Sednaya military prison, once confined not only military defectors, but thousands of dissident civilians, sending a chilling message to the entire population. Damascus, Syria.
Syria’s long civil war reached a turning point when on 8 December 2024, after a two-week upsurge in success, rebel forces took the capital Damascus with little resistance, toppling President Bashar al-Assad’s 24-year regime. The rebel forces immediately began to free inmates from a vast network of detention centers, with the much-feared Sednaya military prison at its core. Survivors’ accounts revealed the extent of the Assad regime’s systematic detention, torture, and secret execution of its opponents, which transformed its already brutal prison system into a weapon of war.
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