In\u202fSednaya\u202fprison\u202fwe slept in darkness. You never knew who they would take from the cell. The prisoner would be brutally beaten, sometimes to death. By morning, we would realize the person beside us had died. They used electric batons, iron rods, wooden sticks, stones, cables, and any object they could find to hit us.\u201d This is Mohammad Khaled\u202fKrayem, one of the survivors of Syria’s prisons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since the first protests erupted in Syria in 2011, Assad’s regime transformed its already brutal prison system into a weapon of war, designed to crush tens of thousands of bodies on an industrial scale. By the end of this process, all that remained were lifeless, broken bodies, stripped of soul and dignity. This story with photographs and aerial footage reveals this grim reality through interviews with nine survivors. All of them were jailed in intelligence service detention centers. Six of them ended up in the military prison of\u202fSednaya. Two fought with the armed opposition, two defected from the regime’s Army, and the rest\u202fidentify\u202fthemselves as civilians. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
These testimonies are further supported by interviews with experts, data and sources from Syrian organizations, and visits to key sites after the regime’s collapse:\u202fSednaya, a military intelligence prison known as the Palestinian Branch, and the morgue of Al Mujtahid Hospital, where dozens of bodies arrived after the regime\u2019s fall. This was not merely a system that, amidst a war, jailed, executed, and killed rebels and Army deserters through starvation and disease. It was a vast network of prisons, with\u202fSednaya\u202fat its core, where countless demonstrators, doctors, activists, journalists, humanitarian workers, laborers, taxi drivers, and students disappeared forever. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ordinary people were used by the dictatorship to send a chilling message to the entire population. This is how the regime waged war against its own people. The arbitrary arrests and executions served not just to extort thousands of families but to bury the nation in silence and cultivate a mystique of terror and secrecy around the regime. This was an industrial death machine. It was the trench, far from the battlefield, where the dictatorship justified its existence. It was the psychological and physical battleground where Assad nearly won the war.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In\u202fSednaya\u202fprison\u202fwe slept in darkness. You never knew who they would take from the cell. The prisoner would be brutally beaten, sometimes to death. By morning, we would realize the person beside us had died. They used electric batons, iron rods, wooden sticks, stones, cables, and any object they could find to hit us.\u201d This is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":183,"featured_media":17100,"menu_order":1,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"edicion":[263],"class_list":["post-17110","ganadores","type-ganadores","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","edicion-2025-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n