Footage showed prisoners being released from Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison – including a young child kept by her mother – after rebels took over the country.
The child is featured in a video showing the women being released which was posted by the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP).
“He (Assad) has fallen. Don’t be afraid,” a voice on the video says, apparently trying to reassure the women that they were safe.
Video confirmed by AFP showed Syrians running to see if their relatives were among those evacuated from Saydnaya, where thousands of opposition supporters are said to have been tortured and killed under the Assad regime.
As rebel forces swept across Syria, they freed prisoners from government prisons as they went.
Throughout the civil war, which began in 2011, government forces kept hundreds of thousands of people in camps, where human rights groups say abuses were common.
On Saturday Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) said it freed more than 3,500 prisoners from the Homs Military Prison when the group took over the city.
As they entered the capital hours later early Sunday, HTS announced “the end of the era of tyranny in Saydnaya prison”, which has become a reference to the worst abuses of the Assad era.
In a 2022 report, ADMSP said Saydnaya “became a death camp” after the start of the civil war.
It estimates that more than 30,000 prisoners were killed or died due to abuse, lack of medical care or starvation between 2011 and 2018. Citing the history from the few released prisoners, perhaps 500 prisoners were executed between 2018 and 2021. , that is.
In 2017, Amnesty International described Saydnaya as a “slaughterhouse”, in a report that said executions were sanctioned at the highest levels of the Assad regime.
The government at the time dismissed Amnesty’s claims as “baseless” and “uncertain”, insisting that all executions in Syria followed due process.
A video reported by Reuters showed rebels shooting the lock from the gate of Saydnaya prison and using multiple guns to open the closed doors leading to the cells. Men poured into the corridors.
Other photos, which Reuters reports were taken on the streets of Damascus, appear to show recently released prisoners running down a street.
In it, one asks a passer-by what happened.
“We canceled the government,” they reply, causing the ex-prisoner to laugh with joy.
Among all the signs of the tyranny of the Assad regime, the network of prisons in which those who expressed any kind of dissent disappeared cast a long and dark shadow.
In Saydnaya, torture, sexual abuse and mass murder were the fates of thousands. Many never came out again, and their families often did not know for many years whether they were alive or dead.
One of those who survived the ordeal, Omar al-Shogre, told the BBC on Sunday about what he endured during three years of detention as a child.
“I know the pain, I know the loneliness and also the hopelessness you feel because the world let you suffer and they did nothing about it,” he said.
“They forced my cousin whom I loved to torture me and they force me to torture him. Otherwise we would all be killed.”
The Syrian Organization for Human Rights estimates that more than 130,000 people have been detained in these conditions since 2011. But the history of these terrible organizations goes back a long way.
Even in neighboring Lebanon, the fear of extinction in the Syrian abyss was widespread during the many years that Damascus was the dominant foreign power.
The deep hatred of the Assad regime – both father and son – that has sunk underground in Syria is due in large part to this industrial-scale method of torture, death and humiliation meant to scare people into submission.
For that reason, the rebel groups in their lightning march through Syria that overthrew President Assad made sure that in every city they took to the central prison in each one and freed the thousands imprisoned there.
The image of these people emerging into the light from the darkness that had covered others for decades will be one of the defining images of the fall of the Assad dynasty.