Source reference: Forensic Architecture collaboration with Amnesty International. Derivative illustration created with AI tools for artistic and explanatory purposes. Not an original photograph or evidentiary reconstruction.
Content warning: This episode contains descriptions of torture, imprisonment, and state violence. Listener discretion is advised.
The drip of forgotten pipes.
A distant metal groan.
Boots on concrete.
A scrape on a stained wall and then - silence.
Even whispers feared the dark.
Men vanished into the air thick with dust and dread,
packed into rusting steel boxes and cages -
only waiting, breathing, enduring.
New arrivals learned fast.
The sounds told the story:
keys, cages, and the dull rhythm of bodies greeted by iron.
Veterans knew each strike by sound alone.
There was no law here - only mercy, if the guards allowed it.
A crackle of a loudspeaker.
A command, cold and final:
“You are now in Saydnaya.
You wake on command.
You sleep on command.
You eat on command.”
Today, we go to a place built to erase memory.
A prison that came to embody the machinery of repression under Syria’s former president, Bashar al-Assad.
It’s been a year since the collapse of Al-Assad’s regime.
In December 2024, the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham toppled the Syrian government in a lightning offensive.
The former president fled the country, and Ahmed al-Shaara was installed as Syria’s new leader.
As the regime collapsed, prisons were broken open across the country.
Tens of thousands were freed after years - even decades - of incarceration.
By then, Saydnaya’s horrors were already known.
At the height of the civil war, now fifteen years old, human rights groups had described the facility, some twenty kilometres from Damascus, as a “human slaughterhouse” -
a place where thousands were executed or perished in atrocious conditions.
Most were protesters and fighters who rose up against the regime during the Arab uprisings of 2011.
Saydnaya is infamous.
Its atrocities have been documented, mapped, reconstructed in memory and testimony.
But there is a chapter missing - a moment almost no one outside these walls has likely ever heard about.
Before the mass hangings.
Before the machinery of disappearance reached its full industrial scale.
There was a revolt.
A prison uprising and an atrocity that shook the foundations of this place -
and revealed the cracks already forming in a regime that believed it could never fall.
Saydnaya was not the oldest prison of the Assads.
The fortress opened in 1987, a few years after Bashar Al-Assad’s father, Hafez Al-Assad, had crushed a revolt against his government.
Tucked into the Qalmoun Mountains, a rugged sweep in western Syria, natural obstacles of windswept slopes dotted with pines, olives and scattered villages surrounded prison.
In the highland climate, hot and dry summers could reach about 30C while winters temperatures could drop near to or below freezing with snow at higher peaks.
The semi-arid flat terrain and hill, stark, bare and with limited tree cover were scoured by patrols, before a snaking tarmacked road lined with olive green pine trees led to several checkpoints run by military police.
Beyond the trees lay Saydnaya.
From the sky, the ‘red building’ - a distinctive three-pronged star-shaped building dominating the entire facility - was nestled in a maze of military barracks.
Adjacent to that lies the ‘white building’, an L-shaped building also surrounded by army installations and where other prisoners were kept.
Ringed by minefields and three reinforced concrete walls, dotted with watch towers and rings of barbed wire, escape was near impossible. No one, save the guards and jailers, had ever seen the inside.
The prison had been veiled in secrecy for over a decade.
Inside Saydnaya, nothing happened unwatched.
Cold, fixed cameras stared down every corridor
- cell blocks, hallways, the exercise yards,
even the kitchens and the heavy steel entrances.
Infrared lenses scanned the dark,
tracking bodies through shadows,
making sure no corner
ever truly disappeared from view.
And behind those walls,
another kind of surveillance ran quietly.
In dim offices, guards filled thick black notebooks —
lines of cramped handwriting,
names, factions, whispered loyalties,
religious leanings, political history.
Every man inside was catalogued,
sorted, studied,
not just for control -
but for leverage.
Who might break.
Who might inform.
Who could be used against his own cellmates.
