“A Visit to Sednaya Prison: The Cold Heart of Syria’s Machinery of Murder”, Der Spiegel
Sednaya Prison near Damascus was the symbol of the Assad dictatorship. Now that the regime has been overthrown, thousands are coming here to search for their loved-ones. There isn’t much left to find.
By Christoph Reuter (Text) and Johanna Maria Fritz (Photos) in Damascus
17.12.2024
In Tall, the last town before the prison, located some 10 kilometers to the south, young men are standing at an intersection holding up signs: “Pull over to the left for Sednaya Prison.” The last two or three kilometers must be traveled on foot. It is an almost biblical scene: A long process of people, stretching for several kilometers, first approach the facility by road before then winding their way up the hill along a shortcut through yellow even scorched grass. They are vigilant, anxious to stay on the narrow pathway for fear of potential mines. And, says a lawyer who is returning from the prison with a pile of documents, they have been coming since Sunday morning. The surge has shown no signs of waning since then. Not even at night.
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 51/2024 (December 14th, 2024) of DER SPIEGEL.SPIEGEL International
In many other places around the country, millions of people are rejoicing over the end of fear, oppression and constant chicanery – and hoping for the return of normalcy after so many decades. Even as the days pass and the overthrow recedes into the recent past, the celebrations are continuing.
It is a euphoria born also of astonishment. The fact that Syria’s regime has now collapsed so suddenly and completely after having clung to power for so long with such an extreme system of brutality presents a unique opportunity. The old regime simply gave up. Something new can now take shape in a civilized fashion, even if the intentions of the country’s new rulers remain difficult to read. The opportunities, at least, have never been better.
But here on the narrow path up the hill to Sednaya, the atmosphere is heavy, filled with desperate hope tempered by fear and sadness. From 2011 until today, around 80,000 people disappeared throughout the country, abducted from their homes or from the street, while shopping or while demonstrating – never to be seen again. In the decades prior to that, during the rule of Hafez al-Assad, the dynasty’s found and Bashar’s father, more than 10,000 people disappeared. Sednaya was the icy heart of this machinery of fear on which the power of the Assads rested.
Now, family members are coming here – finally free and animated by reports of hundreds, even thousands of prisoners are being released from Sednaya and from uncountable other prisons – desperately hoping that many other prisoners are still waiting in subterranean cellblocks to finally be found and freed. Where, if not Sednaya?
In the Opaque Web of Secret Services
Nadya Saad from Damascus is breathing deeply as she stands on an embankment in front of the main, star-shaped structure, a round hub with three identical cellblocks jutting out from it. She has just spent several hours walking through the dimly lit, labyrinthine complex. “My son,” she says, “my only son.” Muayad, 16 at the time, headed out on August 29, 2013, to buy credit for his mobile phone at the kiosk around the corner. Neighbors, she says, saw a civilian vehicle pull up before men then jumped out, pulled her son inside and drove away. Still a schoolboy, Muayad was “against Assad, we were all against Assad. But he was careful. Since he was my only son.”
nadya Saad from Damascus. “He was my only son.” Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
She dared to begin asking around about him, going from one department to the next in the opaque web of secret services. She brought along to Sednaya a small bundle of tiny receipts from those visits, little slips of paper confirming that she had asked after her son Muayad. Such was the bureaucracy of the system. But they all turned her away with a shrug of the shoulders.
Military secret service, air force secret service, the Palestine Branch of state security – an extensive collection of deceptive names to disguise what the agencies really were: death squads that abducted people, dragging them from one prison to the next, torturing and raping both men and women. Or forcing prisoners to rape each other. After several months, or even years, they would murder those they had previously tortured. Or they would kill them right away. The corpses would vanish into mass graves dug in the desert or in the mountains.
An empty cellblock in Sednaya Prison Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
Cells like this one would hold 20 to 40 prisoners, sometimes even more. Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
“After six months, I suddenly received a call,” says Muayad’s half-brother Iyad, the son of a different mother. He too has come to Sednaya. “A voice said: ‘It’s me, Muayad, really.’ He sounded weak, but I recognized him. Then, the connection broke off.” The line remained open for two days, he says, and they kept trying to call back. “A lot of different men with coastal accents would answer and tell me that I must be mistaken and that there was no one by the name of Muayad there.”
