Saydnaya Prison: Inside Assad’s ‘human slaughterhouse’
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Hello, Simon Jack here from Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast from the BBC World Service, exploring the minds, the motives and the money of some of the world's richest individuals. Did you know there's an easy way to get new episodes automatically? Whether it's Good Bad Billionaire or any of your other favourite BBC World Service podcasts, find the show on your podcast app and then just click follow or subscribe. And if you switch on notifications, you'll get a reminder too. It's that easy. Follow or subscribe now.

Hello, I'm Azdeh Mashiri. From the BBC World Service, this is The Global Story. Crowds gathered in the Syrian capital Damascus, celebrating the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the shocking end to his family's 50-year rule. Our country is free now. Since the start of the civil war, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been held in the former regime's secretive prisons.

My cousin, my son, my family, all. Prisons that came to represent the brutality of Assad's rule. Some detainees were executed. Others were held for years, until now. Today we look inside these prisons, exposing the worst of the Assad regime.

With me today is our Middle East editor, Sebastian Usher. Sebastian, hi. Hi. Now, Sebastian, as the rebels have been travelling through the country, gaining more territory, they've also been passing through Assad's prisons. What happens when they get there? I'm going to start with the rebels.

I mean, it was one of the patterns of the way that the Islamists led movement from Idlib in the northwest, this lightning advance, just took 10 days to topple. President Assad, first in Aleppo, then in Hama, then in Homs, each major city they went to, the first things that we would hear were that rebels were beginning to enter Homs.

the city, and then very shortly after that, the next thing that they would be broadcasting would be that they had liberated the central prison and that hundreds, in some cases thousands of people, had been freed and then pictures would start to come through of these prisoners, some of them held for years, coming out from the darkness into the light, some of them for the first time, as I say, for a very long time.

and then later reunions with family members. Some families had no idea whether their relatives were alive or dead. My son, son-in-law and my sisters have been detained for 10 years and we do not know anything. Highly emotional scenes and highly symbolic scenes. I mean, it's no accident that this is

the first thing that they did in virtually every city, as I say, and also other places where this vast network of secret prisons that were established under the two Assad's, Hafez Assad and his son Bashar, essentially there to, um,

to terrify the population, to tell them that if there would be any dissent from anyone in a police state, their fate would be to be disappeared. They might appear months later, they might appear years later, they might never appear again.

So this was really to show that that darkness in the regime was being opened up and that what the rebels were bringing was a new way, perhaps, that Syria could be run free from the worst excesses of repression that the Assad's

had exacted on the Syrian people for decades. And here from London, I've been watching these videos of these prisoners being released. Could you tell us who they are and what sorts of populations are we talking about? Because there are videos not just of men, but also of women. Yes, I mean, there are...

There were sections in these prisons where women were held. I mean, the vast majority were men, but women and also children would be born inside or they would go with their mothers. Again, some of the most affecting images that have been of these children or of young men, young women who had spent their lives essentially in this dark place.

And talking numbers, as I say, I mean, this is a system that goes back decades under Hafez al-Assad. And I mean, it characterized the repressive nature of his regime. When Bashar al-Assad, his son, took over for the first few years, people will remember, perhaps, that there were moves that he made to try and change that, to try and have a more modern, to have a more open version of Syria under Assad's rule.

rule. That changed in 2011 when the uprising began and since then it's estimated, and I say this is just since 2011, it's estimated that more than a hundred thousand people have been detained, have been held for some length of time in this network of prisons. Some of them have been held throughout, some for a year here, two years, three years,

Some given a warning, essentially, by being taken in. And I mean, I have met many Syrians, basically, who left Syria after the first or second time that they were taken into these prisons, their families telling them, look, this is a warning from the authorities. And if you don't take it seriously, you're

you are going to be in far worse trouble. You need to leave the country. There's no future for you here. You're talking about a warning. What were these prisoners? What were some of them taken in for? These are essentially political prisoners. These are, I mean, some people who had been political activists, who had

you know, put posters in the streets, had pamphlets asking, demanding, hoping for change, reform. The brief period under Bashar al-Assad in the early 2000s, when there was a breath of reform in Syria, and it was even encouraged from the top down, many of those people who were involved at that time, and we're talking about writers, artists, journalists,

you know, the whole gamut, many of those people, if they didn't leave when things began to turn, found themselves in prison for the very sentiments that they'd been expressing when there was this brief period, this Syrian spring, when such sentiments were permitted. So, you know, this could be simply someone saying something that was seen as critical

of the Assad's, it could be said in private, and then it could be passed on. I mean, again, this was part of the network of fear within the country that people were scared to speak, whether in private or public, because there were many informers. I mean, as I say, this was a secret police state. So it could be the most anodyne form of dissent to people who really did try to take on the Assad's.

