Reports of people trapped underground at Syria’s Saydnaya prison investigated | Global News Avenue

Syria’s civil defense group, the White Helmets, said it was investigating reports from survivors of the country’s notorious Saidnaya prison that people were being held in hidden underground cells.

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Saidnaya prison was one of the prisons liberated after rebels took control of the country.

Damascus governorate authorities reported that efforts were continuing to free prisoners, some of whom “almost suffocated” due to a lack of ventilation.

Rural Damascus governorate called on former soldiers and prison staff of the Assad regime on social media to provide the rebels with the codes for an electronic underground door.

They said they were unable to open the prison to release “the more than 100,000 detainees who can be seen on CCTV monitors”.

Video circulated online and in news outlets including Al Jazeera showed attempts to gain access to the lower part of the prison.

In it, a man can be seen using a type of post to knock out the lower wall, revealing the dark space behind.

Other videos showed prisoners being released, including a young child who was being held with his mother. The Turkey-based Association of Detainees and Missing Persons (ADMSP) of Sednaya Prison released a video of the woman being released, in which he appears.

“He (Assad) has fallen. Don’t be afraid,” a voice in the video says, apparently trying to reassure the women that they are now safe.

Video verified by AFP showed Syrians rushing to check whether their relatives were among those released from Saidnaya. Thousands of opposition supporters are said to have been tortured and executed there under the Assad regime.

Rebels have swept through Syria, freeing prisoners from government prisons.

During the civil war that began in 2011, government forces held hundreds of thousands of people in internment camps, where human rights groups said torture was common.

On Saturday, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) said it had released more than 3,500 detainees as the group seized the military prison in Homs.

As they entered the capital early Sunday, HTS declared “the end of the era of tyranny in Saidnaya prison,” which has become synonymous with the darkest atrocities of the Assad era.

ADMSP said in a 2022 report that Saydnaya ‘Effectively turned into death camps’ as civil war began.

It is estimated that more than 30,000 detainees were executed or died from torture, lack of medical care, or starvation between 2011 and 2018. At least 500 more detainees were executed between 2018 and 2021, it said, citing accounts from a small number of released prisoners.

In 2017, Amnesty International Describing Saidnaya as a “human slaughterhouse”claimed in a report that the highest levels of Assad’s government had authorized the execution.

The government at the time dismissed Amnesty International’s claims as “baseless” and “lacking the truth,” insisting that all executions in Syria followed due process.

Video cited by Reuters showed insurgents shooting at the lock on the Saidnaya prison door and using more gunfire to open the closed door to the cells. People poured into the hallway.

Reuters said other footage was taken on the streets of Damascus and appeared to show recently released prisoners running through the streets.

Among them, some people asked passers-by what happened.

“We overthrew the regime,” they replied, prompting the former prisoner to laugh excitedly.

Of all the symbols of the repressive nature of Assad’s regime, it is the prison network that casts the longest and darkest shadow, into which those who express any form of dissent disappear.

In Saidnaya, torture, sexual assault and mass executions were the fate of thousands. Many are never seen again, and their families often don’t know whether they are alive or dead for years.

Omar al-Shogre, one of the survivors of the ordeal, told the BBC on Sunday about his experiences during a three-year prison sentence as a teenager.

“I know the pain, I know the loneliness, and I know the despair you feel because the world makes you suffer and does nothing about it,” he said.

“They forced my beloved cousin to torture me, and they forced me to torture him. Otherwise, we would both be executed.”

The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that more than 130,000 people have been detained in such conditions since 2011. But the history of these institutions of deliberate terror goes back much further.

Even in neighboring Lebanon, during Damascus’s many years as a dominant foreign power, there was a widespread fear of disappearing into Syria’s dungeons.

Syria’s deep hatred of the Assad regime – both father and son – is due in large part to this industrial-scale mechanism of torture, death and humiliation designed to scare the population into submission.

For this reason, rebel factions in their blitzkrieg operations in Syria to oust President Assad have made sure that in every city they capture they travel to the central prisons in each city to free the thousands of people held there.

The image of these men emerging into light from the darkness that had shrouded some for decades would become one of the defining images of the fall of the Assad dynasty.