Coastal accents: Alawites, men who belong to the same minority as the Assad clan and who occupied virtually all positions of military power in his empire. It was from their ranks that the torturers and executioners were recruited. The regime trusted them.
Since that winter in 2014, there has been no sign of life from Muayad. Instead, the family received call after call, along with messages from purported informants: For the equivalent of $500, $1,200, $600, they told Nadya, she could learn her son’s whereabouts. Or she could even buy his freedom. She paid and paid, but never received even a single sign of life. “At some point, I couldn’t do it anymore”: after she had spent all of her savings and borrowed all there was to borrow from relatives.
Extorted by the State
Now, she says, she can finally do something. The two of them hitchhiked here in the morning from Damascus. They wandered through the cells looking for graffiti, any sort of message scribbled onto the walls, and they joined the others in the hopes of finding access to the underground cellblocks that everyone was convinced were there. But they found nothing. Tomorrow, she says, they will be back.
Inside the structure, groups, individuals and couples poke their way through the corridors, their paths lit by their mobile phone screens or flashlights as they peer into the roughly 30-square-meter cells. Blankets, filthy foam mattresses and sweatpants can be seen lying in chaotic piles on the cement floors. The prisoners would be packed inside, with 20, 40, even more jammed into each cell.
Family members searching through Sednaya Prison Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
The wall of a cell that has been broken through Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
As soon as you stop, people begin telling their stories, every one of them a personal tragedy, sometimes more than one. Abdelfattah Khalifa is looking for his three brothers, kidnapped in 2013, 2015 and 2017 from Damascus: “In 2014, we heard rumors that the youngest had been sent to Sednaya. After that, we heard nothing more.” Ma’an Salman from the village of Rimi in the southeastern province of Suwayda, where the Druze minority lives, disappeared in 2012 when he was transporting diesel to Damascus. Wearing traditional Druze clothing, complete with crocheted caps, Salman’s father and cousin have come here to find him.
Young Juman Mohahi is looking for his father Wasim Mahmoud Mohahi, who was a well-known cleric in the Palestinian community in the Yarmouk district of Damascus. “When thugs in civilian clothing abducted him in 2012, they forced him to undress down to his underwear before taking him away. They pulled him through the streets to humiliate him. We paid lots of money and received an interrogation report and a photo in 2015. After that: nothing.” For many years, the extortion payments were a highly profitable business model for the country’s massive secret service apparatus. And sometimes, people really were set free. But not often.
Busra, an energetic young woman, tells the story of her two brothers, who were 17 and 28 at the time. They were selling cigarettes in a Damascus suburb when they disappeared in 2012. “Every time I asked about them at a secret service division, I was harassed. They would tell me that I should do something for my brothers. I hate them. These torturers and murderers. We should kill them all, hack them to pieces!” Many of those in the crowd gathered round speak up to contradict her. “No. We now have a state, or something like it. The murderers should be tried in court. We must not become like them.”
Fifteen-year-old Hala Kashkash has come with her older brother. Her father Nabid, she says, was arrested in 2011 at one of the very first peaceful demonstrations against Assad. “We never gave up. We were told that he had ended up in the ‘red building’ at Sednaya where the ‘terrorists’ are held” – imprisoned civilians, in other words. “In 2015, a secret service officer said that my father would be freed in exchange for a kilogram of gold. But we didn’t have that much.” She says she was two when her father disappeared. “I still have a couple of memories of him,” and she protects them like a precious treasure.
Clothes from former prisoners Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
Leftover shoes in Sednaya Prison Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
Mohammed Obeid, from the central Syrian city of Hama, says that he was even able to visit his brother Jamal in Sednaya on one occasion. Jamal had been arrested for deserting from the army, says Mohammed. “After hours of waiting, first at the outer gate and then again in front of an interior gate, his name was called. And I was then allowed inside. Jamal came, his head bent low and his hands behind his back as if they were bound.”