Even torture could be outsourced,
handed off to those already held in chains.
This was a system that didn't just watch you.
It learned you.
And then it used you.
New prisoners were given a ‘reception party’.
They were beaten, processed, stripped, and broken in cages.
Those who didn’t follow the rules were sent to the room with the black door.
Behind there, they were tortured.
After the ‘reception’, they were then flung into cells of four square meters, with barely enough room to stand or sit in the gloom, the silence only punctured by the sound of brutal beatings.
Time became measured by meals and scarcity of water (10 litres per week for one person)
Newcomers were in a black box, largely scrubbed from the face of earth.
Those that complied were soon released out into the main cells to join the other men incarcerated.
Who were they?
They were the mirror of Syria’s political climate, a portrait of generational conflict across the region.
Like crashing water upon rocks, charged currents slowly reshaped the concrete fortress and what it contained.
The first wave, faded symbols of a long-dead democratic republic: aging communists, purged Ba’athists, Nasserists, and Saddam loyalists.
The second wave - Hafez al-Assad’s main nemesis - consisted of Islamists from the Fighting Vanguard and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Crammed into dank, sealed metal boxes - more like rusting ship containers than cells - they existed among ragged, sparse blankets, stale bread crusts, and the dregs of labeh yogurt spread and bulgur.
There they survived and slept amidst the dour stench of sweat, fungus, dirt and the blood of those who crossed the guards.
While life in Saydnaya was anything but normal, life settled into its own rhythm.
Prison life had its own grinding monotony.
Every moment was thoroughly scrutinised by the military police. Roll calls, exploitation, beatings, inspections, scrounging for food, beatings, smuggling goods and letters in and out, all while avoiding solitary and the dreaded black door.
It all became ritual to preserve sanity. But it all had its own routine:
· 05:00 – 07:00 – Breakfast
· 09:00 – 10:00 – ‘Breathing’ time
· 12:00 – Roll call
· 13:00 – Cleaning and maintenance
· 14:00 – Lunch
· 19:00 – Return to dormitories
Indignities remained ever-present.
Showers were often a vicious affair, with prisoners shoved in and out of the central bathroom in batches, hosed down like factory milk bottles being scoured for reuse.
A quick glance sideways, a shift of the gaze towards another detainee could land a prisoner behind the black door or weeks in solitary.
Family visits were rare.
It took months of legal limbo and bribery to obtain approval to go to the prison. After hours of walking to the prison, subjected to humiliating inspections and rustled for money, they met relatives, separated by a net, a meter apart.
The brief feel-good hormones of oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin released by a simple hug were withheld.
Families could be thrown out on a whim after months of obtaining approval and hours of waiting.
The bribes underpinned everything that kept Saydnaya turning: ‘The Invoice’.
Before the civil war, the facility soon became a preferred destination for some who had been transferred there, arriving from other prisons across Syria that had far worse reputations.
Inside Saydnaya, survival had a price tag.
Prisoners called it “the invoice.”
A quiet economy of despair -
and the easiest way to stay alive.
Families scraped together money.
Not for luxuries - but for a cup of lentils,
a slice of cheese, a spoon of jam,
medicine, clean clothes.
Everything had a cost.
And every cost fed the system.
Corruption wasn’t hidden -
it was the system.
If the guards got their cut,
radios slipped through,
letters passed between cells,
and food arrived from the outside.
Soon, a strange kind of economy flourished behind the walls.
Prisoners brewed alcohol the guards drank.
Televisions and metal bed frames were smuggled in, circling from wing to wing like contraband relics.
A small library appeared -
books on politics, psychology, religion.
Even a clinic opened, funded by detainees themselves.
By 2004, they had improved heating,
rigged light and power,
and renovated parts of the prison with tools
they shouldn’t have had…
but found anyway.
For some men, especially those who had survived worse prisons in Syria, Saydnaya even felt - in their words - “like half a release.”