Sebastian, these are obviously horrific scenes that you're describing and

And now, many of them, after going through these secret prisons, this torture, they're being released. What state are we finding them in? Well, some are in a state almost of catatonia, of, you know,

not being able barely to speak. I've seen videos, images of men in their 40s just crying, unable to speak. But many others, I mean, who were not held for such a long period are coming out and essentially with whatever belongings they have, they're marching off from the prison into an unknown future, hoping that what existed for them before they were put into the prisons is still there, their families, their

so they can be welcomed back into a life that they had been ripped away from. And families, of course, of those who were taken, in many cases never informed of what had actually happened to them, are hoping that as these prisons are opened up, their relatives will re-emerge, but many of them will find that they don't, that they died, that they will never return.

The BBC has been to visit one of these prisons, one where huge crowds have been gathering. It's called the Sayed Naya prison in Syria's capital, Damascus. It's the most secretive and notorious prison in the country, a symbol of Assad's oppression. Amnesty International described it as a human slaughterhouse. We find out why next.

Hello, Simon Jack here from Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast from the BBC World Service, exploring the minds, the motives and the money of some of the world's richest individuals. Did you know there's an easy way to get new episodes automatically? Whether it's Good Bad Billionaire or any of your other favourite BBC World Service podcasts, find the show on your podcast app and then just click follow or subscribe. And if you switch on notifications, you'll get a reminder too. It's that easy. Follow or subscribe now.

and never miss an episode.

With me is Sebastian Usher. So, Sebastian, on Monday, our colleagues at the BBC gained access to the most notorious prison in Syria. I'm about 30 kilometres outside of Damascus by one of the main prison complexes. It's called Sayyid Naya. And I can see two prisons in the distance on a hill. The one to the right is the main prison. There, HTS freed the inmates already. The one to the left is called the Red Prison. And there it's believed that some prisoners are still locked inside

in cells underground and there is a stream of people walking up the hill towards it. Families had come to see if they can find their missing loved ones. Munder Tarqi is looking for his brother-in-law.

I know my experience with the Syrian regime since more than 13 years. I've lost a lot of my friends in prisons. But I think we could. I don't know. We pray for that. We try. We are trying to find him everywhere. We're asking everyone. We came to here like everyone.

Call me the wounded mother, says this woman, because of the children she's lost. May God take revenge on Bashar. Our priority is our sons, who are the future of this country. Do you believe that we, the elderly, can do much now? We want our boys back. We want our country back too.

It feels like the whole world has been watching Seydnaya. What makes this prison different to the ones we've been talking about and especially concerning? I think to say different is probably not quite the way to look at this. I think it's that Seydnaya is seen as the worst example of

of this network of prisons across the country, in each city, in big towns, that this was the one where the most frightening stories emerged from. But it differed more, I think, in the sense of the numbers of people there, and the particular horrors that people recounted, if they were able to come out of there. But I mean, in terms of

the way that people were treated and the kind of people who were sent there, it doesn't differ so much from the prisons that were opened up in Homs, in Hama, in Aleppo. But it now will function, I think, as the key symbol of the horror that to many Syrians, the Assad regime father and son represented. So I think that's why it's important

having so much impact and also this sense that there is a deeper, darker level that we've seen in the past two or three days that people have been trying to reach. They believe there is

a closed-off area in Sednaya where people who have been treated in the worst of all possible ways, subjected to the worst treatment perhaps of any of those, the hundreds of thousands throughout the decades who have been imprisoned in Syria, that that's where it is. Tell me how and when we learnt about what specifically was going on there. Well, we've known what's been going on in these prisons for a long time. This isn't new. This isn't something that suddenly...

