INSIDE ASSAD’S SLAUGHTERHOUSE
Barbarity DISAPPEARANCES Torture Extermination Electric shocks INHUMANE TREATMENT SECRET EXTRAJUDICIAL EXECUTIONS
THE BODIES OF THOSE WHO ARE KILLED AT SAYDNAYA ARE TAKEN AWAY BY THE TRUCKLOAD AND BURIED IN MASS GRAVES. IT IS INCONCEIVABLE THAT THESE LARGE-SCALE AND SYSTEMATIC PRACTICES HAVE NOT BEEN AUTHORIZED BY THE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT.” — AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
BEIRUT • Saydnaya prison was known as “the slaughterhouse.”
Omar Alshogre, who was arrested at the age of 17, spent time in several detention centres before being taken to Saydnaya where death was always present, “like the air,” he said.
Once when he was deprived of food for two days, a cellmate handed him his food ration — and died days later. Another cellmate died of diarrhea, also common in the prison.
“Death is the simplest thing. It was the most hoped for because it would have spared us a lot: hunger, thirst, fear, pain, cold, thinking,” he said. “Thinking was so hard. It could also kill.”
But more common than dying of thirst, hunger or disease, was death by mass hangings and torture.
Behind the closed doors of Saydnaya military prison, about 30 kilometres north of Damascus, police hanged as many as 13,000 people over the course of four years. About 20 to 50 people were hanged each week, sometimes there were hangings twice a week, in what Amnesty International called a “calculated campaign of extrajudicial execution.”
Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty’s regional office in Beirut, said there was no reason to believe the practice stopped. A new report from Amnesty International covered the period from the start of the March 2011 uprising to December 2015, when Amnesty says between 5,000 and 13,000 people were hanged.
Amnesty said the killings were authorized by senior Syrian officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad.
“The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population,” Maalouf said.
In the grounds of the prison was the “white” building containing military officers and soldiers suspected of being disloyal to the Syrian government.
The “red” building housed political dissidents, human rights defenders, journalists, doctors, humanitarian aid workers and students accused of being opposed to the regime.
The report, compiled from guards and survivors of the prison, detailed how prisoners were collected from their cells on the day of execution and informed they were being transferred to a civilian jail. They were then brought before a tribunal where there was a one- or twominute “trial.”
Prisoners were then transferred to a room and beaten for hours.
From there the victims were taken to a basement cell where nooses lined the walls and mass executions took place.
“The bodies of those who are killed at Saydnaya are taken away by the truckload and buried in mass graves,” the report states.
There were also endless beatings for inmates, “on the journey after arrest. In transit between detention centres. As part of a ‘welcome party’ of abuse on arrival at a prison. And in some cases every day for every conceivable minor ‘breaking’ of rules, including talking or not cleaning their cells,” the report states.
The chilling accounts in Tuesday’s report came from interviews with 31 former detainees and more than 50 other officials and experts, including former guards and judges.
Amnesty is demanding a full international investigation into the “crimes against humanity” committed at the prison.