Inside Assad’s torture chambers the place prisoners had been made to suck their very own blood off the ground, rape fellow inmates and executed for guards – as illustrations reveal merciless punishments

Prisoners held inside Assad’s notorious Syrian torture chamber prison were forced to suck their own blood off the floor and rape fellow inmates.   

Sednaya Prison, nicknamed the ‘Human Slaughterhouse’, is where huge numbers of detainees were tortured, subjected to all manner of inhumane treatments and executed.

Survivors of the Syrian hellhole have provided chilling testimonies about life behind Sednaya’s bars, describing a world ‘carefully designed to humiliate, degrade, sicken, starve and ultimately kill those trapped inside’.

It comes amid the downfall of Assad’s government, with rebels freeing thousands of detainees in Homs while Syrians plead for their loved ones to be freed from the notorious torture chamber of Sednaya.

Assad previously denied both killing thousands of detainees at Sednaya as well as using a secret crematorium to dispose of their remains in 2017. 

Many detainees have revealed they were raped while imprisoned, and in some cases, forced to rape other inmates.

Torture and severe beatings from guards were used as a regular form of punishment and degradation, often leading individuals to life-long damage, disability, and even death.

Cell floors were covered with the blood and puss from injured prisoners, according to a 2017 Amnesty report, with the corpses of dead detainees collected by prison guards at 9am each morning.

Detainees at Sednaya Prison were forced to obey a set of sadistic and dehumanising rules, as staff deprived inmates of food, water, medicine and medical care.

When food was delivered, it was often scattered over the cell floors by guards where it mixed with blood and dirt, forcing detainees to ingest the gruesome bodily fluids left behind by those wounded and killed.

It was also reported an iron press that was allegedly used to crush and execute prisoners in Sednaya Prison was found in new videos shared by rebels as they liberate inmates.

Footage of what appears to be some kind of large hydraulic press within the prison is yet to be verified, but tales of torture, deprivation, starvation and executions at Sednaya have been widely documented. 

Other harrowing accounts have revealed mass hangings at Sednaya were carried out once or twice a week, usually on Monday and Wednesday, in the middle of the night. 

Those whose names were called out were told they would be transferred to civilian prisons in Syria, and as many as 50 people were called in one night.

Instead, they were moved to a cell in the basement of the prison and beaten severely before being transported to another prison building on the grounds of Sednaya, where they were hanged. 

Throughout this process, they remained blindfolded, meaning they did not know when or how they would die until the noose was placed around their necks.

‘They kept them [hanging] there for 10 to 15 minutes. Some didn’t die because they are light. For the young ones, their weight wouldn’t kill them. The officers’ assistants would pull them down and break their necks,’ said a former judge who witnessed the hangings in the Amnesty report.

Detainees held in the building in the floors above the ‘execution room’ reported that they sometimes heard the sounds of these hangings.

‘If you put your ears on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of gurgling. This would last around 10 minutes… We were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death. This was normal for me then,’ said ‘Hamid’, a former military officer arrested in 2011.

A terrifying ‘special rule’ within the prison also meant prisoners were not allowed to make any sounds, speak or even whisper. 

They were forced to assume certain positions when the guards come into the cells and faced death as a punishment if they even looked at the guards.

‘The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population,’ said Lynn Maalouf, Deputy Director for Research at Amnesty International’s regional office in Beirut, at the time of publication.

‘We demand that the Syrian authorities immediately cease extrajudicial executions and torture and inhuman treatment at Sednaya Prison and in all other government prisons across Syria. Russia and Iran, the government’s closest allies, must press for an end to these murderous detention policies,’ she added.

In 2012, it was revealed Syrian intelligence agencies were running torture centres across the country where detainees were beaten with batons and cables, burned with acid, sexually assaulted, and their fingernails torn out, a report released today has said.

Human Rights Watch identified 27 detention centres that it said intelligence agencies had been using since Assad’s government began a crackdown in March 2011 on pro-democracy protesters trying to oust him.

The New York-based rights group found that tens of thousands of people had been detained across Syria. It conducted more than 200 interviews with people who said they were tortured.  

This included a 31-year-old man who was detained in the Idlib area in June 2012 and was made to undress.

He told the group: ‘They started squeezing my fingers with pliers. They put staples in my fingers, chest and ears. I was only allowed to take them out if I spoke. The staples in the ears were the most painful.’

‘They used two wires hooked up to a car battery to give me electric shocks. They used electric stun-guns on my genitals twice. I thought I would never see my family again. They tortured me like this three times over three days,’ he said. 

Speaking to CNN, the former officer, who later fled to Turkey with his family, said: ‘Whatever we wanted the prisoner to say, he would say. We took their fingernails out with pliers and we made them eat them. We made them suck their own blood off the floor.’    

These horrific practices, which according to human right’s groups amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, were authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government during Assad’s reign.

As Syria’s rebels swept towards the capital city last week, they made a point of liberating inmates from every jail they found, claiming most of the inhabitants were political prisoners of the Assad regime.

Over the past 10 days, insurgents freed prisoners in cities including Aleppo, Homs, Hama as well as Damascus.

Widely circulated footage has shown rebels ‘opening cells one by one’ by breaking down walls, and they are said to have rescued ‘hundreds of inmates, including women and young children’.

At Sednaya, the terror experienced by the inmates was evident when the liberators arrived.

Women detainees, some with their children who were born behind bars, screamed as men broke the locks off their cell doors.

The rebels who were filmed releasing inmates at the Sednaya prison said: ‘We celebrate with the Syrian people the news of freeing our prisoners and releasing their chains and announcing the end of the era of injustice.’ 

But Assad’s atrocities and human rights violations spread beyond prison walls after UN weapons inspectors returned ‘overwhelming and indisputable’ evidence of the use of nerve gas in Syria in 2013.

Assad faced calls for international military action against his government after the alleged chemical weapons attacks in the suburbs of Damascus.

Then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the August 21 attack ‘the worst use of weapons of mass destruction in the 21st century.’

The United States said that attack may have killed more than 1,400, including hundreds of civilians. 

The Syrian opposition accused pro-Assad forces of having carried out the attacks, but Assad denied having used chemical weapons and asserted that, if such weapons had been used, rebel forces were to blame. 

Assad’s tactics against the rebels continued to draw international condemnation even when his forces refrained from using chemical weapons.

So-called ‘barrel bombs’ – dropped from helicopters and airplanes – were routinely used to devastating effect against military and civilian targets in rebel-held areas even though human rights groups insisted that employment of such indiscriminate weapons constituted as a war crime.

Syrian officials have repeatedly denied allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity.