Syria’s Damascus The dream of a nation liberated from its long-standing tyrant was clouded Tuesday in the outskirts of the capital of Syria by the growing atrocities of the Assad regime.
In an attempt to find any sign of loved ones who they believed had vanished into their invisible depths, thousands of people were racing to the maze-like prisons.
The rugged, desolate hills west of Damascus are home to the most infamous gulag.The human slaughterhouse is the name given to the labyrinth of small, concrete cells that is Saydnaya Military Prison. Evidence of savage conditions and the desperation of Syrians looking for their loved ones were discovered by NBC News during their visit there on Tuesday.
Throughout the 50 years of the Assad family’s power, armed guards patrolled a network of institutions, including Saydnaya, to make sure anyone entering could not leave. According to rights organizations, whistleblowers, and international authorities, the dictatorship utilized the jails to imprison, torture, and murder tens of thousands of Syrians, some for voicing disapproval of the government or other false accusations.
Now that Bashar al-Assad and his henchmen have left, hundreds, if not thousands, of cars clog the tree-lined Saydnaya gate. Rumors of a secret wing holding famished captives have prompted people from all over Syria to check if their loved ones are still there.They arrived with their bare hands, pickaxes, and pry bars. At one time, a bulldozer arrived with the intention of destroying the jail’s structure in order to uncover a secret hoard of kidnappees.
Outside the structure itself, a massive, brutalist cube stood in a run-down, off-white gathering of largely men. Some of them yelled to find out whether anyone had seen their sons, brothers, or uncles who were thought to be in the regime’s custody. A self-appointed organizer among these men yelled out names from a dirty document that was reportedly found in one of the administrative rooms.
The fact that these papers were all over the floor worries international law specialists who have emphasized how crucial it is to have these records on file in case they are used as proof of these crimes.
These locations were not hidden; rather, they were well-known among Syrians, extensively covered by the news media, and documented by rights organizations. However, Tuesday presented a scene of fervent emotions, with people sobbing and yelling as they witnessed for the first time what was happening behind the scenes of their overthrown police state.Inside, there were concrete cells with white bars that could hold no more than four individuals, but it looked like dozens of people were packed in due to the debris. Civilians searching for clues in the deteriorating maze used their smartphone flashlights to illuminate piles of clothing and bedrolls.
According to one mom, her son had been absent for ten years. She claimed he was a nurse, but he was accused of being a militant.
A huge iron apparatus with two flat surfaces big enough to accommodate a prisoner and a mechanism to securely close them was located in one chamber. People here referred to it as the “execution press,” which was used to torture or crush prisoners to death.
Another room featured a large metal pole stretching from one wall to the other. Prisoners would apparently be handcuffed to this with their feet off the ground and beaten. Outside, a man held at least four nooses, one covered in blood, that he said were used to put people to death.
When theSyrian rebels seized Damascuson Sunday, they said they freed dozens of prisoners from Saydnaya, with video appearing to show women reluctant to leave their cells, so disbelieving were they that the tyrant who held them had been ousted.Rumors that the prison contained a secret underground red wing drew crowds of more families, as well as the White Helmets search and rescue organization, which dispatched its crews to look for such a hidden complex.
Around 1:30 a.m. local time (5:30 p.m. ET Monday), the White Helmets said there was no evidence of any hidden chamber or rooms, sharing the profound disappointment of the families of the thousands who remain missing and whose fates remain unknown.
Nevertheless, people were still using hand tools to knock through sections of floors and walls, presumably still looking for hatches or doors, when NBC News visited Tuesday.Saydnaya may be the most infamous but it is far from the only place where Assad andHafez Assad, his predecessor and father, visited the darkest horrors upon their own people. The dynasty built and operated a network of detention centers scattered across Syria, according to the human rights group Amnesty International.
The Human Rights Data Analysis Group, an independent scientific human rights organization based in San Francisco, has counted at least 17,723 people killed in Syrian custody from 2011 to 2015 around 300 every week almost certainly a vast undercount, it says.
Prisoners in Saydnaya are regularly tortured, usually through severe beatings and sexual violence, Amnesty International said in a landmark 2017 report, which drew on survivors accounts and other sources. They are denied adequate food, water, medicine, medical care and sanitation, which has led to the rampant spread of infection and disease.
Even during these torture sessions, total silence is enforced, it said, contributing to many detainees developing serious mental illnesses such as psychosis. All of this seemed designed to inflict maximal physical and psychological suffering. Their apparent goal is to humiliate, degrade, dehumanize and to destroy any sense of dignity or hope, it said.
Hafez Assad began this policy of systematic and secretive state violence in the 1980s, making an estimated 17,000 Syrians disappear between then and 2000, Amnesty said. But the government s violations against detainees have increased drastically in magnitude and severity since 2011, it added.That was the year Syrians began peacefully protesting against the regime as part of the younger Assad violently crushed the demonstrators, leading to the armed uprising that became the civil war.
The conflict has seen more than 350,000 deaths documented by the United Nations, which says this is certainly an undercount. Now, Syrians hope their country can transition to something that does not involve such loss nor the abuses meted out at Saydnaya.
Richard Engel and Gabe Joselow reported from Damascus and Alexander Smith from London.
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