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Sednaya Prison

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33°39′54″N 36°19′43″E / 33.66500°N 36.32861°E / 33.66500; 36.32861

Sednaya Prison (Template:Lang-ar) is a military prison near Damascus in Syria. The prison has been used to hold thousands of political prisoners, among them members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists. Amnesty International estimated in February 2017 "that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extrajudicially executed at Saydnaya between September 2011 and December 2015."

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About the Sednaya Prison

Located 30 kilometers north of the Syrian capital Damascus, Sednaya Military Prison is known for its tortures of people suspected of opposing the government. There are different social groups who are at risk. These can be groups of labourers, business people, students, bloggers, university professors, lawyers, doctors, activists defending the rights of minority groups, people helping their neighbours or journalists. Detainees may be either men, women or even children.

The prison consists of two buildings with a total of 10 000 – 20 000 detainees and is under the jurisdiction of the Minister of Defense while operated by the Military Police. Detainees have usually spent months or years in detention elsewhere before being transferred to Sednaya. It was not until after the 2011 crisis when this started to happen. The way in which detainees are being transferred to this facility has been internationally recognized and criticized, mainly by Amnesty International. The transfers usually take place after holding unfair trials at a secret military court. In interviews with Amnesty, prisoners described the trials as sham for lasting only one to three minutes. While some prisoners would be told they were being transferred to a civilian prison when they instead were to be executed, other detainees do not even get to see a judge.

Recognized unfair trials

The Syrian Mus’ab al-Hariri belonged to the banned organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, and lived in exile in Saudi Arabia until his return to Syria in 2002 with his mother. She worried that their return would cause problems for her son because of his political stand but the Syrian Embassy in Saudi Arabia had assured her that this would not happen. However, shortly after al-Hariri’s return, he was sentenced by the Syrian Security forces on 24 July 2002. At the time of arrest, he was only 14 years old. Even though the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention announced al-Hariri’s detention as arbitrary, the authorities took no step to amend his situation. The UN Working Group based its announcement on their assessment that he did not receive a fair trial. Four main issues that were raised were his young age when arrested, that he had been held in isolation for more than two years, reportedly tortured and that he was sentenced by the SSSC (Supreme State Security Court) in June 2005 to six years in prison despite no substantial evidence. All the SSSC knew was that al-Hariri belonged to the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

The Syrian Human Rights Committee reported in 2004 about people being arrested the same year because of political reasons. To offer the suspected individuals human rights defenders and lawyers was not self-evidence and as in the case of Mus’ab al-Hariri, hundreds of prisoners remained in long detention without trial or following sentences enforced after unfair trials. It was also reported that no respect was given to the poor health condition of prisoners and that these were still held in rigorous conditions.

The 2008 Massacre

According to The Syrian Human Rights Committee, the military police changed all the locks of the prison cells on the night of 4th of July 2008. On the day after a search operation was launched through all the prisons quarters, in which the security guards trampled on copies for the Quran. The act triggered fury among islamist detainees who rushed to collect the Quran copies. The guards opened fire and killed nine of the prisoners. Among the nine killed prisoners, they were able to identify eight of them, those were: Zakaria Affash, Mohammed Mahareesh, Abdulbaqi Khattab, Ahmed Shalaq, Khalid Bilal, Mo’aid Al – Ali, Mohannad Al – Omar and Khader Alloush. Clashes have been reported after this incident where the total number of victims reached 25 detainees. However, the committee could not ascertain their identities.

WikiLeaks published some emails which had been sent from the American embassy in Damascus about the events in Sednaya. The massacre was confirmed and 90 detainees reported as injured. According to these emails, during a routine sweep conducted by military police trainees, some prisoners overpowered the security guards and took several hostages, including the prison director. The security forces tried to negotiate with Samir Bahar, the spokesman of the detainees, and asked him to put an end to the riot and immediately release the military hostages. Bahar replied that the detainees were willing to accept these demands if they could secure a guarantee that there would be no retaliation against the prisoners by the military forces. Both parties could not reach an agreement, and in the same day the security forces cut off the phone lines, electricity, and water in the prison as well as the surrounding area. However, media, human rights organisations and government contacts confirmed the continuation of violence till the morning of July 7th.

Reactions to the massacre

While Sarah Leah Whitson, Director of the Middle East and North Africa human rights said: “President Bashar al-Assad should immediately order an independent investigation into the police’s use of lethal force at Sednaya prison”, SANA, the Syrian official news agency, issued a short press release on July 6, stating that “a number of prisoners…incited chaos and breached public order in the prison and attacked other fellow prisoners…during an inspection by the prison administration.” The agency reported that the situation required “the intervention of the unit of guards to bring order to the prison.” Ammar al-Qurabi the director of the National Organization for Human Rights commented on SANA’s release by asking to form a committee of activists which can visit the detainees and ascertain their conditions and he confirmed that the number of prisoners in Sednaya was between 1500 to 2000. 200 of them had islamic backgrounds and most of them participated in the Iraq war. Al-Qurabi called to investigating the massacre’s perpetrators and announcing the investigation’s result. Also he asked for enhancing the living conditions and the medical care of the detainees.

