Pain floods his body. It spits and crackles like electricity. Every day for three months, the guards have hung him by his arms from the ceiling. Every day for three months they have beaten him with whatever they can find.
Belts, pipes, steel rods, it makes no difference. Once, they even used the metal tracks from a tank.
Beyond the ceaseless agony, he is tortured by the knowledge that the jailors aren’t even trying to get him to confess. After all, he’s already been convicted. He understands that all this is just violence for its own sake. The purest form of sadism.
Sednaya Prison is also known as ‘Al-Maslakh Al-Bashari’ – the human slaughterhouse. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International estimate that over 13,000 prisoners died there from torture between 2011 and 2015 alone, with another 13,000 executed over that period.
To call Mohamad Kafarjoume ‘lucky’ would be grotesque, but at least he survived Sednaya. He was, he tells me over lunch, the first person sent there for protesting during the Syrian revolution.
It was August 2011, and he was at a peaceful gathering in central Damascus when government forces snatched him off the street and took him straight to a military court. Following a quick and farcical ‘trial’ he was sent to Sednaya, where he would moulder for almost a decade.
His crime? That offence so beloved by squalid dictatorships everywhere: ‘Insulting the government.’
David Patrikarakos in Sednaya Prison, also known as ‘Al-Maslakh Al-Bashari’ – the human slaughterhouse
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International estimate that over 13,000 prisoners died at Sednaya from torture between 2011 and 2015 alone, with another 13,000 executed over that period
The prison sits just 19 miles north of the capital Damascus. Nestled within the Qalamoun Mountains, almost 4,000ft (1,200m) above sea level, its views over the surrounding countryside are incongruously beautiful.
After the ostrich-necked tyrant Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus for Russia, this is one of the first places the victorious rebels of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – and the newly liberated Syrian people – went.
I remember the images well. Desperate families searching for their relatives amid the chaos. Weeping mothers holding photos of long-disappeared sons. Liberated prisoners walking unsteadily into the light.
And, scattered throughout almost every scene I saw: cables, sticks and, in one instance, an ‘iron press’ used to crush bodies – the trappings of torture.
What most struck me, though, was the drilling as rescue teams bore through floors to reveal yet more prisoners locked away and stuffed underground. Prison staff fled quickly and are now considered the country’s most-wanted fugitives – second only to key members of the Assad family.
Sednaya was the apotheosis of the regime’s brutality, a byword for the savagery Assad inflicted on his own people – and now I have come to see it for myself.
I arrive in the early afternoon, driving up the narrow grids of streets and white and beige flat-roofed buildings that make up the town of Sednaya below.
The prison courtyard is strewn with the detritus of revolution: smashed brick, shards of glass and pieces of cracked concrete.
After HTS came the people – in their thousands. They tore this place apart, in rage and in desperation to find the loved ones who had disappeared into Sednaya’s steel jaws. Many are still looking. Dotted on the courtyard walls are posters of men. These are the missing.
To call Mohamad Kafarjoume ‘lucky’ would be grotesque, but at least he survived Sednaya
The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that by August 2024, more than 157,000 had been arrested or forcibly disappeared across the country – including 5,274 children and 10,221 women – since the beginning of the revolution in March 2011.
Under the former regime, Syria itself became a prison, with Bashar al-Assad its keeper.
Through the courtyard, I enter the facility up a flight of stairs and, after a few minutes, find myself in a long room with a row of cages, or more correctly pens, pressed up against one wall.
They cannot be more than two feet in depth, and just tall enough for one person to stand in. It was here that Mohamad Kafarjoume’s torment began. Along with 40 to 50 other prisoners, packed side by side, he was led here, told to strip and to hand over his possessions.
Then it was time for the Sednaya ‘welcome’. While the arrivals stood there naked, the guards began to beat them relentlessly and spat on them, while cursing their mothers and sisters.
The floor must have once been concrete, but now it has been torn up, only mud and dirt remains. In the middle of the room is a huge hole. Either the people were digging to find further levels of cells – and prisoners – beneath, or they were searching for mass graves.
On the floor by one pen I see a prosthetic leg. It is a chilling sight, just lying there. I cannot help but wonder what happened to the human being once attached to it.
Kafarjoume explained to me the guards would take the prosthetic limbs for two reasons: either because they feared the prisoners might use them as a weapon, or because they were about to be executed. Behind the execution room, there were, he said, mounds of hundreds of prosthetic limbs.
A few rooms along, I wander into the shower room. It is yet another block of yellow-beige walls. Rows of cubicles fill the space, each with a narrow piece of black piping – the shower heads – jutting down from the ceiling.
In Sednaya’s shower rooms, prisoners would be allocated 55 seconds under the water – linger a moment longer and they could expect a beating
A short climb to nowhere: these are the steps that condemned prisoners would walk up to be hanged
Prisoners would be allocated 55 seconds under the water – linger a moment longer and they could expect a beating. ‘My first shower was after six months,’ Kafarjoume says. ‘And I wish I never went in there because they beat the s**t out of me. The water alternated between utterly freezing and boiling. It was just more torture.’
