09/07/2025
SAYDNAYA, Syria—Inside Bashar al-Assad’s most-notorious death factory, the hangings had become routine.
Once a month, around midnight, the guards at Saydnaya prison would call the names of the condemned, usually dozens at a time. They wrapped nooses around their necks, then dragged tables from beneath their feet with a scraping that echoed through the building. Those in nearby cells heard a gagging sound as the men choked to death.
Then, in mid-March of 2023, the pace picked up dramatically, according to six witnesses.
“They gathered 600 people and killed them in three days, about 200 each night,” said Abdel Moneim Al-Qaid, a 37-year-old former rebel soldier who was arrested after handing himself in for what he thought was an amnesty deal with the government.
The 2023 mass killing, previously unreported, came just as the Syrian president was poised to break out of his international isolation. After more than a decade of using bombing, torture, and chemical attacks to crush an internal insurrection, Assad was deep in talks with regional players that would lead Syria to rejoin the Arab League. Some Arab states and Western officials viewed the rebellion as a lost cause, and sought to embrace Assad and freeze the conflict.
The sudden collapse of the Assad regime late last year revealed just how badly the international community miscalculated. In one of their first acts as they swept into Damascus in the predawn darkness on Dec. 8, rebels stormed the prison and shot the locks off the doors, freeing the remaining prisoners and pulling back the veil on one of the worst examples of systematic state killing since World War II.
Inside the prison, a pair of concrete buildings ringed by razor wire on a mountainside near Damascus, Assad’s regime carried out industrial-scale torture and death that likely killed tens of thousands of people over more than a decade. The regime orchestrated the killing in a bureaucratic manner rarely seen in recent history. Assad’s security apparatus kept meticulous records of the detainees’ transfer to the prison and other facilities, court documents and death certificates of those executed.
“It’s the worst atrocity of the 21st century in terms of the number killed and the way a government was directly involved,” said Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes. “I do draw a line to the N***s and to Soviet Russia in terms of the organized nature of state terror.”
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Under the Assad regime, Saydnaya prison became a mass-killing machine; ‘a symbol of shame for the whole world.’
