Syria’s infamous Sednaya prison was a ‘slaughterhouse’, ex-inmates say
Now the Assad dynasty has been toppled, its dungeons and torture chambers are giving up their secrets
03:45
Inmates freed from Syria’s most notorious prison after Assad regime falls
No other building in the war-torn country of Syria symbolises the sheer horror of the Assad family regime more, its former inmates say, than the Sednaya prison – so much so that they adopted a special nickname for it: slaughterhouse.
There officers from the now overthrown government of Bashar al-Assad are said to have tortured and killed on an “industrial scale”. Before Bashar, his father Hafez al-Assad imprisoned people there under harsh conditions, former prisoners say.
Now – after the lightning offensive by the insurgents, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – thousands of people are being released from Sednaya and are relaying the horrors they had to endure.
Civil defence workers from the White Helmets estimate that 20,000 to 50,000 prisoners were rescued from the building complex north of the capital Damascus in just one day. Up to 150,000 could have been imprisoned there – many are still missing.
With the liberation, new details have come to light about the conditions in Sednaya, where, according to estimates by the White Helmets, 50 to 100 people were probably executed every day and then burned in ovens.
