The names of those sentenced to death were called once a week. These men were removed from the group cells of Sednaya Prison and chained together. They were usually held in designated cells for their last three days of life, during which time they were deprived of food and water. Apparently this made them die more easily, less messily. The killing itself was done on the ground floor, in the reception hall, using a gallows constructed of metal pipes that was large enough to dispatch several victims at once.
The victims were not criminals but political prisoners. They had been jailed for protesting, organizing, or fighting against Bashar Assad’s regime, which finally collapsed in December after nearly 14 years of revolution and counter-revolutionary war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and uprooted half the population. Some of them had been arrested simply because they came from a rebellious neighborhood, or because one of their relatives was suspected of opposition. Sednaya Prison—otherwise known as the “human slaughterhouse”—was the most notorious of the dozens of prisons run by the regime. Prisons had always been central to Assadist rule. From 1970—when Assad’s father Hafez seized power in a coup—a comprehensive system of surveillance, detention, and torture terrified Syrians and turned the country into a “kingdom of silence.”
Read More: Tales of Torture Go Unheeded in Syria
Syrians found their voices in 2011 when, in the context of the wider Arab Spring, they rose up against nearly a half-century of the regime’s brutal repression. But they paid an enormous price. Assad responded by declaring war on the people. Iran and later Russia dispatched troops to save him, while Turkey and Gulf states backed rebel militias. And as the cities burned, the prisons were transformed into death camps. A Syrian human rights network estimated in August that at least 160,000 men and women remained arbitrarily detained or forcibly disappeared. The corpses of detainees fill the mass graves that are still being uncovered today.
The result is the mass traumatization of Syrian society. Recovery from such terrible crimes requires a full accounting and at least a degree of justice. The Prisons Museum, where I work as an editor, is at the forefront of this effort. It brings together investigative journalism, human rights advocacy, and cutting-edge technology to shed light on horrors that the perpetrators would prefer remain hidden.
The surviving prisoners in Sednaya Prison were liberated by rebel fighters and local civilians in the early hours of Dec. 8 last year, as Assad fled to Moscow. A few days later, a Prisons Museum team entered the facility and began to document every room and object.
The team was applying the methodology developed for our first project—the ISIS Prisons Museum. By 2017, with the ISIS defeat, many of the buildings that it had used as prisons were being demolished or reclaimed by their original owners. This meant evidence of the crimes committed within their walls was being lost. So the Prisons Museum filmed every inch of every room using 360 degree cameras. It recorded the names scratched on the walls and collected the torture tools and over 70,000 documents ISIS had left behind. Then it tracked down and interviewed hundreds of survivors of these prisons. When the forensic evidence and the witness testimony were cross-referenced, they provided compelling proof of crimes committed.
The same methodology allowed the Prisons Museum to work out the means of mass murder at Sednaya. Our team relied on the accounts of those prisoners who had been held in the cells above the prison’s reception hall. They reported hearing heavy metal objects being dragged on execution nights. The accounts of former prisoners in Tadmur Prison—the most notorious before Sednaya was built—were also useful. These men had witnessed executions at Tadmur in the 1980s on a similar gallows, but one made of wood rather than metal. Once they knew what they were looking for, our team was able to locate the metal pipes scattered throughout the prison and reconstruct the gallows. Bags full of nooses had already been found.
Then the documents that our team discovered at Sednaya show what happened to the corpses of the victims. Those sentenced to death and executed on the gallows were transported directly to mass graves, except when the roads were closed by fighting. On those occasions, the bodies were stored temporarily in the prison’s “salt room” to slow decomposition. Those killed under torture, or by starvation, or medical neglect, on the other hand, were transported first to military hospitals where pretexts were invented for the deaths. A common one was, “respiratory failure due to tuberculosis and fluid-electrolyte imbalance disorder.” (Both the Assad regime and ISIS built intensely bureaucratic systems; both of them documented their own crimes, and produced more than enough evidence to convict their operatives.)
The Syria Prisons Museum launched on Sept. 15. Visitors to the website will be able to take virtual 3D tours of Sednaya Prison, watch survivor testimonies, and read detailed reports on the history and administration of the facility. Further investigations will be uploaded regularly on both the ISIS and Syria Prisons Museum websites.
Both projects aim to support victims and, if possible, to achieve justice. Evidence produced by the ISIS Prisons Museum has already been used in a German court to convict war criminals. The hope is that the evidence produced by the Syria Prisons Museum will also be used against the crimes of the Assad regime.
Even when our work does not result in convictions, we hope to offer some level of closure to the relatives of the disappeared by shedding light on their fates. We hope to combat denialism of these crimes, both in Syria and abroad, and to build a national memory for Syrians and Iraqis, so that present and future generations can reflect on what happened, and deter its recurrence.
The stakes could not be higher. Syria’s current government has in some cases released Assadist figures accused of massacres and appointed former militia leaders accused of crimes against civilians to high ranks in the new army. The logic is understandable; the government is focused on solidifying its authority and eliminating potential threats. But society has different priorities, and demands rapid, visible justice.
The alternative to organized, transparent, legal accountability is vigilantism and generalized revenge attacks which threaten to spill over into sectarian violence, and risk destabilizing Syria’s fragile transition. That is why our project is not just about Syria’s past, but its future too.
The post How Our Digital Museum Is Uncovering Assad’s Crimes in Syria appeared first on TIME.
