In Syria’s former ‘slaughterhouse,’ a desperate hunt for the disappeared

SEDNAYA PRISON, Syria - The grounds of Syria’s most notorious prison are strewn with scraps of paper, offering clues to the horrors meted out within its walls.

One order from 2020, signed by the head of the facility, refers in clinical language to an “administrative matter,” ordering a Syrian officer to “blindfold the detainees for the implementation of the aforementioned decision ... in complete secrecy.” An accompanying letter with the most vital details - including the identity of the detainees - was nowhere to be found.

Since the fall on Sunday morning of Bashar al-Assad - who presided for 24 years over the totalitarian police state he inherited from his father - desperate families have come to this dusty hill 20 miles north of Damascus, home to the Sednaya military prison, where rights groups say torture was inflicted on an industrial scale, and where thousands upon thousands of people simply disappeared. Executions here were so commonplace it became known to Syrians as the “slaughterhouse.”

As families roamed Sednaya’s sprawling geography Tuesday, poring over papers recovered from its offices and passing around nooses discovered in some of its cells, they were gripped by a gnawing fear that they would not learn the fate of their missing loved ones - that so much of what happened here may never be known.

“I’m coming every day, and every day more of my hopes are lost,” Hannan Odeh, 43, said of the search for her brother, who has been missing for the past decade.

At points, Sednaya held as many as 20,000 prisoners, Amnesty International has found. Few made it out alive; land mines in the surrounding countryside were waiting for those who tried to escape.

Of the 145,000 Syrians detained through September 2019 during the course of the country’s civil war, nearly 90 percent were taken by the government, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Of those, more than 80,000 vanished without a trace, with many believed to be have been held in Assad’s extensive network of prisons.

Sednaya towered over them all.

Osama Shalhom, 39, grew up in its shadow, in the nearby village of Talfita. As a child, “there was fear even passing it,” he remembered. “I wondered why it was so big.”

He joined the rebels in the early days of Syria’s civil war. As news spread Sunday of Assad’s downfall, and a helicopter was spotted taking off from the prison grounds - carrying the warden and his underlings, he guessed - Shalhom joined a group of men heading for the gates. A lone soldier was guarding it when they arrived, he said, and laid down his gun. Shalhom said he and the other men began shooting the locks off the cells.

There had been fears of mass executions here during the dying days of the regime. But when the men reached the central security room, with a wall of television screens streaming more than 400 feeds from across the facility, they saw there were prisoners still alive.

“Some couldn’t walk and had to be carried out in blankets,” Shalhom said Tuesday, standing in front of one of the iron doors he had forced open.

In the first cell he liberated, the prisoners cowered and faced the wall, mistaking him for their jailers. “They were so scared,” he said. Only some dared to turn when he shouted that they were free.

[Prisoners freed by Syrian rebels from Assad’s notorious dungeons celebrate in Damascus streets]

Thousands of Syrians have since streamed in from across the country. Some screamed with anger as they made their way through the cells on Tuesday; outside, they picked through what remained of the scattered papers, many of which have already by removed by those desperate for information.

A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross was on the scene, urging the patchwork of rebel forces who now control the prison to help preserve records. But it was a losing battle. “I’m taking them so they don’t get burned,” said one man, departing with a stack of papers under his arm.

Some in the crowd shouted out names, asking those who held the precious logbooks to scan them for any reference to their loved ones. “What year is it for? What year?” a woman screamed at a person holding one of the ledgers.

The wall of security monitors has been smashed. Shalhom doesn’t know if any of the footage has been preserved. Parts of administrative buildings, and their reams of paperwork, have been torched.

In what some former detainees said was Sednaya’s “red wing,” which held political prisoners and those accused of terrorism, there were putrid blankets on the stone-floored cells, the inmates’ only protection from the Syrian winter.

Outheima Ismail Hassan, 50, was searching for her five brothers. Like many of the missing, they were taken at checkpoints or from their homes in the early days of the civil war. She visited one in Sednaya the year he was arrested; she doesn’t know what happened to the others.

“I still have hope,” she said. She had checked hospitals and other prisons, clinging to the possibility that they had walked free and were looking for her, too. “Maybe they have lost their minds from being imprisoned and can’t get home,” she said.

Lawyer Ammar Abbara Mohammed said he had come to try to preserve the prison records, in the hope that some families could find closure. “There are people who lost their children,” he said. “They need to know they are dead.”

Mohammed spent five days in the red wing in 2015 after being accused of illegally exchanging money. He managed to get out by bribing a judge before he was convicted. Once a sentence was handed down, he said, a person’s fate was sealed.

“They tell you to remember your number and forget your name,” he recalled of his intake process for new inmates.

Inside the prison, some are still looking for undiscovered rooms, secret chambers rumored to be deep underground. There are gaping holes in the concrete yard outside, left by civil defense teams who spent two days digging for hidden floors. They found nothing.

Husni Karmo, 60, had given up. He had spent years asking for information about his four missing sons, and his questions had landed him in Sednaya. He was strung up on ropes and tortured, he said, and subjected to sexual assault.

He traveled from northern Idlib as soon as he heard the prison was opened, hoping finally for news of his sons, who he says were arrested for no other reason than the place of birth on their identification cards.

He knows that one of them is dead. He saw the face of 25-year-old Osama almost as soon as he opened what’s known as the Caesar photos - a cache of 53,000 images taken in Syria’s prisons and military hospitals and smuggled out by a defector. His teeth had been broken and his nose was bloodied, Karmo said, wiping away tears.

There was another photo of a man who looked like Anas, who was 22 when he disappeared. But his face was too disfigured to know for sure.

“I have no hope. Not for my sons, not for others,” he said. “Whoever didn’t already come out is dead.”