By the showers, I see two metal poles on the floor used to beat the prisoners. To make the beatings even more vicious, these had been filled with cement.
‘I realised they were doing this because once they forgot one of the poles in my cell,’ Kafarjoume told me. ‘We always wondered why they were so heavy. Many people died from those beatings.’
At the end of the room by the grilled windows I see a portable staircase of just four steps, extending to around two feet high.
A short climb to nowhere: these are the steps that condemned prisoners would walk up to be hanged. Wherever you are in Sednaya, even in the washing room, you cannot escape the furnishings of murder.
I’m aware that it’s cliched, but as I descend several staircases into the bowels of the prison, I’m put in mind of Dante’s Inferno: as its protagonist descends into ever more hopeless circles of hell, so he also journeys still farther away from God.
To descend into Sednaya is to feel yourself becoming ever more distant from the light – from everything decent and gentle.
The lower we go the more I run headlong into fury’s footprint. Walls have holes knocked through them, floors are mounds of rubble. In the search for the missing, no brick has been left unturned.
I stumble across yet another set of cells. Here the smell is so bad that my fixer Hassan (not his real name) rushes past me retching. ‘The smell of death, David. It is so strong! I feel sick,’ he says.
It is the same smell I have encountered in eastern Europe and Africa: rotting flesh mixed with stale sweat and fear. It is thick and pungent, unmistakable. And still there.
We stagger on towards a dark and terrifying room with cells along the side.
I am now in one of the worst parts of the worst prison in Syria. For years this was one of the most wretched places on earth.
Hassan now has a tissue clasped over his mouth. ‘I’m worried we’ll catch a disease here, David,’ he explains. I walk into one of the cells. It is large enough to hold just one person, but the guards here would regularly stuff over a dozen prisoners into it. They would be able only to stand up, packed together like bricks in a furnace.
When the prison was liberated and these cells opened, stacks of bodies were found, still on their feet. People who had died and were just left here.
When I later showed Kafarjoume a photo of the room he recognised it instantly. He was stuffed into one of those tiny cells with others.And when he wasn’t being tortured, he would hear the screams of those around him who were. It went on 24 hours a day. And it drove him mad. ‘I lost my mind in there,’ he confessed.
It wasn’t only the physical torture. The psychological side of things was almost as bad. Prisoners were blindfolded almost all the time to prevent them bonding with their jailors.
‘To descend into Sednaya is to feel yourself becoming ever more distant from the light – from everything decent and gentle’
Everything was geared towards depriving them of their humanity. Every day the guards would call out numbers, never names, and those whose number came up were taken from their cells and executed. Kafarjoume’s was 44. His number was never called, and I asked him why he thought he had been so lucky.
As the first prisoner of the 2011 Syrian revolution in Sednaya, there was media attention around him, he told me. Television channels like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya had run his story, so the regime were careful not to execute him, though he could have died from the torture many times.
Even the prison doctor, a man bound by the Hippocratic oath to care for people, turned out to be a brutal sadist.
He would enter cells for random check-ups and if he found that anyone was sick, he would mark them for death.
Kafarjoume experienced his ‘treatment’ personally. ‘He beat me on my chest and leg, and even broke some of my ribs,’ he said.
Then there was rampant disease, just as merciless. ‘The worst was the scabies,’ he tells me.
‘You could not help but scratch yourself until the blood began to pour out. People who got sick from this had no respite, not even for a minute. They kept on scratching until they died. It was horrific.’
As he told me his story the day after I’d gone round the prison, I grew almost desperate to hear something – anything – positive.
‘I know Sednaya was a living hell,’ I said to him, ‘But were there any good days?’
He paused to think. ‘Well, sometimes, when they took ten or 12 people out of our cell to be executed it meant that because those people never came back and because they always brought the same amount of food each time, I got to eat properly.’
David Patrikarakos with Abu Omar, who is now charged with guarding the facility for the Ministry of Security
This did not make me feel any better.
I looked at Kafarjoume and thought of the line from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book about the Soviet Gulag, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich: ‘How much can a man endure and still remain a man?’
‘I spent ten years in Sednaya,’ Kafarjoume told me. ‘I left my family when my kids were very young. And now they are older and they don’t accept me as a father. They don’t sit with me. They thought I was dead, and then I came back to life.’
Finally, after several hours, it was time to leave. I drove past a couple of bombed-out vehicles and an abandoned Syrian army tank.
At the entrance I met Abu Omar, who is now charged with guarding the facility for the Ministry of Security.
He told me about the day after Assad fell, when he arrived here and came upon the hundreds of emaciated prisoners so pale they were almost translucent.
As I left through the prison gates, I saw what I so often see across Damascus: the Free Syrian Flag painted on to a wall. My eyes dropped to the words written in Arabic below.
‘This is a slaughterhouse,’ it read. ‘We will never forgive, and we will never forget.’
