“My father”, “my son”, “two cousins”, “my three brothers”, “my brother-in-law and my neighbor”… access to Sednaya prison is blocked by relatives searching for their missing loved ones in this prison. maximum security. It doesn’t matter that the rescue services insist that there are no secret cells, it doesn’t matter that the experts repeat that there are no more prisoners inside. The families review the lists found in the offices of this prison in search of any clue about their loved ones. The problem is that there are no miracles in “the slaughterhouse”, also known as “the red prison”, due to the color of the mountain rock. Located in the mountains northwest of Damascus, just 30 kilometers from the capital, Sednaya It was opened in the eighties as a military prison, but over the years it began to house Islamists and, since the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011, it was the place of confinement for activists, political prisoners and anyone type of voice critical of the regime. Amnesty International (AI) produced a report and ended up calling this place a “human slaughterhouse,” where tens of thousands of people were tortured and murdered during the 13-year civil war. People now climb on foot to the top where the enormous prison rests, cross the wire fences and walk along a track surrounded by signs warning of the presence of mines. The checkpoints have disappeared and the access gate now shows the black, white and green colors of the flag of change. Related News Standard military movements If Syria forms its new government under harsh bombings from Israel Mikel Ayestaran | Special envoy to DamascusThe testimonies are repeated one after another. Same words, despair and helplessness. Aref Abdul Al Hussein’s father was a soldier, he was 50 years old, he went home on leave, they stopped him at a checkpoint and the next thing they knew about him was that he was in this prison. That happened in 2011 and since then his father has not shown any signs of life. Ahmed Kaderi is looking for his son Musa, a first-year engineering student who was also detained in 2011 while returning from college and a year later they were told he was in Sednaya. They tried to visit him, but never obtained permission. Ezzedin looks for his brother Nasser, whom he was able to see on one occasion in this center and now walks through the endless galleries in search of any trace. “Since 2015 we know nothing, we visited every office imaginable to find out his whereabouts, whether he was alive or dead, but no one answered us,” laments Ezzedin, broken with pain and with teary eyes. Relatives of detainees look for their blood relatives in the Sednaya M. Ayestaran prisonThe militiamen who freed the prisoners repeat again and again that there is no one left. Some of them witnessed the release of the prisoners from the underground floors, where they remained locked up with barely any air five floors underground. “They were walking skeletons, the living dead, people who were fed one olive a day,” says one of the fighters. Hayat al-Turki, 27, walks inside Sednaya prison while searching the prison with his hope to find their relatives ReutersPeople do not listen to them, but they do seem to hear voices behind the walls or from underground and when that happens they begin to hit with mallets and pickaxes to find out if there is someone held in ultra cells secrets No one knows better than the Syrians that in the regime’s prisons everything was possible, that’s why they don’t give up. They hit and hit with more soul than strength against walls that in some sections are reinforced with metal plates. Only these walls and the jailers in this labyrinth of corridors know the whereabouts of the thousands of missing people. 2,000 releasedThe prison had an estimated 1,500 inmates in 2007, but its population increased to 20,000 people after the start of the civil war in Syria , according to an AI report published in 2017. It is not clear how many prisoners were there on the day of liberation, but organizations such as the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights (OSDH) raised the number of people who were released to 2,000. Many of them injured and the majority with serious psychological trauma after being subjected to all kinds of ill-treatment for years. A group of Syrians searches the Sednaya prison in search of their relatives Reuters «Journalists? “We do not need journalists, what we want are experts who know how to find our people and international help to bring Bashar Al Assad and his security officials back to Syria so that they can be tried and convicted for their crimes, we need justice to be done,” claims a frustrated father after three days in a row trying to find any clue about his son, locked up in 2012. Vehicles from the International Red Cross and the Syrian Red Crescent have arrived and maintain several teams at the entrance to the prison. Everyone wants answers, but this cursed place only throws silence. “Have you found any of your own?” is the question they ask each other as they leave the complex. Everyone knows the answer. As you begin the descent, on the left, a white building is the one that, according to the AI report, was used as a place of executions. The last place that many of the missing people saw, whom the families search for with tenacity and desperation.
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