Politics Syria's horror: The liberated Saidnaya military prison
In order to make the actually indescribable horror somehow tangible, ex-prisoners soon used a special nickname for the Saidnaya military prison in Syria: "slaughterhouse".
10.12.2024, 12:54
10.12.2024, 12:55
SDA
Like probably no other building in the country, it has become a symbol of the sheer horror of the times of the now overthrown government of Bashar al-Assad. Assad's officers are said to have tortured and killed people here and in other prisons on an "industrial scale".
Following the lightning offensive by the insurgents, led by the Islamist group Haiat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), thousands of people are now being released from Saidnaya. The civil defense forces of the White Helmets estimate that 20,000 to 50,000 prisoners were rescued from the building complex north of the capital Damascus in just one day. Up to 150,000 could have been imprisoned there - many are still missing.
The liberation has brought new details to light about the conditions in Saidnaya, where the White Helmets estimate that 50 to 100 people were executed every day and then burned in ovens.
Searching for a "spark of hope"
For relatives, a feverish search begins for clues about imprisoned or missing relatives they have not heard from for years or decades. Mohammed Abel Asis, who came to Damascus from Aleppo, was looking for his father in Saidnaja, for example. When the security forces arrested him in 2000, Mohammed was seven years old. "We searched for a spark of hope," he tells the German Press Agency, in vain.
Some of those who return home from prison empty-handed hold symbolic funerals and mourning ceremonies for their loved ones, who are probably lost forever, according to eyewitnesses.
Others walk like shadows of themselves into unexpected freedom, sometimes after decades in prison. The news channel Al Jazeera shows a man who cannot remember his own name after allegedly being severely tortured. Others who were imprisoned during the reign of Assad's father Hafez now learn that he died in 2000 and that his son Bashar - who has now been overthrown - took power at that time.
According to the British newspaper "Guardian", one of those freed is an ex-pilot who refused to bomb the city of Hama during an uprising against Hafez al-Assad in the 1980s - and who is now entering a completely different Syria after 43 years.
"Killings on an industrial scale"
The methods used by army officers and security authorities must have been so brutal that the lawyer and former UN chief prosecutor David Crane, who viewed torture images of the Syrian defector "Caesar", compared them to Nazi rule. In 2014, he spoke of "killings on an industrial scale".
According to the organization Amnesty International, there was a room in Saidnaya with 30 nooses to hang prisoners and, according to the US government, a crematorium next to the main building to burn bodies. White Helmets leader Raid al-Saleh also says he and his team have discovered bodies in ovens.
Before possibly dying in the complex, prisoners must have died countless other deaths. Survivors and former guards told Amnesty International about a human press known as the "flying carpet" and the "tire" method, in which victims were forced into a car tire with their heads between their knees and then beaten. Prisoners had been raped and beaten, others had become psychotic and died in their cell. Since the 1970s, there have been prisons in Syria where opposition activists have disappeared like black holes.
Arrested 30 years ago - liberated as a grandfather
The Assad government described the accusations as "unfounded" and false. Nevertheless, human rights activists estimate that between 2011 and 2018 alone, more than 30,000 prisoners in Saidnaya were either executed or died as a result of torture, denial of medical care or starvation. Civilian guards and relatives searching for allegedly hidden underground cells these days could make even more gruesome discoveries.
Those freed are struggling to find their feet in a new life. Suhail Hammuji was arrested more than 30 years ago and spent about half of that time in Saidnaja. "We lived hour by hour. The biggest worry was staying alive," he told dpa after returning to his home country of Lebanon. "When I went to prison, I had a ten-month-old son. Now, after my return, my son is married and I am a grandfather."