He didn’t even seem like a person, says Mohammed, more like an extremely fearful, docile creature. “I said: Hello, how wonderful to see you. He asked how our mother was doing and who had given birth since he had last seen them. I answered. That was it. A couple of minutes. Had we spoken about him, about his case, the guards would have kept me there.”
He never saw his brother again. There was, he said, a rumor going around at the time: If you received permission to visit a prisoner, it meant that his execution was imminent. Such visits, it was said, were intended to calm people and keep them in a state of fear. “That’s why some people never even went, despite having received permission.” He snorted: “But the prisoners were killed no matter what, whether they had been visited or not.” Why did he go? “Hope. Or clarity, at least.” He says not going would have been betrayal.
Gurgling Gasps of the Men Being Hanged Outside
Prisoners were forbidden from looking up as they were moved through the prison – as they were brought to be tortured or to be interrogated. Frequently, several prisoners were lined up one behind the other in the “train position,” heads bowed and holding onto the person in front of them, according to descriptions from prisoners released over the years. Nobody was allowed to speak, it always had to be completely silent. Which is why some prisoners were able to hear the gurgling gasps of the men being hanged outside. A report by the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison from 2022 estimates that fully 30,000 people were killed at the prison just in the years 2011 to 2018 alone.
In a side-yard, where those sentenced to death were hanged, two ropes are still swinging from above. On the floor of a room off to one side, there are a number of stinking ropes tied in hangman’s knots. A large hydraulic press stands in the corner, surrounded by people talking about what it might have been used for. To crush prisoners to death? Or to pulverize the corpses of the executed? The only comforting thing about the press is the thick layer of dust on the lower plate and the cobwebs between the steel struts. It seems not to have been used in quite some time. Which may have to do with the fact that even here, the power supply was anything but reliable.
A hydraulic press in Sednaya Prison. It isn’t clear what it might have been used for. Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
A rope still tied with a hangman’s knot. Between 2011 and 2018, some 30,000 people are thought to have been killed in the prison. Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
Hardly anyone stays in one place for long. They all just keep moving, searching helplessly for an entrance to the underground cellblocks, about which new rumors are constantly swirling. According to those rumors, there are three, five, perhaps even seven levels below-ground, including secret gates secured with electronic codes. A constant stream of new stories is bouncing around on social media, many of them completely invented – tales of newly discovered underground dungeons in Damascus and of prisoners suddenly being released from the depths. Men armed with picks, hammers and axes wander through the Sednaya corridors without pause. Where are the entrances?
On the second floor, a man suddenly begins pounding on the solid metal door in front of him with a sledgehammer. The banging and its echoes are deafening. The entrance must be behind the door, he screams. He raises the massive sledgehammer again and continues pounding.
But the gate only leads to the central hub where the three cellblocks converge. Several men are standing on the other side calling out to him: “There’s nothing here! We are here! It’s just a door!” They bang back from the other side with a screwdriver. But the man with the sledgehammer can’t hear them and keeps banging away, for another minute or two, his face red with exertion and fury, as if he could break open the secret and save the detainees if only he could swing hard enough.
Syrians in Sednaya Prison after it was liberated Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
Syrians looking for possible clues about the whereabouts of their family members. Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
He then stops, wordlessly rejoining the stream of people. It’s eerie. They refuse to give up. On another occasion, someone yells that he found something in the central tower. Hundreds run toward the voice, pushing through the narrow barred doors into the round, central hub. Armed men shoot into the air to control the crowd. After a few minutes, it becomes clear that it was just a cable shaft that had been pried open, too narrow even for a child to fit through. Most of the people wander off to continue their search, but one man collapses into a plastic chair. “I’m just going to wait here until they’ve found the tunnels,” he says.
Logic doesn’t have a chance here in the face of the almost mythic import of this place. Built in the 1980s as a symbol of absolute power, Sednaya Prison is now the incarnation of the evil that has now been overthrown. If the underground corridors could just be found, it would be a symbol of the old regime’s final defeat. And it must be defeated. Ergo, the underground cellblocks must exist. Somewhere.
