Every night for the past 13 years, Rana Aankir has dreamed of her son Raed, his gentle downcast eyes smiling at her as he walked out the family’s front door in Homs.
In her dreams, he’s wearing the same red sweatshirt he threw over his shoulder before running to the protest, something she only found out weeks later when he didn’t come home.
Raed was just 16 when state security forces swept him away in a crackdown on a popular uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s regime that turned into a brutal civil war. Over the years, his mother had sold most of her belongings to bribe officials for information about which of the regime’s vast networks he was in. It took six years before she found out she was in the most infamous of all: Saydnaya.
“I’ve been looking for him for 13 years. He is my whole world, he is my life,” said Aankir, who wandered the corridors of the ransacked prison on Monday, desperately searching for a trace of her long-missing son through piles of official-looking papers and notebooks. “I need to know what happened to him. I have to find him.”
Assad’s fall on Sunday sparked jubilation across Damascus. Yet the scenes just a day later in Saydnaya evoked the desperation and devastation that remained amid the euphoria. Aankir was among the thousands drawn to the heavily fortified building on the outskirts of the city, searching for the ghosts of loved ones who had haunted them since their enforced disappearances. With Assad gone, they hoped they would now finally find answers to years of pain in the labyrinths of his police state.
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Like most of those who turned up at the prison in desperation, she didn’t find Raed. Instead, she spent the day picking up papers scattered throughout the prison complex for clues — “hoping that maybe somewhere I could read his name and know if he was alive,” she said.
On Sunday night, a rebel faction from the southern province of Deraa, the Southern Operations Command, reached the prison and began freeing the first inmates in Saydnaya, echoing what rebels have done in detention facilities across the country.
Videos shared widely on social media showed shocking scenes: prisoners, thin and pale, some barefoot in the winter cold and wrapped in frayed blankets, stunned to be released. Rebels in the prison said on Monday that some of the men freed the night before did not even know that Bashar’s father, former dictator Hafez al-Assad, had died – an event that took place almost 25 years ago.
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“One man told me he doesn’t know where to go now, this prison has been his home for 30 years and he doesn’t remember where his family lives,” said one rebel fighter.
Human rights groups, whistleblowers and former prisoners say torture was systematic in Assad regime prisons, with secret executions widespread. But Saydnaya, also known as the “human slaughterhouse”, has had a particularly dark place in the Syrian imagination: a facility of industrialized cruelty, it has long been synonymous with torture, death and despair.
In the 2017 reportAmnesty International found that many of the tens of thousands of people detained there over the decades were imprisoned for simple offenses such as gathering in small groups during the 2011 uprisings that turned into war. They were subjected to routine beatings by prison guards, which included brutal sexual abuse, electric shocks, bone crushing and more.
Rights groups say dozens of people are secretly executed each week in Saydnaya, and Amnesty estimates that up to 13,000 Syrians were killed there between 2011 and 2016. An estimated 20,000 people were held in the prison, it said.
A Syrian military defector known as “Caesar” smuggled in more than 53,000 photos in 2013. Rights groups say they show clear evidence not only of torture, but also of widespread disease and starvation in Assad’s prisons.
Caesar’s photographs only emboldened the regime: decades before, the prison’s power derived from its mysteries. Afterward, soldiers and guards openly released videos of gut-wrenching torture, showing Syrians that the horror stories they whispered about were real and, often, worse. This fear strengthened Bashar’s and Hafez’s grip on power.
Many died and their families were deliberately never told, the wounds of permanently missing relatives left to fester. Last week, a UN report blamed the regime for withholding basic information about its detainees, saying it was “unimaginable psychological torture” for the families.
In the chaos of that first evening, people grabbed prison books and documents, took them home or scattered them all over the compound. Lawyers and human rights groups say it will be key to tracking down the missing and prosecuting those responsible.
Those families who did not find their relatives camped overnight, lighting small fires to keep warm. But by Monday morning, that hope had begun to turn to anguish and despair, amid rumors that untold thousands were still trapped in the underground levels of the prison.
Cars were abandoned by the side of the road, while people climbed the hills surrounding the prison, which was long thought to be lined with mines to get to it more quickly. When they arrived, they were greeted by rioters who tried to impose order on the already chaotic scene and prevent the crowd from rushing through the compound. “Please don’t stop us, we just want to find our loved ones,” screamed one man, who was nearly crushed by the crowd control efforts.
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Saydnaya’s architecture was clearly meant to confuse, its maze of corridors littered with traces of the horrors encountered there. In one hall there were cages high enough to fit a row of people. On the lower levels were the cells, one former inmate said: cramped, windowless and smelly, not wide enough for a person to sleep stretched out on the hard floor.
People brought shovels and prayer beads to help in the effort. Others wandered aimlessly through metal staircases and cell blocks, reading scribbled notes on walls and letters left behind by prisoners.
Syria’s White Helmets, emergency services that traveled all the way from the northwestern province of Idlib to help excavate the prison, brought mobile machines to targeted areas that a defector told them housed underground cell blocks.
Whenever they thought they had found a door or a way to access the underground prison, the rebels silenced the crowd by firing their weapons into the air.
But hours of digging yielded nothing but dashed hopes.
By early afternoon, the lead prisoner advocacy group Saydnaya said it believed all remaining prisoners had already been released and urged anyone still in the building to go home.
But people refused to believe. Crazy rumors circulated, including that a group of prisoners had been taken from Saydnaya to an unknown destination before the rebels took over the prison.
Later on Monday, a video appeared on social media showing rebels uncovering a cold storage unit at Harasta Hospital, in the suburbs of Damascus, with multiple bodies left in a pile, covered with white sheets. The marks on their toes indicated that they were prisoners of Saydnaya.
