'Slaughter house' prison with bodies strewn across floor and execution parties

Daily Mirror

4 days ago

WARNING DISTRESSING DETAILS: Bashar Al-Assad's brutal regime saw thousands die in his 'human slaughterhouse' prisons - with some guards getting so carried away they threw execution parties
Before Bashar Al-Assad's regime was toppled, thousands perished or disappeared after being sent to his notorious "human slaughterhouse" jails.
Prisoners in one of Assad's infamous institutions faced gruesome realities, where execution parties and floors strewn with corpses were everyday sights. Notably, a single jail accounted for the deaths of 13,000 individuals.
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Incarcerated souls endured conditions so abhorrent they were often driven to madness, crammed together to the point of asphyxiation and fed as if they were less than cattle.
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One Saydnaya Prison guard even boasted about his fearsome reputation to a BBC Two documentary called 'Surviving Syria 's Prisons': "When the prisoners heard my name, they would tremble. I beat them with all my strength. I showed them no mercy at all."
With the collapse of Assad's rule, evidence of the atrocities began to surface, including rooms littered with documents and charred pictures of detainees – efforts to obliterate proof of the horrors within those walls were clear. Amidst these chilling scenes, families were recorded desperately sifting through the debris, searching for traces of their missing relatives, reports the Mirror US.
From 2000 onward, Al-Assad ran a ruthless dictatorship in Syria, marked by appalling violations of human rights. The terror spawned from his prisons served to cement his iron-fisted reign for over twenty years.
The Arab Spring in 2011, inspired by calls for enhanced human rights in Tunisia, was swiftly silenced in the Syrian capital, casting the nation into a protracted civil war.
Thousands were detained, including Shadi, and whisked away to clandestine sites where they endured torture until they coughed up confessions, which were frequently concocted.
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During his second arrest with his brother, Shadi found himself in the infamous Air Force Intelligence branch in Harasta. Colonel Zain, who was second-in-command at the time, revealed: "The place I worked in was very famous for its bloody practices and the number of detainees held there. We would pack 400 detainees in a room that was eight by ten metres.
"Those who entered would walk over the bodies of the detainees - you couldn't see the floor. The interrogation room was right underneath my office. Everyone heard the screams. Everyone knew how the interrogations were conducted."
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Shadi said: "The temperature was around 40 degrees, because it was so crowded. We saw strange cases of disease amongst prisoners, I think, due to oxygen deficiency because of overcrowding. These psychotic episodes soon turned into physical symptoms."
Inmates were stripped in a changing room before some were thrown into solitary confinement cells for months or even years.
Demonstrating against a wall, Shadi illustrated how he was forced to endure hours of torture. "They'd bring a cable and suspend us like this. This is the 'Ghost Method'. They'd pull us up and we'd be on our toes - you'd last 30 minutes then you'd pass out."
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Shadi recounted his harrowing experience of being chained up with his brother and interrogated via ceiling pipes. He revealed: "We were taken there and hung by our handcuffs from the pipes. It was unbearable - for almost 72 hours, three days, in the same position, without food or drink.
"We were tortured for hours, and stopped keeping track of time," Hadi remembered. "If someone cried during a beating, the beating would get worse."
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Amnesty reports that as many as 13,000 inmates were executed here alone in the initial four years of the civil war.
Hussam, a military policeman, said: "Our superiors would say, 'Torture them, don't let them sleep at night. Throw them a party... put them in a grave if you want to, bury them alive'.
"When they'd call me to go and torture them, the prisoners would return to their cells bloody and exhausted. On Wednesday mornings, we'd have an 'execution party. Our role during executions was to place the rope on the prisoner - only an officer could push the chair.
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"One time, the chair was pushed, but after 22 minutes he didn't die. So I grabbed him and pulled him downwards, so another guard who was bigger and stronger said, 'go I will do it.' Before he died he said one thing: 'I'm going to tell God what you did'.
"Most of the bodies suffered acute weight loss, resembling a skeleton," Kamal, an army nurse, noted. "Most of them suffered from skin lesions and rashes due to lack of hygiene - and most of them had torture marks."
He revealed a harrowing fact: "It was forbidden to record the cause of death as torture. Even those killed from gunshots were recorded as heart and respiratory failure."
With an overwhelming number of casualties, mass graves became a grim necessity. Investigators have since uncovered at least 130 burial sites throughout Syria, although many of those laid to rest there may never be identified.