A Panopticon of Hell
In the late Sunday afternoon light, there is a sudden explosion in the distance, with the bursting and rumbling of strong detonations coming ever closer, two of them even shaking this massive building. Israel’s air force is bombing the surroundings, the mushroom shaped clouds of dust and smoke rising from the ground.
Briefly shocked, many look outside to see if the Israeli warplanes intend to attack the prison itself and whether they should flee. But the explosions begin to ebb. A munitions depot belonging to Assad’s troops was apparently struck not too far away, and the sound and smoke of smaller follow-up explosions continue for half an hour.
In other places, Syrians were furious. Yesterday, they toppled the dictatorship and today, their country is being bombed by Israel, the only discernible international reaction. “Why now?” someone wants to know. “Why did they not destroy Assad’s army during all these years?” Others seemed shocked, but not surprised. “This is an evil, bad place,” someone mutters. As if this were the site of the apocalypse, where anything might happen.
The scenery outside augments this image of a panopticon of hell. There are fires everywhere: The bushfires lit in an attempt to detonate the suspected minefields around the prison in addition to the campfires of those planning to stay the night. The air is full of acrid smoke, billowing in the sky among the drifting remains of the clouds from the detonations.
Outside, diggers have excavated deep holes through the asphalt. Teams of White Helmets, the first responders that emerged early in the civil war in bombarded opposition cities, have arrived with heavy equipment. But they ultimately give up on Monday: “The search revealed no unopened or hidden areas within the facility.” All surviving prisoners were liberated on Sunday, they say. There were around 4,000 of them, according to a list of prisoners from November. All that is found below-ground is a primitive kitchen, a few storage rooms and a diesel tank. Behind it: nothing but rock.
Fires were set in the surroundings of Sednaya Prison in an effort to set off possible landmines. Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
Diggers were used to search for possible underground cellblocks at Sednaya. Nothing was found. Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
Evil had no secrets, at least not here. Those who were sent to Sednaya were not tortured in the hopes of getting anything out of them. That had already taken place in the myriad secret service departments. Many of those sent to Sednaya by the so-called field courts – those show trials that were frequently concluded after just a few minutes with no lawyer present – only got a one-way trip. Here, torture served to irreparably break prisoners, to keep them and their fellow prisoners in a constant state of fear. And, ultimately, to kill them.
“Everything went according to a precise system,” says a man who this system would have killed, but who it saved instead. His name is Imad al-Jamal, and he was the owner of a mobile phone store in Harasta, north of Damascus. He was abducted from a checkpoint on March 1, 2021, and brought to Sednaya after being tortured, but not interrogated, but the military police. Two months ago, he was transferred from Sednaya, Ward 5B, to the Tishrin military hospital in Damascus suffering from advanced tuberculosis. “I could no longer walk, no longer stand, so they threw me into the meat wagon, as we called the delivery trucks, and took me to the hospital.”
They didn’t just murder him. “It wasn’t my turn yet.” Once a month, he says, 45 prisoners would be chosen from among those who had been there the longest. “For three days, they were given nothing to eat or drink. After that, they were more compliant for hanging.” Others died in between times from the beatings. “I remember one of the guards,” he says. “Manhal. When we heard his voice in the corridor, some prisoners started vomiting or soiling themselves out of fear.”
On Sunday, Imad al-Jamal was freed and transferred to the Ibn al-Nafees Hospital –where he has since been besieged by family members of prisoners who show him photos of their relatives in the hopes he has news. He looks at each picture and shakes his head. “Everyone who was in Sednaya before 2017 is dead.” There is no underground cellblock, he says. “Why would there be? Enough space was created. Sednaya was Syria’s cemetery. In strict accordance with the system.”
Imad al-Jamal (right) in the hospital. He has been besieged by family members desperately looking for news about their loved-ones. Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
The Torturers Simply Left
When the dictatorship came to an abrupt end on the evening of Saturday, December 7, Sednaya was witness to a systemic collapse. The uniformed torturers and murders ceased their killing. But they also didn’t release anybody. They simply changed their clothes and took off, leaving behind their weapons, half-eaten sandwiches and even partly drunk glasses of tea. As if they no longer had anything to do with this place. They climbed into their private vehicles and drove off into the darkness.
