The little boy, who looks barely three years old, looks around, visibly disoriented. Is this the first time he can walk freely through the corridors of Sednaya Prison? This vast enclosure had become the symbol of the ferocious repression of the fallen regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Since Sunday, videos have been circulating showing the release of prisoners locked up by the dictator’s regime. The boy appears in a three-minute video broadcast on X by Shaam network, in which women held prisoner are released from their cells.
Another video broadcast on Sunday and identified by the New York Times shows a group of men, probably former prisoners, walking free in the town of Mneen, about ten kilometers from Sednaya.
On Monday, the Sednaya Prison Prisoners and Missing Persons Association said there were no more inmates in the entire prison complex. According to the association, based in Türkiye, the last detainees left the prison on Sunday at 11 a.m.
On the other hand, rumors are circulating on social networks about people being detained in the basement of the prison. A video showing a man emerging from a hole, visibly frightened, circulated on X and TikTok, even though it was generated by artificial intelligence at least six days ago.
At the time of writing, these rumors, likely fueled by the prison’s appalling reputation and mistreatment of prisoners, have not been confirmed by the Turkey-based association or rescuers. “The presence of detainees locked in the basements has not been proven,” the association wrote this Monday afternoon.
For their part, the White Helmets, an organization of rescuers, indicated that they were continuing to search the prison accompanied by people familiar with the location, without having yet found any people detained in these locations. “As of today, December 9 at 4:45 p.m. Damascus time, there is nothing to confirm the presence of detainees other than those who left the prison yesterday (Sunday),” the organization wrote on Facebook.
A vast complex built north of Damascus to lock up common law prisoners and those the regime considered opponents, the prison was described in 2017 as a “slaughterhouse” by Amnesty International.
From 2011, the start of the Syrian revolution and the first demonstrations against the regime, to 2018, 30,000 prisoners were executed or died as a result of torture, deprivation of care or food in the prison, the association estimated detainees and missing persons from Sednaya prison.
At least 500 additional people died between 2018 and 2021, adds the association, which argues that rooms with salt were created to store the bodies of the victims, which were never returned to the families.