has been discovered. I mean, Syrians, you know, Sednaya, Tadmor, next to Palmyra. These are names that Syrians grew up with and feared. The wider world is perhaps learning more about it now, just as it's learning more about the whole country.

in a way, I mean, this is a conflict, remember, that was at the heart of the news for five or six years, going back a decade. The last few years, it's been almost forgotten about. So I think really what's been happening in the last couple of weeks is that everything about Syria has re-emerged. I mean, it's not as if

When people were fighting against the Assad regime back in 2011, 2012 and 2013, they weren't saying what they were fighting against and why they were doing it. And this, Sednaya, a prison like this, Tadmor, this network, as I say, this archipelago, this industrialized mechanism of fear and horror, this is what people were fighting against. This is what caused the uprising in 2011. It was...

A group of young Syrians in Dara who were taken in to the local prison and then returned to their families dead and mutilated. It was the final straw for people there and led to the first protests

an uprising in Daraa, which then spread across the whole of the country. This is at the heart of what has now finally come to an end. Can you tell us more about that? There was an image of a teenage boy, two images basically, one of him before he was taken in by the security forces and one of his mutilated body afterwards. And that face of his fresh body

undamaged face before he went in and mutilated remains that were returned to his family. That was the symbol that people rose up in Dera and then one city after another to say this is enough. You are killing our children. You've humiliated us for decades.

You've killed and tortured large numbers. And now you're coming for our children. To your point, even the wider world has known for some time about this. And there was a report by Amnesty International in 2017 saying,

that talked about more than a decade of torture and hangings. I wonder what the reaction was in the wider world at that point. There was someone who worked in the prison system who documented and logged and gathered the pictures, thousands of pictures, of the dead, of the executions, of the torture. It was essentially an atrocity exhibition. This was known. This was...

why the Syrians who rose up in Man Uprising became frustrated and angry by the sense that the world lost interest. That information was there. Those faces. It's not as if this was something that was rumored that maybe happened, maybe didn't happen, maybe people were exaggerating. There is huge, extensive documentation of this. And also, of course,

the people who went through it, I mean many, many people went through it and then came out after two years, three years, four years. I mean we were speaking to someone yesterday

who had spent three years in one of these prisons, not in Sednaia, but a similar prison, you know, was talking about how he was there with his cousin. He's saying the man, the person, you know, one of the people he loved most in the world. And in order to punish them, they were made to torture each other. And if they didn't torture each other, they would be executed. And, you know, this is not new. Documented by amnesty, documented by every human rights group you can imagine,

But there, beyond all that, in this library of photographs from the prisons themselves. So nobody in the wider world can say this is a surprise. No politicians can say this is a surprise. There was also one man named Omar who spoke to our colleagues on NewsHour today.

Talking about what day-to-day life was like in Sidnaya. I was, like all other political prisoners, tortured on a daily basis, starved. We were sitting in rooms where the guard would come sometimes and say, hey, you've got to choose one of you to be executed. So we as cellmates, we had to discuss between each other who is willing to die tomorrow.

You know, my cellmates were killed on a deadly basis and I was lucky to survive after three years because I have the most incredible, strong, fabulous, beautiful mother on this planet. She managed to smuggle me on my execution day. Talking about luck.

And then I made it out and I met my mom. I hugged her for the first time. It felt unique. I wonder when you hear a story like that, it reminds you, I'm sure, that this isn't happening in isolation. He isn't the only one to have gone through horror like that. The fact that the BBC, the fact that all sort of other media organizations have been able to speak to people with those stories in the last couple of days shows how right this was. I mean, some of the pictures, as I was talking about in this documentation,

that was provided by a sort of shadowy figure who had worked in the prisons, shows these emaciated figures, the figures that you associate when you think of the Holocaust in the 1940s, the Nazi Holocaust, that we've seen, we saw in Yugoslavia during the fighting there. In the 1990s, we've seen in many appalling situations where starvation occurred.

has essentially been used as a method of torture, which this is. And it's a way of dehumanizing people and reducing them to nothing. I really can't speak for the people who were there. I think they have to speak for themselves.

