For many Syrians, the fall of President Bashar al-Assad provides an opportunity — at last — to try to discover the fates of loved ones who disappeared into a notorious military prison that has become a symbol of human rights abuses under his rule.
The rebels who swept across Syria and claimed to have taken the capital, Damascus, appear to have also captured the prison complex of Sednaya, where human rights groups say Mr. al-Assad kept large numbers of political prisoners, according to reports and videos circulating on social media on Sunday.
For more than a decade, human rights groups and news organizations including The New York Times have documented the torture, sexual assault and mass execution of detainees in the government’s network of prisons, of which Sednaya, on the northern outskirts of Damascus, was the most notorious and feared.
For relatives and friends, the absence of information about those imprisoned has been agonizing, compounded by the knowledge that detainees may have been tortured or killed.
The rebels appear to have made the prisons a central focus of their campaign.
On Sunday, media outlets in the Arab world aired a video of a group of men who said they were broadcasting from a Syrian state television studio. The men, who said they represented rebel forces, announced “the liberation of the city of Damascus, the toppling of the dictator Bashar al-Assad, and the liberation of all oppressed prisoners from the regime’s jails.”
On social media, Syrians posted photos and identification numbers of loved ones who had been detained, hoping that someone might have spotted them finally free.
Videos emerging from north of Damascus showed groups of men walking through city streets at night, reportedly after being freed from Sednaya. The videos, from the town of Mneen, about three miles from the prison, were verified by The New York Times.
Ahmed al-Misilmani, a journalist in northwestern Syria, said that his first thought when he heard reports that rebels had captured the prison was of friends who had been held there.
“We hope to God they are still alive,” said Mr. al-Misilmani, who said he was displaced from his home near the city of Homs six years ago.
More than 130,000 people have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and detention by the government, according to a report in August by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which began its count when the conflict began in 2011. It said that more than 15,000 people had died “due to torture” by government forces between 2011 and July this year.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2016, Mr. al-Assad said that anyone in prison in Syria had committed a crime, suggested that the family members of detainees were lying and insisted that the numbers of prisoners showed Syria’s justice system was working.
But a secret, industrial-scale system of arbitrary arrests and torture prisons was central to Mr. al-Assad’s ability to crush a civilian uprising against his rule and then to overcome a rebellion, according to reports from human rights groups.
While the Syrian military, backed by Russia and Iran, fought armed rebels for territory, the government waged a war on civilians, throwing hundreds of thousands into filthy dungeons, according to reporting by The New York Times and human rights groups.
Many prisoners died in conditions so dire that a United Nations investigation labeled the process “extermination.”
While the regime maintained an archipelago of jails, Sednaya was often the final destination for prisoners detained elsewhere, according to Amnesty International, which said that tens of thousands of people across the country had died in custody since 2011.
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