the prison symbol of the repression and torture of the Al Assad regime

Just forty minutes north of Damascus, in Syria, the silhouette of the hill on which the Sednaya prison is located is not the same. After the fall of the Al Assad regime, the rebel forces managed to free this human slaughterhouse and the more than 8,000 people who were crammed into its cells. Three hidden floors and basements of true terror in which it is estimated that 30,000 and 50,000 people have lost their lives after being detained by the already fallen regime and where evidence is now being collected to take Al Assad and his people to international courts. Under the former Syrian regime, 130,000 people have disappeared.

It is difficult to explain the sensations felt when arriving at Al Assad’s slaughterhouse, where 30 hangings have been carried out daily for political reasons. Especially, taking into account that just a month before the visit of thirty Spanish media, the cells were full. Once the search for bodies was completed, studies have dated that in the last moments of the Al Assad regime, between 40 and 50 people were executed. The remains of the searches are palpable.

There was a rumor that there was an underground Sendaya where the worst of the tortures occurred or bodies were stored as a mass grave. The visible excavations throughout the premises have not yielded results and nothing has been found, beyond having evidence that those who died in the prisons were taken to common graves. Now it remains for these pending excavations to be duly documented, as approved by the new regime that promises a free and democratic Syria.

From the moment of their release, thousands of Syrian citizens traveled to the prison with the desire, more than certainty, to see if they would find their relatives in some fate. Camped at the foot of the building for several days while they searched through the few papers that Al Assad’s military did not burn, they were the first witnesses to verify the state in which thousands of Syrians have survived between beatings, torture and extreme cold that, Even under sunlight it becomes difficult, causing the death count to increase every night after a long hyperthermia.

Now there is none of that left. Only a team of white helmets collects evidence and completes the excavations inside and around the prison, searching for mass graves among numerous remains of fires with which Al Assad’s military burned papers, weapons and evidence of what was happening in the prison. The smell of gasoline is still palpable in the numerous places where the fires were started.

Precisely the smells are proof of the terror and infamy that was experienced inside Sednaya. Dirt and dust now mix in the prison with the tons of clothes that accumulate in the prison. This is how the head of the Syrian White Helmets, Ahmed Ekzayez, explains it to a group of Spanish journalists from inside one of the cells. “The prisoners left their clothes here because they did not shower and did not have any type of sanitation. The cells were designed for 60 people and there were up to 130,” he comments between the clothing challenges in a space of just over twenty square meters in the that the smell was difficult to breathe.

The cell was the second step in the route that prisoners followed for their reeducation in the previous regime. Before, on the ground floor, after arriving at the prison blindfolded and handcuffed, they were placed in cages where they waited for about six hours standing while the prison staff took their information. The next step before going to the cell was “the welcome party”: a beating with which to begin to put fear into the body in the human slaughterhouse that is its walls.

Apart from the beatings, there was more to introduce terror among his prisoners. Silicone bullets with which to scare the prisoners so that they would not know when their end was going to occur or electric cables with which to electrocute those who were detained for political or arbitrary reasons in this regard.

Even with the floor and walls full of holes where the Syrians searched for hidden cells, mass graves or torture rooms, it is not difficult to imagine what the prisoners sensed while blindfolded. They were prohibited from removing a blindfold that covered their eyes so as not to see the soldiers. If that bandage fell off or was removed, destiny was also death.

With little food, no possibility of washing, overcrowded and sheltered with what they could, the soldiers forced the prisoners to spend the day behind a line drawn in the middle of the cell, forcing them to remain squatting and always behind the line. The fate of not fulfilling these two premises was always the same, precisely for the one to whom the torture center was oriented: death.

After collecting testimonies, the blue helmets explained this Thursday that every morning a jailer entered each of the wings to ask something like “where are the cold cuts?” so that the prisoners could check who had survived the freezing night in the middle of nowhere either as a result of the cold or the torture. The bodies ended up being put between bars and were never heard from again. The remains of ropes with which the regime used to hang civilians persist in the place.

In that circuit, in which cases of cannibalism have been documented given the conditions that innocent Syrians faced for years, there remains one more stop of torture. All prisoners were moved at least once to one of the three wings of the prison and taken to the ground floor. There, a rectangular room gave way to fifteen individual cells into which three prisoners were placed with the same line on the floor. From there and in the rectangle that is drawn on the floor, the torture was committed, including a hydraulic iron with which to extract information, while the rest of the prisoners listened to the cries for help waiting for the moment to come when it was their turn to undergo torture. all kinds of atrocities.

It was not the only place of torture

It is not the only penitentiary center that is being worked on in Syria. The white helmets search for evidence and investigate in more centers. Majad, a 35-year-old Syrian citizen who has lived in Spain for 14 years, encountered this Thursday the thirty Spanish media that were documenting the Sednaya prison.

“I discovered when I arrived that I was here to transfer. They detained me without knowing why, I was 21 years old and I was a student. A soldier detained me and they brought me here, although until now I have not known that I was here. They took us in a car with my eyes covered, but when I arrived at the prison I was able to turn my head back and see something through a gap. When I arrived at the prison entrance, I recognized him. The first time I was detained was 62 days with my brother. It’s worse because they beat us together. I was imprisoned for weeks or days, they put us in and took us out,” he commented at times with a broken voice, remembering the torture to which he had been subjected.

“The Syrian population did not want to know what was happening here. No Syrian knew what happened here. Everything we said when we left that happened to us was something that no one believed because no one imagined that this could be happening here. My uncle was imprisoned in Sednaya for four years and he told us what they did here, we told him it was impossible because we didn’t live in other places where these things had happened. Until we entered, we lived it and now we know. He left 14 years ago and lives in Lebanon,” he explains. . A place where he also went, escaping through the desert for a month, dodging soldiers until crossing the border and ending up in Spain.

Food, very little; treatment, very bad. “Animals were treated better than people, it was a human slaughterhouse. There was no feeling or heart,” he explained in this regard, while confessing that “journalists are asking me here and the bad feelings are coming back to me.”

“In prison they tortured me, they beat me, they put me in a car tire and they started playing with me. All with very bad treatment and with my eyes blindfolded because if you see any of them they will kill you. If the blindfold falls off you have You have to cover your eyes because if they see that you have seen someone, that is where your life ends,” he added.

“The last time they put me in prison, the soldiers came to take people from the cells to clean the areas outside. One day I got dizzy because they put us in a room where there was an inch of blood on the floor in one room. area of ​​about fifty square meters. It was probably dead people and they made us go inside and put the blood in bags, at 21 years old,” explains Majad, who like so many Syrians have suffered family losses, originally from Zabadani, five kilometers from Lebanon. . A route, by the way, that took a month to travel while avoiding the military. “We arrived almost dead,” he says.

“Now you can go freely through all the cities without anyone telling you anything,” he explains after his temporary return to Syria, where he returned for a few days to see his family before returning to Zamora where he works as a computer scientist. There is still no question of returning, given the conditions that the country is still experiencing.

“My family’s life has changed a lot. For example, I asked them for a charger so I could charge my cell phone, they told me it was a dream because the electricity only comes one hour a day. Before they had to pay money to the soldiers to give the light in the house. There are people that I knew before I left, who were in good condition and now they are weak and can’t even walk,” he explains with hope in the changes that seem to be foreseen in Syria with a constitution, freedom for religious minorities. and women and free and fair elections that allow page of the black stain in the history of the country that has been Al Assad: “I believe that the new government is better than the previous one, if they do what they promise it will be the most square government for the Syrians,” he concludes.