Syrian survivor recalls torture, freedom from Sednaya prison

(MENAFN) A Syrian man imprisoned for nearly six years at the infamous Sednaya prison recounted to Anadolu his harrowing experiences of torture and the night of his release following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime last year.

Ammar Dughmush, from Damascus, was detained in a 2018 ambush in Eastern Ghouta and initially held at the Mezzeh Military Airport’s intelligence branch before being transferred to Sednaya, often called a “human slaughterhouse.”

He recalled being packed into a meat refrigeration truck with 145 other detainees and beaten upon arrival. “From the moment I entered that place, my life turned into a complete disaster,” Dughmush said.

Accused of “being armed,” Dughmush endured severe torture at Mezzeh, including being hung from the ceiling with hands tied behind his back. “My shoulders almost dislocated… My joints were beaten with sticks,” he said.

At Sednaya, extreme overcrowding was routine. His cell, meant for 60, held 120 prisoners, with inmates stacked on top of each other. “In the mornings, some were found dead from suffocation,” he said. Prisoners faced life-threatening punishments like turning off the cell’s only fan, causing rapid oxygen depletion.

Diseases ran rampant. “People would start hallucinating, lose bladder control, and die within three days. There was no medication,” Dughmush recalled.

He described Sednaya’s “welcome phase,” where prisoners were stripped, beaten, and humiliated. Torture methods included the “band,” in which guards repeatedly beat detainees’ feet. Dughmush singled out a guard known as “Abu Yaqub” for targeting elderly prisoners. “He would shout, ‘If you’d raised your sons better, the country wouldn’t be like this,’ and beat them. Many died from these assaults.”

On the night of Dec. 8, 2024, Dughmush heard sirens followed by silence and then unfamiliar voices. Around 3 a.m., someone shouted “Allahu Akbar,” and gunfire erupted. “At first, we thought it was a trap by the guards. Then a prisoner looked through a vent and said he saw a man with a long beard and a gun,” he said.

It was a revolutionary fighter who had come to free them. “Someone called the azan out loud. It was the first proper call to prayer we had heard in years. We prayed standing. It felt like breaking our chains,” Dughmush said. When the prison doors opened, he described the overwhelming sense of freedom: “We had no idea where to go. We only knew one thing: the shackles were broken.”

Outside, the streets were filled with people. “Just seeing asphalt was enough to make me feel full. I didn’t eat for two days. I couldn’t believe it was real,” he said. He later reunited with his daughter. “When I saw her running toward me, my knees gave out. We hugged for 15 minutes. After everything – the humiliation, the disease, the beatings – God let me hold her again. That was the moment of freedom.”

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