A look inside Sednaya Prison and Syria’s mass execution machine.
CONTENT WARNING: This content contains descriptions of graphic violence and physical evidence of genocide and may be upsetting or offensive to some. Parental and associated discretion is advised.
On Tuesday, international war crimes prosecutor Stephen Rapp told Reuters that there is “no doubt” that a state-run “machinery of death” in Syria has killed more than 100,000 people since 2013. According to Rapp, and confirmed by satellite imagery taken by Reuters, fallen leader Bashar al-Assad created a system in which Syrian rebels were held in detention and tortured to death, then thrown into mass graves.
Rapp visited two mass grave sites in Qutayfah and Najha, both near Damascus, where bodies were delivered in a steady stream from Syrian detention sites and dumped into trenches with bulldozers.
While Syria is known for having at least 27 mass prisons, the most notorious is the Sednaya Prison, a military prison and death camp north of Damascus operated by Ba’athist Syria. The prison was used to hold thousands of prisoners, both civilian detainees and anti-government rebels as well as political prisoners. Instruments of torture were found inside this prison last week, including butcher rooms that contained heinous industrial carpentry devices and saws to remove body parts from living prisoners, and iron walls capable of crushing human beings.
“This is what a real genocide looks like,” said Joseph Braude of the Center for Peace Communications, on journalist Dan Senor’s ‘Call Me Back’ podcast released on Monday, Dec. 16. Braude is the author of four books on North Africa and the Middle East, and is a frequent contributor to English and Arabic newspapers and magazines. “The intent is in evidence, the machinery is there. The massive scale. The cheapening of the word ‘genocide,’ particularly over the past year and a half or so, and yet the meaning of the word needs to be restored,” Braude said. The Center for Peace Communications has captured exclusive footage from inside the infamous jail called Sednaya, with its underground dungeons, and recorded testimonies of those lucky enough to survive what many have called a human slaughterhouse. The footage was released by and in partnership with The Free Press.
Ahed Al Hendi, a guest on the same podcast, is a former Syrian political prisoner who was arrested for establishing a secular anti-regime student organization. “We always were blamed by fellow Palestinians who are telling us that ‘You are attacking a regime that is supporting resistance against Israel, and Israel is the main evil, the bête noire here. And now, ironically, after they saw what happened in Sednaya, many of them called and apologized, and said, ‘You were right.’”
“Ninety-six thousand people have disappeared through Syria’s vast network of secret prisons,” added Senor.
This full podcast is available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-spt2sR3SI.
“When you talk about this kind of organized killing by the state and its organs, we really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” Rapp told Reuters of his observations. “From the secret police who disappeared people from their streets and homes, to the jailers and interrogators who starved and tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who hid their bodies, thousands of people were working in this system of killing.”
“The world largely watched as Assad was committing his crimes against humanity with the help of Iran and Russia,” said American diplomat and author Dennis Ross on X. It is remarkable that those who want to accuse Israel of genocide remain so silent about Assad.
As one Qutayfah resident—who did not want to be named for fear of retribution—noted: “This is the place of horrors.”
Of the Sednaya prison, images have shown the compound segmented into three structures atop a hill and visibly shaped with three wings, in which inmates were forced to choose between dying themselves or killing their loved ones and tortured in unimaginable ways. In 2017, the U.S. State Department alleged that Sednaya also contained a crematorium to burn the bodies of dead inmates. Until last week, the extent was unknown.
A video circulated on social media on Dec. 16 of a Syrian woman shouting at U.N. employees who were disembarking their cars that had just arrived to inspect the Sednaya facility. “Now you’re checking on us? Get out!” After neglecting the suffering of Syrians for decades, the U.N. is only now inspecting the torture prisons and mass graves.
Sednaya has become the most notorious of Assad’s prisons and a symbol of assault and mass executions. Human rights organizations have identified over 27 similar prisons and detention centers run by Assad’s government, each participating in extreme torture of inmates.
Satellite images of the region have shown trench digging for mass grave sites as early as 2012, continuing up until 2022. Locals suspect that many anti-Assad rebels who have gone missing were taken to detention sites and that their bodies may be in those mass graves.
Omer Hujeirta, a former anti-Assad protest leader in Najha, told Reuters that many of his family members were taken by the government, including two sons and four brothers—and is demanding accountability through a clear judicial process.
“We want our rights, according to Syrian law, and not by some behind-the-scenes process. These massacres and slaughterhouses of death are unacceptable to anyone with humanity,” he said. “We want reputable organizations to come so this isn’t covered up.”
