News Mania Desk / Piyal Chatterjee / 9th December 2024
The Syrian civil defence group known as the White Helmets says it is looking into accusations from survivors of the country’s notorious Saydnaya jail that people are being held in covert underground cells. According to X, the group has sent five “specialised emergency teams” to the prison, who are being assisted by a guide familiar with the facility’s structure. Saydnaya is one of the jails that have been liberated since rebels took control of the country. Authorities in Damascus province stated that efforts to liberate detainees were underway, with some “almost choking to death” due to a lack of air.
The Damascus Countryside Governorate has issued a social media request to former troops and jail personnel in Bashar al-Assad’s administration to furnish rebel forces with the codes for electronic basement doors. They claim they are unable to open them in order to free “more than 100,000 detainees who can be seen on CCTV monitors”. A video of what appears to be attempts to get access to lower levels of the prison has circulated online and through news sites such as Al Jazeera. In it, a man is shown using a type of post to break down a lower wall, revealing a dark space below.
Other footage shows captives being released, including a young boy being kept beside his mother. He appears in a video of women being released provided by Turkey’s Association of Detainees and the Missing in Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP). “He (Assad) has fallen. “Don’t be scared,” a voice on the video adds, presumably reassuring the women that they are now secure. AFP-verified video showed Syrians flocking to see if their relatives had been released from Saydnaya, where thousands of opposition supporters are claimed to have been tortured and killed by the Assad administration. Rebel troops have surged through Syria, liberating captives from government facilities as they go.
On Saturday, the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) announced that it had freed more than 3,500 captives from Homs Military Prison as it gained control of the city. The group was founded in 2012 as the al-Nusra Front. It was once affiliated with al-Qaeda but cut links; however, the United States, the United Kingdom, and a number of other countries continue to regard it as a jihadist outfit. In 2016, the group adopted its current name, HTS, and later united with other rebel forces. It is the most important of the various opposition groups participating in this latest offensive.
According to an ADMSP assessment from 2022, Saydnaya “effectively became a death camp” upon the outbreak of the civil war. It claimed that between 2011 and 2018, around 30,000 detainees were executed or died as a result of torture, a lack of medical care, or malnutrition. According to allegations from a few liberated captives, at least another 500 detainees were executed between 2018 and 2021. In 2017, Amnesty International described Saydnaya as a “human slaughterhouse” in a report alleging that executions had been authorized at the highest levels of the Assad government. The government at the time denounced Amnesty’s assertions as “baseless” and “devoid of truth,” saying that all killings in Syria were carried out in accordance with due procedure.
The network of jails into which individuals voicing any form of opposition were detained casts the longest and deepest shadow of the Assad regime’s authoritarian nature. Thousands of people in Saydnaya were subjected to torture, sexual abuse, and mass execution. Many never returned, leaving their families to wonder whether they were still alive or dead for years.According to a Syrian human rights network, around 130,000 people have been detained under these conditions since 2011. However, the history of these deliberately horrific organizations stretches much further back. Even in neighboring Lebanon, the terror of being kidnapped and imprisoned in a Syrian dungeon persisted for many years while Damascus was the main foreign power.
As a result, in their fast push through Syria to depose President Assad, opposition forces made certain that in each city they conquered, they went to the central prison and freed the thousands of people detained. The picture of these people rising into the light after being cloaked in darkness for decades will be one of the defining images of the Assad dynasty’s downfall.
