Footage shows prisoners being released from Syria’s notorious Saydnaya military prison after rebels seized control of the country.
A video confirmed by AFP shows Syrians rushing to check if their relatives are among those released from Saydnaya, where thousands of opposition supporters are said to have been tortured and killed under the Assad regime.
Among those in the picture who were released are women, including a mother with a small child, who just came out of the cell when the rebels wanted to break the locks of other cells holding a number of women, clip posted by the Turkey-based Association of Detailed and The Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP).
“He (Assad) has fallen. Don’t be afraid,” said a voice in the video, seemingly trying to reassure the women that they are now safe.
As rebel forces have invaded Syria, they have freed prisoners from government prisons as they go.
Throughout the civil war, which began in 2011, government forces kept hundreds of thousands of people in camps, where human rights groups say torture was common.
On Saturday Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) said it had freed more than 3,500 prisoners from the Homs Military Prison when the group took over the city.
As they entered the capital early on Sunday, HTS announced “the end of the dictatorship era in Saydnaya prison”, which has become the name of the worst abuses of the Assad era.
In the 2022 report, ADMSP said Saydnaya “became a death camp” after the start of the civil war.
It is estimated that more than 30,000 prisoners were killed or died from torture, lack of medical care or starvation between 2011 and 2018. Citing accounts from several released prisoners, at least another 500 prisoners were killed between 2018 and 2021, it said.
In 2017, Amnesty International described Saydnaya as a “house of killing people”in a report that says the massacre was authorized at the highest levels of the Assad government.
At the time the government dismissed Amnesty’s claims as “baseless” and “untrue”, insisting that all executions in Syria followed due process.
A video cited by Reuters shows rebels shooting the lock on the gate of Saydnaya prison and using multiple guns to open the closed doors to the cells. Men poured into the corridors.
ADMSPOther images, which the Reuters news agency said were taken from the streets of Damascus, appear to show recently released prisoners running down the street.
In it, a person asks a passer-by what happened.
“We have overthrown the kingdom,” they replied, making the former prisoner laugh.
Of all the signs of the repressive nature of the Assad regime, the network of prisons where those who express any kind of opposition disappear cast a long and dark shadow.
In Saydnaya, torture, sexual abuse and mass murder were the fate of thousands. Many have never resurfaced, and their families often do not know for many years whether they are alive or dead.
One of those who survived this ordeal, Omar al-Shogre, told the BBC on Sunday about what he endured during the three years he was imprisoned as a child.
“I know the pain, I know the loneliness and the despair you have because the world let you suffer and did nothing about it,” he said.
“They forced my cousin whom I loved very much to torture me and they forced me to torture him. Otherwise we will both be killed.”
ADMSPThe Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that more than 130,000 people have been detained in these conditions since 2011. But the history of these deliberately terrifying institutions goes back a long way.
Even in neighboring Lebanon, the fear of disappearing into the Syrian abyss was rife during the many years Damascus was a powerful foreign power.
The deep hatred of the Assad regime – both father and son – that lived underground in Syria was due in large part to this industrialized system of torture, death and humiliation aimed at scaring the public into submission.
For that reason, the rebel groups in their lightning campaign through Syria to overthrow President Assad made sure that in each city they captured it to go to the central prison of each place and free the thousands held there.
The image of these people emerging from the darkness that has shrouded others for decades will become one of the defining images of the fall of the Assad regime.
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