Saydnaya prison sits on a forbidding hill about half an hour’s drive from the centre of Damascus.
In the last few days the entrance has been repainted in the green, white and black of Syria’s revolutionary flag. The new colours did not dispel the sinister atmosphere of the place.
As I walked through the gates, I thought of the despair that must have gripped the thousands of Syrians who made the same journey.
One estimate is that more than 30,000 detainees were killed in Saydnaya in the years since the start of the Syrian war in 2011. That is a large proportion of the more than 100,000 people, almost all men but including thousands of women – as well as children – who disappeared without trace into Bashar al-Assad’s gulag.
Other parts of Assad’s prison system were less cruel. Phone calls home were allowed, and families were allowed to visit.
But Saydnaya was the dark and rotten heart of the regime. Fear of being consigned there and killed without anyone knowing what had happened was a central part of the Assad regime’s system of coercion and repression.
The authorities did not have to tell families who had been incarcerated there. Allowing them to fear the worst was another way of applying pressure. The regime kept its boot on the throat of Syrians because of the power, reach and savagery of its myriad and overlapping intelligence agencies, and because of the routine use of torture and execution.
I was in other infamous prisons in the days after they were liberated, including Abu Salim, the former Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi’s notorious jail in Tripoli and Pul-e-Charki outside Kabul in Afghanistan.
Neither were as foul and pestilent as Saydnaya. In its overcrowded cells men had to urinate into plastic bags as their access to latrines was limited.
When the locks were smashed open, they left behind their filthy rags and scraps of blankets which were all they had to cover themselves as they slept on the floor. Torture and execution have already been documented in Saydnaya.
In the months to come it is certain that more information about the horrors perpetrated inside its walls will emerge from former inmates.
In Saydnaya’s corridors you can see how hard it will be to mend the country Assad broke to try to save his regime. Now that the prison has been broken open, like the country, it has become a microcosm of all the challenges Syria faces since the Assad regime crumpled and was swept away.
The record
One challenge is making a record of exactly what the regime did to its victims. In a sign of how far Syria has come in just a week, volunteers went to the prison to try to preserve Saydnaya’s records.
Paperwork is scattered around offices and even on the concrete floor of the prison yard. Families pick up files and sheets of tattered documentation, trying to find a name, a date or a place that they recognise.
The disarray of the records looks as if someone tried to destroy what was done here in the name of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. When dictators and their henchmen fall, making sure they don’t take the truth with them is a big part of a better future.