A Syrian civil defense group known as the White Helmets says it is investigating reports from survivors of the country’s notorious Saydnaya prison that people are being held in hidden underground cells.
Writing on X, the group says it has deployed five “special emergency teams” at the prison, assisted by a guide familiar with the prison’s layout.
Saidnaya is one of the prisons that was liberated after the rebels took over the country.
Officials in Damascus province reported that efforts were underway to free the prisoners, some of whom were “nearly suffocating” due to lack of ventilation.
The Damascus countryside governorate has appealed on social media to ex-soldiers and prison workers of Bashar al-Assad’s regime to provide codes to electronic underground gates to rebel forces.
They say they have been “unable to open them to free more than 100,000 prisoners who can be seen on CCTV monitors”.
Video circulating online and through news outlets including Al Jazeera shows attempts to gain access to the lower parts of the prison.
In it, a man can be seen using a sort of post to knock down a low wall, revealing a dark space behind.
Other footage shows prisoners being released – including a toddler being held by its mother. They are featured in a video of the women’s release posted by the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and the Missing in Saidnaya Prison (ADMSP).
“That [Assad] has fallen. Don’t be afraid,” says a voice on the video, apparently trying to reassure the women that they are now safe.
Video verified by AFP showed Syrians running to see if their relatives were among those freed from Saydnaya, where thousands of opposition supporters are said to have been killed by the Assad regime. They were tortured and executed.
Rebel forces have raided across Syria and freed prisoners from government prisons.
During the civil war that began in 2011, government forces held hundreds of thousands of people in concentration camps, where human rights groups say violence was common.
On Saturday, the Islamic militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) said it had released more than 3,500 prisoners from a military prison in Homs as the group seized control of the city.
The group was founded in 2012 under the name Al-Nusra Front. It was allied with al-Qaeda but later severed ties – although the US, UK and many other countries see it as an affiliate of the jihadist organisation.
In 2016, the group took its current name HTS and later merged with other rebel factions. This is most important in the participation of several opposition groups in this latest attack.
As the rebels entered the capital in the early hours of Sunday morning, HTS announced the “end of the cycle of cruelty in Saydna prison”, which has become a byword for the darkest abuses of the Assad era.
In a 2022 report, ADMSP said Sidnaya “Effectively became a death camp” after the start of the civil war..
It is estimated that between 2011 and 2018, more than 30,000 prisoners were either executed or died of torture, lack of medical care or starvation. , he said.
In 2017, Amnesty International Described Saidnaya as a “human slaughterhouse”.in a report alleging that executions were authorized at the highest levels of the Assad regime.
The government at the time dismissed Amnesty’s claims as “baseless” and “devoid of truth”, insisting that all executions in Syria follow due process.
ADMSPIn a video cited by Reuters news agency, rebels were shown shooting the locks on the doors of Saidnaya prison and using more bullets to open the locked doors leading to the cells. Men poured into the corridors.
Other footage, which Reuters says was taken on the streets of Damascus, shows recently released prisoners running down the street.
In it, a passer-by asks what happened.
“We overthrew the government,” he replies, drawing a hearty laugh from the ex-prisoner.
Of all the symbols of the repressive nature of the Assad regime, the network of prisons into which anyone expressing dissent has disappeared casts the longest and deepest shadow.
Torture, rape and mass executions were the fate of thousands of people in Saidnaya. Many never resurfaced, their families often not knowing whether they were alive or dead for years.
One of the survivors of the ordeal, Omar al-Shugray, told the BBC on Sunday what he endured during his three years in prison as a teenager.
“I know the pain, I also know the loneliness and hopelessness you feel because the world hurt you and did nothing about it,” he said.
“They forced me to torture my cousin whom I loved so much, and they force me to torture him. Otherwise we will both be hanged.”
The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that more than 130,000 people have been detained in these conditions since 2011. But the history of these deliberately terrifying institutions goes back a long way.
Even in neighboring Lebanon, fears of Syria’s disappearance into prisons were widespread over the years that Damascus was the dominant external power.
The deep hatred of the Assad regime – both father and son – simmering beneath the surface in Syria was largely due to its industrial-scale methods of torture, death and humiliation aimed at terrorizing the population.
For this reason, rebel factions in each city that overthrew President Assad during the lightning strike in Syria made sure to go to the central prison of each and free thousands of people held there.
The emergence of these people from darkness to light, which had been obscured for decades, will be one of the clearest images of the fall of the Assad family.