Other human rights abuses

The Sednaya prison massacre was not the only incident of human rights abuses in the prison's history. Other examples range from particular testimonies of people who had been incarcerated in Sednaya to organized leaks and research done on the topic. Omar al-Shogre, a Syrian teenager has testified that he had gone through 11 Syrian prisons during his several years of imprisonment. Sednaya was the final one. He had described the events in Sednaya as beginning with a "welcome party" during which new inmates were beaten with "metal parts from a tank". He contracted tuberculosis there and witnessed what he thinks is an occurrence of "organ harvesting". Sednaya had come into the public eye when the 2014 Syrian detainee report, also known as the Caesar report got unveiled. While the most of the 55 000 photos encompassing around 11 000 victims from the report are from other detention facilities in Damascus, some of them are also from the Sednaya prison. Prisoners were also often transferred between different facilities: some detainees were transferred to Sednaya from the Mezze Air Force Branch, while others were taken from Sednaya to Tishreen. In early 2017 the Sednaya Military Prison again came into the public eye when an Amnesty International report was released on February 7th. The report, the result of the research conducted by Amnesty International which took place between December 2015 and December 2016, raises a plethora of accusations against the Syrian regime. It alleges that the regime has at its highest instances, authorized the killings of thousands of people in the Sednaya prison since 2011. After interviewing 84 people, out of which 31 were former detainees, Amnesty International has concluded that the regime has implemented systematic torture in Sednaya. One former detainee, Salam, a lawyer from Aleppo described the torture process:

"The soldiers will practice their “hospitality” with each new group of detainees during the "welcome party"… You are thrown to the ground and they use different instruments for the beatings: electric cables with exposed copper wire ends – they have little hooks so they take a part of your skin – normal electric cables, plastic water pipes of different sizes and metal bars. Also they have created what they call the “tank belt”, which is made out of tyre that has been cut into strips... They make a very specific sound; it sounds like a small explosion. I was blindfolded the whole time, but I would try to see somehow. All you see is blood: your own blood, the blood of others. After one hit, you lose your sense of what is happening. You’re in shock. But then the pain comes."

The detainees were also deprived of food and water, and had been raped and forced to rape each other. Amnesty International has managed to confirm the names of 375 individuals executed in Sednaya prison, and while the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch, suggests that tens of thousands of detainees have died in Sednaya and other government-run detention centers since 2011 as a result of the extermination policies, Amnesty International itself calculates the number of deaths to between 5000 and 13 000.

The Syrian Justice Ministry denied the report issued by Amnesty International, describing it as "devoid of truth".

After the 2011 uprisings

After months of anti-Government protests in 2011, many Islamist prisoners were released in several amnesties. Zahran Alloush, Abu Shadi Aboud (brother of Hassan Aboud) and Ahmed Abu Issa were some of the more prominent prisoners released from the prison. After their release many took up arms against the regime, and became leaders of Islamist rebel groups including Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar ash-Sham and Suqour al-Sham Brigade in the Syrian Civil War.

There have repeatedly been reports on inhumane conditions for detainees in Sednaya (as well as other Syrian prisons), ranging from torture and malnutrition to spontaneous executions without fair trials.

"Seventy-five per cent of people who go into Sednaya do not come out alive. It is a field court, where most 'judges' are from the secret police."

— A Syrian lawyer working with prisoners in Hama

Former inmates

References

  1. ^ "Syrian prisoners take over prison, claiming President Assad is about to start torturing and executing them". The Independent. 2016.
  2. "Document". www.amnesty.org. Retrieved 2017-02-07.
  3. , Amnesty, About Saydnaya, 2017
  4. , Amnesty, Detention in Syria, 2017.
  5. , Amnesty, About Saydnaya, 2017.
  6. , Huffington Post, Syria killed thousands in secret mass hangings inside prison, Amnesty reports, 2017.
  7. , Amnesty, About Saydnaya, 2017.
  8. , Amnesty, Public statement, 2005.
  10. , Amnesty International Report 2009 - Syria.
  11. , The Syrian Human Rights Committee, Amnesty International Annual Report on Syria Covering events from January – December 2002, 2004.
  12. , Human Rights Watch, Syria: Investigate Sednaya Prison Deaths, 2008.
  13. , The Syrian Human Rights Committee, Sednaya Prison Massacre, 2009.
  14. , The Syrian Human Rights Committee, Sednaya Prison Massacre, 2009.
  15. , WikiLeaks, Seidnaya prison riots stir conspiracy theories, 2008.
  16. , Human Rights Watch, Syria: Investigate Sednaya Prison Deaths, 2008.
  17. , BBC Arabic,Damascus: Extremists Behind Sednaya Prison's riot, 2008.
  18. , Middle East Eye, Former detainees recount torture organ harvesting Syria's prisons, 2016.
  19. , ABC News, Mass deaths in Syrian jails amount to crime of extermination, 2016
  20. , Human Rights Watch, Mass deaths and torture, 2015
  21. , Amnesty report, Syria: Human slaughterhouse: mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria, 2017
  22. , Amnesty report, Syria: Human slaughterhouse: mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria, 2017, p. 32
  23. , Amnesty report, Syria: Human slaughterhouse: mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria, 2017, p. 33
  24. , Amnesty report, Syria: Human slaughterhouse: mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria, 2017, p. 40
  25. , Amnesty report, Syria: Human slaughterhouse: mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria, 2017, p. 40
  26. , Amnesty report, Syria: Human slaughterhouse: mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria, 2017, p. 6
  27. , Reuters, Amnesty says Syria executes, tortures thousands at prison; government denies, 2017
  28. Abouzeid, Rania (23 June 2014). "The Jihad Next Door". Politico. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
  29. "Behind the Black Flag: The Recruitment of an ISIS Killer". The New York Times. 21 December 2015.
  30. "Thousands of Inmates Killed in Sednaya Prison from Torture, Disease, Malnutrition: Former Prisoner". The Syrian Observer. 2015.
  31. "Ex-detainee tells about horror of Sednaya Prison, 285 Security Branch". Zaman Al Wasl. 2016.
  32. "If the Dead Could Speak - Mass Deaths and Torture in Syria's Detention Facilities". Human Rights Watch. 2015.
  33. "هيثم المالح". Al Jazeera. 2011-03-10. Retrieved 8 December 2016.

See also

External links

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