Some shuffled out of the Syrian prison’s gray concrete corridors like zombies rising from a graveyard. Some sobbed as they reunited with long-unseen relatives. Some exulted, crying at newfound freedom from an institution whose brutality earned it the moniker “the human slaughterhouse.”
The fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad opened a Pandora’s Box of revelations about the cruelty of the country’s hated internal security services. Exhibit A is the Saydnaya prison, the military-run complex north of Damascus where tens of thousands of prisoners have been held, tortured, and executed over many years.
Between 2011 and 2018, more 30,000 detainees were executed or died of starvation, medical neglect, or from torture, according to estimates by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based war monitor.
An aerial photo shows people gathering at the Saydnaya prison near Damascus on December 9, 2024.
Saydnaya – whose name is sometimes spelled as Sednaya -- was decidedly a Syrian creation, said Philip Luther, head of research for Amnesty International, to jail and punish alleged Islamic extremists initially, and later, political prisoners or anyone perceived to be a threat to the regime.
Since Assad’s flight over the weekend, activists have flocked to the facility throwing its doors open, releasing people, some of whom reportedly have been held for decades, hammering down walls, and unearthing the horrifying details of the facility’s operations.
A man breaks the lock of a cell in the infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, on December 9.
“In short, I’m not aware that the design or operation of Saydnaya prison was guided or inspired by outside entities such as Iran or Russia,” Luther told RFE/RL. “The operation of the prison seems to have responded to the particular security objectives of the Syrian authorities.”
In the hours after the prison’s gates were breached, thousands of people flocked to the facility, many looking for news of relatives.
Other videos verified by RFE/RL showed people, some appearing to be rebels or insurgents, scouring through paper administrative files, while scores of men thronged corridors of the complex celebrating their release.
Other men appeared confused and befuddled inside the complex's first floor, apparently not understanding they had been freed.
"Don't be scared! The regime has fallen! Don't be scared! You are free!" says the narrator of another video verified by RFE/RL. "Leave, old man! Thank God you are safe! You are free!"
"I haven't had a biscuit in 9 years," another man said joyfully, as he also fed another inmate.
Rumors that the complex contained vast, subterranean cell blocks drew people with engineering and demolition equipment, to sledgehammer concrete walls. The White Helmets, a well-known humanitarian organization, brought in jackhammers to drill into floors.
The group issued a statement on December 9 saying that it had not discovered any “unopened or hidden areas in the facility.”
In 2017, the U.S. State Department publicly accused the Syrian government of building a crematorium at Saydnaya, and prison officials killing as many as 50 people day, mainly by hanging, the bodies being dumped in a mass grave. U.S. officials accused Syria of apparently conducting the killings with “unconditional support of Russia and Iran", though officials later qualified that there was no evidence that Russia or Iran were involved with the crematorium.
"This is from Saydnaya prison. This is the food that they're serving. "Those are the cells," one man narrates in another unverified video as he films the interior of the prison. "They feed them cabbage."
Prisoner survivors, relatives, and activists have reported that some inmates had been held in Saydnaya for years -- if not decades. One video that circulated widely but RFE/RL could not independently verify purported to show one man who was incapable of speaking and who had been held in the facility for 13 years.
The jubilation at Saydnaya was echoed elsewhere around Damascus and other cities, in scenes of other prisoners being released and exulting at their freedom.
“Ten years in prison! Ten years!” one newly freed prisoner yelled on December 8, as a crowd of men ran past the Ministry of Energy in Damascus.”
In one video that circulated widely on social media, an unnamed woman who purportedly spent years in various Syrian prisons is shown sobbing as she is reunited with her two young children.
Riyad Avlar, who spent 12 years inside the prison and is now the co-founder of the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and The Missing in Sednaya Prison, likened the facility to what he’s read about North Korea prisons.
“What people should understand is the Assad regime was like Hitler, like the Nazis. Absolutely as bad,” Avlar told RFE/RL.