A month and a half after the fall of Bashar al Asad and the release of thousands of prisoners in Sednaya, today nobody guard the entry to the so -called “the prison of horrors” or “the human slaughterhouse.”
The prison was practically an extermination fieldwhere the beatings were part of the Welcome Committee as Majda Hamdan tells us, which spent the worst moments of his life in the Sedian prison before being transferred to the prison of Al Jatib.
The torture was part of the Sednaya Welcome Committee
“They treated us worse than animals, so they called the human slaughterhouse. The people who worked here had neither feelings nor heart, ”says the former inmate.
At the top of a hill, just over 30 kilometers of Damascus, three concrete plants practically without windows. Two main buildings with the capacity to house between 10,000 and 20,000 detainees, form a huge mole in the middle of the most absolute nothing. There the torture were common: Electrocutions and violations, but there were more formulas. “They tortured me, they put me in a wheel of a truck and started playing with me, but with abuse,” laments this young Syrian.
There are cells with capacity for five or six people who housed more than thirty prisoners without hygienic measures of any kind. And in the group cells they lived over 70 people. Cells in which the clock stopped in mid -December: there are blankets, clothing, rotten food and even some abandoned leg prostheses.
They were forced to put the blood of their classmates into bags
The prisoners had to carry day and night the eyes Because if they crossed their gaze with that of some jailer, without a word they killed them. “You have to cover your eyes because if they see that you have seen their face, your life ends,” says Majda. “It is not that the Syrians did not know what was happening in this prison, is that most did not want to find out.” But one of the things that feared most, Majda confesses – this young man now refugee in Spain – was when it was to clean the blood of his teammates.
“The soldiers take people like us to clean the rooms where they killed our teammates. We clean a span of blood in a 50 -square -meter room. I had to empty the blood rooms and put everything in bags, ”he recalls with tears in my eyes.
The jailers left their neck with their own hands
Amnesty International has also revealed that the hanging in the Sednaya prison were carried out once or twice a week, always at dawn. And if this method failed, the guards were in charge of splitting their neck with their own hands.
It is estimated that some 30,000 political prisoners since 2011 would have been executed or cause of torture, lack of health care or hunger. And almost half of them were civilians, as another Syrian, Kamil. “War is bad, in war everyone loses. If there is a conflict it is as if there is a conflict in the couple. The victims are the children and now the victims are the people. ” “Two my brothers have died.”
150,000 Syrians remain missing throughout the country
In Sednaya, relatives no longer look for their loved ones, at this point they have lost hope, but some – as Mohamed and their sister – do not throw their towel after six years without news from their father.
In the common graves of this prison – which has become a symbol of the repression of Bashar al asad – the new Syrian authorities have unearthed dozens of corpses, while Others have appeared paired or abandoned in the dark torture rooms. And those who have had more luck, survivors like Majda, hope to be able to turn page after the worst episode in Syria’s history.
