Inside Syria's notorious Sednaya prison dubbed the 'human slaughterhouse'
Sky News sees bags of faeces, nooses, a torture chamber and an alleged "crushing machine" inside the facility, warned about for years by human rights groups as a symbol of the brutality of the Assad regime. When rebels liberated it, some inmates couldn't remember their names.
Thursday 12 December 2024 06:36, UK
Inside Syria's notorious Sednaya prison, dubbed the "human slaughterhouse", Sky News saw the conditions that people were kept in until the fall of the Assad regime.
Sky News' lead world presenter Yalda Hakim went inside the infamous facility and walked the halls once stalked by Bashar al Assad's enforcers.
Human rights groups have reported on the site north of Damascus for years, warning of what has been going on.
But until rebel forces stormed the Syrian capital earlier this month, leading to the prisoners walking free, it was impossible for journalists to freely go inside.
Now, thousands of Syrians have flocked to the site this week in search of loved ones who went missing, and Hakim has reported on what she's seen in the halls and cells of the prison.
'Bags of faeces and urine'
"There are almost two dozen prisons scattered across this country, but this is the one that really is linked to just the brutality and torture of this regime," Hakim said, speaking outside the facility near the capital Damascus.
"I was walking earlier from cell to cell, and I could just see the horrifying conditions that people were kept in.
"They had plastic bags full of faeces and urine because people weren't able to go to the bathroom - if they were allowed to go to a handful of toilets here, they were only given a few seconds, so they were relieving themselves and dumping the plastic bags in the corner of the cells."
Walking past nooses, she added that prisoners were detained, tortured and sometimes even executed inside.
"Apparently, every day, 50 people were brought out and told that they were going to be taken to some kind of civilian prison when they were brought out here to be hung," she added.
The smell of death still envelopes the air
The Sednaya prison has long been synonymous with the horrors of the Assad regime.
When the gates of the notorious site swung open after the tyrant's overthrow, the extent of Bashar al Assad's cruelty against the Syrian people became evident.
The smell of death still envelopes the air - four days after the prison guards and inmates fled.
Torture rooms, execution chambers, machines built to crush human beings to death - cell after cell has its own horror story.
As a journalist, I've witnessed the devastating effects of war and the vicious impact authoritarian rule inflicts on civilians.
Yet the Assad regime cut a unique profile 鈥� murdering hundreds of thousands of his own people with the weapons of war, and terrorising millions more.
Now, Assad is suddenly gone. But for Syrians, the reckoning with decades of this dictatorship has only just begun.
'Crushing machine'
Heading into one area they were told was a torture chamber, Hakim said it appeared to have been sound-proofed and had a fan installed - possibly to distribute cold air, gas, or heat into the room.
Afterwards, she reported from next to an alleged "crushing machine" which prisoners were said to have been forced into and crushed to death.
Walking around the outside of the prison, she said: "There were rumours that Assad's guards had created a labyrinth of tunnels where they had buried some of the prisoners deep beneath the ground.
"As you walk around the outside of the prisons you see holes everywhere where people have tried to dig the ground up to see if they could find anyone."
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'Forgotten who they were'
"When the rebels came and took over this prison, they said that people couldn't even remember who they were," Hakim added.
"They couldn't remember their names when they went into these prisons, the prison guards told them that they were a number, not a name.
"So many people had even forgotten who they were because they'd been kept in there for so long."
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She continued: "They were tortured. They were brutalised. They were sexually assaulted and abused. They were electrocuted."
While human rights groups have said they want to preserve the prison's documents to maintain evidence of what went on inside, Hakim said that the families who rushed here have gone through and taken them all "because they want to find out if their loved ones were actually at this very notorious prison".