Families search for their loved ones in Syria’s Sednaya prison after the fall of al-Assad. jail news
Rescuers and relatives of those missing in Syria are searching for their loved ones in Damascus’s notorious Sednaya prison following the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
On Monday, the prison was undergoing an intensive search of “hidden underground cells in which detainees were reportedly being held,” said the White Helmets rescue group, which dispatched emergency teams to the facility.
Al-Assad’s police state was known for generations as one of the harshest police states in the Middle East, holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners.
Shocked and excited prisoners came out of Syrian prisons on Sunday after the fall of al-Assad’s government. They screamed with joy as they walked out of one of the world’s most notorious detention systems.
During Syria’s war that began in 2011, security forces held hundreds of thousands of people in detention camps, where international human rights organizations said abuses were widespread. Families were often told nothing about the fate of their loved ones.
As the rebels captured town after town in a fierce eight-day campaign, prisons were often among their first objectives. The most notorious prisons in and around Damascus were finally opened on the final night and Sunday morning of the uprising.
Across Syria, families wept as they were reunited with their children, siblings, spouses and parents who disappeared years ago into the impenetrable gulags of the al-Assad dynasty’s five-decade rule.