You know, we've described some of the horrors that they face, but on a daily basis, it would just be living in an utterly squalid place with no sense that you might ever get out, that you are completely cut off from the rest of the world. The same ex-prisoner we were talking to yesterday described this, essentially saying that one of the worst feelings that there was was

was of being totally abandoned, totally alone, that the world didn't care, that you just were disappeared. And this word disappeared, we've heard in other contexts too, in other places at other times. But I think it applies especially to this, that they were taken off the face of the earth. The US has said it's in touch with Turkey to track who is coming out of these prisons. Sebastian, what do you think they're worried about? Well, I mean, the fear of

You know, obviously we'll be there as there was in Iraq after the US-led invasion which toppled Saddam Hussein, that you had many, many people who were imprisoned during the era of Saddam Hussein, many of them, of course, being political prisoners, but...

but also being political prisoners who perhaps didn't think too highly of the US or the West either, jihadists. And I mean, for example, the man Abu Muhammad al-Jilani, who's led the offensive, which has toppled President Assad, he's one such prisoner. He was...

In Iraq, he was a prisoner there and he came out as a fully fledged jihadist. The past of the group HTS was very strongly jihadist, linked to ISIS, linked to Al-Qaeda. So the fear would be, as far as the U.S. is concerned, as far as Western countries are concerned, that there will be jihadists there.

who will come out and who will go and join potentially the remnants of ISIS that still exist inside the country, in Syria, in the remote desert areas.

area, there are several thousand, as far as estimates go at the moment, ISIS holdouts, and that they could be strengthened and bolstered, and that in this aftermath of the Assad's, it could give space for the most extreme elements within the country to have their moment again, and that some of those people who come out of

That might be what they're thinking of and that might be where they head. So I think that will be certainly a concern. The US has, but Turkey also. I mean, Turkey is very much deeply involved in Syria, has been for a long time. Turkey's main concern is over the Kurds in the northeast where they have...

their own kind of semi-autonomous region. Turkey has fought the Kurds there a number of times. It regards them as terrorists. So Turkey will have its own definition of the sort of people that it regards as undesirables and will want to know who they are and where they go when they come out of prison. So I think, yes, this is certainly...

And finally, Sebastian, you've described horrific scenes in these prisons. How much hope is there that those responsible for that kind of serious violence will be able to come out?

will be held accountable in any way? That's a, I mean, that is a very big and interesting question, isn't it? Because I mean, what my understanding is of how the rebel forces who've now taken over have been portraying the way that they want things to move forward is to try and avoid revenge, is to try and avoid bloodshed, bloodletting, and to

say that if there is going to be justice, it needs to be done through the court system. It needs to be done through the state. It shouldn't be done on a personal basis. It shouldn't degenerate into people taking revenge. It seems that that could be very difficult because, and there's no doubt that people who are involved in

in these prisons are known, obviously, and that they could face revenge. I would imagine that the people at the top arrive out of the country or have found some way to disassociate themselves. But yes, I mean, there will be a great appetite for those who were most deeply involved in this system to face justice and the harshest of justice. There's no doubt about that.

But the people at the very top, the people around President Assad, the people closest to him, the elite in the military, economically, politically, I think they're gone.

So I don't think that they are necessarily going to face that retribution inside the country. But the lower level officials who were involved, some of the people who perhaps feel that they were just pawns in what was going on, that they didn't decide, you know, that that was what they wished to do, but that's what they ended up doing. Whether they will face some kind of summary justice or whether they'll be

the ability, the capacity within Syria to deliver a proper sort of justice to those people, or whether they would just melt away and that the powers that now take over feel the best option is to let that go and to limit the amount of revenge, the amount of violence that will be meted out in response to these decades of horror. Sebastian, thanks for your time. We appreciate it. Thank you. Bye.

And thanks so much to you for listening. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at theglobalstory at bbc.com or you can send us a message or even a voice note on WhatsApp. Our number is plus 44 330 123 9480. You can find those details in our show notes. Wherever you're listening in the world, this has been The Global Story. Thanks for having us in your headphones. Bye for now.

Hello, Simon Jack here from Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast from the BBC World Service, exploring the minds, the motives and the money of some of the world's richest individuals. Did you know there's an easy way to get new episodes automatically? Whether it's Good Bad Billionaire or any of your other favourite BBC World Service podcasts, find the show on your podcast app and then just click follow or subscribe. And if you switch on notifications, you'll get a reminder too. It's that easy. Follow or subscribe now.

and never miss an episode.