Families search Syria’s Sednaya Prison for loved ones after al-Assad’s fall

Rescue teams scour the notorious prison near Damascus for detainees and hidden underground cells.

Thousands of prisoners have been freed from Syria’s infamous jails as shocking footage emerged of a toddler appearing to be freed from a cell in the country’s “human slaughterhouse” jail.

Just north of Damascus in the Saydnaya military prison women detainees, some with their children, screamed as men broke the locks off their cell doors as rebels overthrew the “barbaric” Assad family’s regime after 50 years of rule in Syria.

Throughout Syria’s war, which began in 2011, security forces held hundreds of thousands of people in detention camps where international human rights organisations said abuses were rampant. Families were often told nothing of the fate of their loved ones.

As rebels seized one city after another in a blistering eight-day campaign, prisons were often among their first objectives. The most notorious prisons in and around Damascus itself were finally opened on the uprising’s final night and the early hours of Sunday

Assad’s ‘human slaughterhouses’: What to know about Syria’s prisons

During a lightning offensive to capture Syria, opposition fighters have freed thousands of people from a network of terrifying prisons that characterised the repressive al-Assad regime that they eventually ousted.

Coming from the north, they took Aleppo first, then Hama, Homs and Damascus

Along the way, they busted open central prisons and reassured those stumbling out – frail and confused – that they were safe.

They told them the regime of President Bashar al-Assad was on the verge of – or had already – fallen, and showed the world the conditions that untold thousands of people had been held in for ages.

The work has continued, as fighters and relief workers scramble to find prisoners left behind, open secret cells, and even find the locations of secret facilities

More than 100 detention facilities – according to a United Nations report – and an unknown number of secret facilities.

Two of the most notorious prisons were Tadmor and Sednaya.

They were in the desert of the ancient city of Palmyra and just outside Damascus, respectively.

What were conditions like in Syria’s prisons?

Horrific.

In 2014, a regime defector, who went by the name “Caesar”, fled Syria with tens of thousands of images showing the mutilated bodies of detainees who were killed or tortured in Syrian prisons.

He passed on about 53,276 files to Syrian and international rights groups and activists

How many people languished in prison?

About 157,634 Syrians were arrested between March 2011 and August 2024.

Of this number, 5,274 were children and 10,221 women.

Thousands more were abducted by Syria’s feared security services during the reign of Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, who came to power in 1971.

His youngest son assumed control of the country after Hafez died in 2000.