Saydnaya prison in Syria was turned into an extermination camp over the course of the war years. The accusation, an extremely serious one directed at Bashar al-Assad's government, comes from an Amnesty International report published on 7 February. The document brings together the testimonies of 84 people, including prison police officers, detainees and magistrates. According to the organisation, an unspecified number of people — estimated at between five thousand and thirteen thousand — were hanged inside the prison between 2011 and 2015. At least once a week, the report states, prisoners were executed in groups of dozens, following arbitrary trials and torture. A massacre carried out "in complete secrecy".

Rape, torture and mass hangings

The executions, Amnesty International continues, also affected civilians accused of being close to rebel groups. Some testimonies speak of a "body count" that was carried out every morning: if the number did not satisfy those in charge of the prison, other prisoners were taken from their cells and tortured until a confession was extracted. At that point it was possible to kill them after extremely swift judicial proceedings, lasting as little as one or two minutes: "The judge would ask the prisoner's name and for confirmation that they had committed the crime of which they were accused. But the guilty verdict came regardless of the answer. These are trials that have nothing to do with the law," accused another former magistrate.

To this day, thousands of people remain detained at Saydnaya, some thirty kilometres from the capital Damascus. And, according to the NGO, torture, lack of water and food, as well as lack of medical care, still represent the "norm" inside the prison. The report adds accounts of atrocious violence: "Crimes that are no longer war crimes but crimes against humanity." Omar, a young man who was still a secondary school student at the time of his arrest, spoke of guards who "ordered all the detainees to undress and enter a bathroom one at a time" to be raped by prison warders or by other prisoners, forced to do so.

The United Nations' first accusations against Syria in 2016

In the past, Amnesty International had spoken of 17,700 people hanged in Syrian prisons during the war. The figure of 13,000 in a single facility therefore suggests a significant increase. "The horrors described in the report," commented Lynn Maalouf, director of the NGO's Beirut section, "reveal the existence of a policy authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government, with the aim of crushing every form of dissent among the population." The official spoke of "cold-blooded killings of thousands of defenceless prisoners, in addition to physical and psychological torture."

As early as 2016, the United Nations had accused Assad's government of having orchestrated "extermination policies" in its detention centres. The testimonies gathered by Amnesty International thus confirm the existence of an atrocious reality, in the context of a war that has lasted five years and has cost 310,000 people their lives.