The center of horror lies just a few kilometers away from the centuries-old idyll of the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Our Lady of Sednaya: the Syrian military prison Sednaja. From the air it resembles a Mercedes star; in his three red-brick wings are the cells. Next to it, in a white building, there are more cells and the execution room. The human rights organization Amnesty International called the facility a "slaughterhouse for people" in 2017: Between September 2011 and December 2015, between 5,000 and 13,000 people were murdered there.
Sednaya is the most notorious prison in Syria. Although it is only one of about 30 prisons in the country, Sednaja symbolizes unimaginable torture and horror of the regime of the ruler Bashar al-Assad like no other prison. Hardly anyone dares to pronounce the name of the prison in public. (Read here a detailed account of the torture in Sednaya)
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Prison Syria: "slaughterhouse for people"What exactly is going on there, north of the capital Damascus, human rights activists are trying to document meticulously. Ironically, because of the civil war, this is now much easier than in the early days of the prison in the eighties: Many former inmates and guards no longer live under the rule of Assad - and can talk. There is even now an Association of Victims and Relatives (ADMSP) working with the "IIIM", an investigative mechanism created by the UN General Assembly in 2016 to prosecute the worst crimes committed in Syria.
ADMSP has now published the most detailed study of detainees in Sednaya, interviewing more than 400 of them. The interviews give an impression of who has landed in Sednaya since the beginning of the protests in Syria in 2011: There are a disproportionate number of young, well-educated men from Sunni families. Almost all were tortured.
- 89 percent were younger than 37 at the time of their arrest and 74 percent are university graduates.
- Almost no one was informed why he was arrested and by whom. Only two percent have seen a warrant.
- Everyone was mistreated. All were beaten with sticks and whips, almost all had to undress and were abused on penis and anus. Almost a quarter was scalded with boiling water.
- Psychologically, almost all were tortured to permanently break survivors. 80 percent were religiously offended. Nearly half saw the corpse of a deceased detainee lying in the cell for days. The starving people had their food dumped in the toilet; they had to eat from it (25 percent).
The testimonies allow to look deeply into the methods of a state, which since 2011 increasingly more people disappear without explanation. Assad's torture has even turned his crimes into a business model.
- Almost all of the later Sednaya inmates were sentenced within a few minutes by a military court, without legal assistance or revision - and without any legal basis. 96 percent were not informed of their verdict.
- In 68 percent of the cases, relatives paid between $ 500 and $ 10,000 for promises to get information about the fate of the arrested - a fortune in Syria where the average salary is currently around $ 40 a month.
- Over half of those arrested lost all their possessions. House, car or company, everything was confiscated, in two-thirds of the cases without a court order.
- 71 percent were released due to an amnesty. Only five percent were released after serving their sentence.
- Almost all had no job after their release. 58 percent reported effects on their marital status, such as divorces.
At peak times, Amnesty International estimates that up to 20,000 people were detained in Sednaya. ADSMP now reports that by the end of 2018 there were only around 2,500 inmates left. What became of the others?
An indication of this is the Washington Post. She documented how one grave after another was added to the mass graveyard, which according to information provided by Amnesty International for the detainees of Sednaya, was used during 2018.
