kurdish activists.

But over the years, Saidnaya became a symbol of ruthless state control over the Syrian people.

In 2016, a UN commission found that “the Syrian government has committed murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture, imprisonment, enforced disappearance and other inhumane acts against humanity”, specifically But in Saidnaya.

The following year, Amnesty International documented thousands of executions there in a report titled “Human Slaughterhouse” and called it a policy of extermination.

Shortly after, the United States revealed the existence of a crematorium inside Saydnaya where the remains of thousands of murdered prisoners were cremated.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, reported in 2022 that about 30,000 people were imprisoned in Saydnaya, where many were tortured, and only 6,000 were released.

Mortuaries of salt

ADMSP believes that between 2011 and 2018, more than 30,000 prisoners were executed or died under torture or due to lack of medical care or food.

The group says former officials in Syria built salt boxes — rooms lined with salt used as makeshift morgues to make up for a lack of cold storage.

In 2022, ADMSP published a report describing these temporary salt mortuaries for the first time.

It said the first such chamber dates back to 2013, one of the bloodiest years of the Syrian civil war.

Many prisoners are officially considered missing, with their families never receiving death certificates unless they pay exorbitant bribes.

Foreign prisoners.

After the fall of Damascus last month, thousands of relatives of the missing flocked to Saidanaya in the hope that they might find their loved ones hiding in underground cells.

But Saidnaya is now empty, and White Helmets emergency workers have since called off search operations there, and no prisoners have been found.

The foreign ministry in Oman said last month that several foreigners were also imprisoned in Syria, including Jordanian Osama Bashir Hassan al-Batinah, who spent 38 years behind bars and suffered from “unconsciousness and memory loss”. “Victims” were found.

According to the Arab Organization for Human Rights in Jordan, 236 Jordanian citizens were imprisoned in Syrian prisons, most of them in Saydnaya.

Other foreigners freed include Sohail Hamawi from Lebanon, who returned home after 33 years of imprisonment in Syria, along with Saidnaya.

(Other than the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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