Tens of thousands of people were detained and tortured in the Sajdnaja prison, which is often referred to as a “human slaughterhouse”, the first images after the fall of the Assad regime show ubiquitous dirt, pieces of rope on the floor, windowless rooms in which dozens of prisoners were crammed without a single mattress. Thirty-year-old Kásim Sobhí al-Kabalání was in one of these cells at the time of liberation.
“Is there anyone there?” Kásim heard, but he was afraid to answer. The moment he realized he was free, he ran barefoot as far as he could. Like many other prisoners, he was afraid to look over his shoulder when escaping. “I was hit by a car. But I didn’t mind. I got up and ran on. I was afraid that they would catch me and I would go back,” said another prisoner, 31-year-old Adnán Ahmad Ghnem, in an interview with the British BBC.
Kasim and his fellow prisoner Adnán said that at that moment they had no idea that Syrian President Bashar Assad had fled the country and that his government had fallen. When Adnán found out, he described that it was the best day of his life. “An inexplicable feeling. I felt like someone who had just escaped death,” he recalls.
Cut off fingers, beatings with sticks and sexual assaults
“They stripped me naked and told me to pose for a photo, then they beat me for looking at the camera,” Kásim recalls of one of the many forms of torture. He further stated that chained together with other prisoners, he spent several days in solitary confinement without food or water. Another of the prisoners showed the BBC his severed fingers.
The prisoners could only speak to each other in muffled voices and knew that the guards were constantly watching them. “Everything was forbidden. You were only allowed to eat and drink, sleep and die,” says Kásim. If someone spoke too loudly, the prison guards punished him, for example, by drowning him in a barrel of water.
Prisoners also reported that there were frequent sexual assaults by guards. They described frequent beatings with metal rods or electric cables. “They entered the room and started beating us. I stood still, watching and waiting for my turn,” Adnán recalls.
Another of the prisoners told the BBC that guards damaged his spine for stealing medicine for his fellow prisoner. “I had to lie on the ground with my knees to my chest and the guard jumped on me,” he describes the terrifying memories.
Executions took place in the prison by the dozens, the prisoners were hanged side by side and then just taken to mass graves. “After entering that prison, you are a dead person,” Kásim says quietly in the interview, this time from his family home near Damascus.
Doctors from the Damascus hospital state that so far the medical examinations of the detainees mainly point to psychological problems.
The prisoners the BBC spoke to were sent to Sajdnaja prison because of their alleged links to the rebel Free Syrian Army, because of their opposition to Assad or simply because they lived in an area known to be against him. They were convicted of kidnapping and killing regime soldiers and terrorism.
The Sajdnája prison was established in the early 1980s and for decades was used to detain opponents of the Assad regime. Until now, it has been called the main political prison in the country.
They found a missing American who was imprisoned by Assad near Damascus
Near and Middle East
