CNN’s chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward gets access to Syria’s Saydnaya prison – dubbed the “human slaughterhouse” by Amnesty International – after rebel forces released prisoners from the notorious facility over the weekend.
Cries of “Allahu Akbar” and bursts of machine gun fire rang through the air as families gathered outside the prison waiting for news of missing or detained loved ones.
Maysoon Labut came from the southern city of Daraa looking for her three brothers and son-in-law. She was breathless and emotional as she conveyed the urgency of the situation.
“The red section of the prison, they have been trying for days to reach it. There’s no oxygen because the ventilation went out and so in the end all of them may die. For the sake of Allah, help them,” she told Ward.
Inside the prison, where tens of thousands of Syrians were forcibly disappeared under the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, workers from the White Helmets volunteer organization frantically drilled and hammered through concrete to find an entrance to the red area. A sniffer dog lent support. But no entrance was found.
In another part of the prison, family members walked around, using lights from cell phones and sifting through the vast trove of documents the fleeing regime left behind, searching for clues as to the fate of their loved ones.
Saydnaya has come to symbolize industrial-scale arbitrary detention and torture – all to keep one man in power.
Even after the collapse of Assad’s regime, the legacy of his cruelty lives on – the cruelty of not knowing, and the agony of waiting.