Indeed, the only thing that the medical doctor Ashraf Liqayet and local activists in the nearby town of Tall noticed was a bit more traffic than usual. There was no convoy, no military vehicles, nothing conspicuous. “It simply dissolved,” says Liqayet, director of the city’s Zahra Hospital, where many of the prisoners were brought who were injured or too weakened. Those who couldn’t walk anymore – or who simply no longer knew who they were.
Dr. Liqayet in the Zahra Hospital Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
The first liberators from Tall reached the prison – still bathed in floodlights – at 3 a.m. Ahmed Suleiman followed them, a locksmith and an expert in electronic closure systems. “I expected to find coded gates, electronic locks and I brought along all of my equipment, my computer and scanner. But then I saw the door locks. It was technology from the 1970s. Steel bars and locks. We just took hammers and rocks and burst them open.” Some rebels who had come from the south also blew open locks with shots from their Kalashnikovs.
The prisoners stumbled out into the night – barefoot, emaciated, their heads shaved. Many of the imprisoned women initially didn’t dare come out of their cells. A sheikh and a lawyer from Tall arranged for buses to bring the liberated prisoners to the city and around 300 were checked into the city’s two hospitals. “Among them was a tuberculosis patient who was completely apathetic, silent, as though he had lost his mind,” Liqayet says. “But when we started treating him, he mumbled after a time that he is also a doctor and had been on the eve of his examinations. It was as though his consciousness had suddenly returned from far away.”
News about the liberated prisoners rapidly spread through social media along with images, and friends and family members immediately began traveling in from around the country on Sunday to pick up the men and the handful of women. Except for the few who were taken to hospitals in Damascus: “most of them to psychiatric wards.”
The crazy events of the immediate past still have the country in their grip, said Liqayet last Tuesday over an evening tea in the hospital cafeteria. “Even as I speak here with you, I can feel the old choking fear rising in my throat. It makes no sense, I know. But I can’t do anything about it.”
Family members of those who disappeared examine photos of dead bodies from Sednaya Prison. Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
The morgue in a nearby hospital Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
The same is true of the thousands of people desperately searching for the secret underground cellblocks. As a man of science, he says, he can only draw conclusions based on logic and on the evidence. “We found nothing. The White Helmets and the Red Cross with their diggers and stethoscopes found nothing. Furthermore, it would be impossible to feed dozens or hundreds of prisoners in an underground complex without electricity cables, water lines, sewer pipes and at least openings for food rations. But all the pipes end on the ground floor. There’s nothing below that.”
He then pauses briefly before telling a story that he had never related to an outsider before last week. It’s the same one told by all the others who have been wandering for days through Sednaya. Just that it’s his. “Nine years ago, my two nephews were on the way from Deraa in the south to their graduation exams in Damascus, 17 and 18 years old. They were dragged out of the car at a checkpoint. We never learned why. I have connections and I spent several weeks phoning around. After six months, I learned that they had been brought to Sednaya by the ‘Palestine Branch.’ After that: nothing.”
In 2017, he received an appointment in the notorious Tishrin military hospital, where several secret service agencies brought their bodies and where the mobile phone store owner suffering from tuberculosis had survived. “A friendly colonel turned on his computer, took a look, and said: oh, my condolences. The two had died. Heart failure. Like all of them. Always heart failure.”
Since Sunday, his sister has been driving to Sednaya every day from Qunaitra, located 110 kilometers to the south, to look for them, “a trace, a sign, a molecule of their existence. What am I supposed to tell her? That there is nothing under the cement?”
It has grown late. We should have been back in Damascus long ago, where the evening curfew is still in place. But the doctor refuses to leave the contradiction unresolved: “If I were to write a novel about Sednaya,” he says in parting, “it would be called ‘The Bastille.’ Like the famous prison in Paris during the revolution. And the Syrian Bastille would naturally have seven or, make it 12 basement levels where all those we love would still be alive.”
With reporting by Hani Alagbal