One former prisoner put it plainly in the book Syrian Gulag:
“Can paradise be compared to hell?”
But paradise here was fragile.
It could vanish overnight, with a single order.
Because this wasn't mercy.
It was business.
The prison profited from its inmates.
And the guards could double prices,
cut rations,
or starve an entire wing
to force families to pay more.
As one detainee remembered:
“They made prison food even worse
so we had to buy from outside.
Everything was part of the invoice.”
In Saydnaya, even survival was a transaction but the quiet status quo flourished for a time.
But the prison was not impervious to the shifting currents of the Middle East. Like crashing water upon rocks, those currents slowly reshaped the stone fortress and what it contained. A new wave of prisoners was arriving.
Kurds, dissidents from the crushed civil society movement and riots that has spread across Syria in 2004, and, perhaps more potently, militant and quietist Salafi jihadists from across the region.
Syria had played its own game -
feeding flames abroad, with Kurdish, Lebanese and Palestinian militants.
Now it was cultivating jihadists when convenient,
exporting them like weapons.
But when Washington, mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, demanded cooperation, Damascus swept them up.
Attending a protest; participating in a sermon or listening to a preacher; acts of civil disobedience; tapes of even a moderate Salafist; all were one-way tickets to prison as repression was cranked up by Bashar al-Assad.
The new prisoners immediately impacted the prison.
Old dormitory lines blurred.
Veterans eyed the newcomers with suspicion as routines frayed. Far from defusing tensions between the warring wings, prison officials leant into them.
The guards called the democrats 'the spies' and whispered 'Al-Qa’ida' whenever the Salafis passed, never mind their differences.
In the yard, glances sharpened into stares; alliances frayed before they could form. One cell’s prayer was another’s proof of betrayal.
The wardens watched it all with quiet satisfaction.
Certain wings became ripe for ideological recruitment and mentoring for militant Salafism. After weeks of beatings, men turned to the radical scriptures. Some became converts and those already extreme on arrival deepened their zealotry, fantasising about liberating Syria from Saydnaya.
The call to prayer echoed down corridors and the Islamic legal system - derived from the Qur’an and the Sunna, the teaching of the prophet Muhammad - began to govern relations in Islamist circles as the newly arrived Salafis tried to find solidarity amongst the prison’s corruption and lawlessness.
The “spies”, more moderate Islamists and democrats, pressed up close to their more conservative neighbours, grumbled.
Being proscribed as a heretic for reading in the library about capitalist economics, admonished for turning a profit off of alcohol to buy-off guards or get better food or berated for having a liberal world-view was not ideal in an already cruel prison system where space was tight.
Some veterans who had spent many years within the prison had worked for years to get TVs and radios into dormitories.
Hot-headed, militant newcomers disrupting that routine, trying to prohibit music and other hard earned privileges rubbed some the wrong way.
But it was dangerous to confront many of these men.
“A more militant current of Al-Qaeda was born in Saydnaya,” said one detainee. “This group considered everyone infidels, even Salafi-jihadists and Al-Qaeda.” Even Al-Qa’ida, who had a prison ‘emir’, steered clear, wary of these absolutists loyal not to Osama Bin Laden’s creed but those of Islamic State.
But rumours passed from dormitory in dribs and drabs from cells to wings, fed by guards, whispers from office of the prison director itself. Informants spun lies and reports trickled back to the military police as Islamist prisoners, moderate or extreme, looked over their shoulder in corridors and conversations.
One affront, one alleged ‘blasphemy’ finally became too much .
A makeshift Sharia court was quietly conveyed in a dormitory.
A pipe.
A beating in the dark.
A man dead.
Others broken beside him.
A murder - not by guards,
but by prisoners.
Men began treating their fellow inmates
not as victims of the state
but as heretics to be purified.
A red line crossed but mangeable.
And then something unthinkable.
An escape.
No one escapes Saydnaya.
No one leaves unless the state releases them -
or kills them.
But a man vanished.
Some say he slipped out in sacks of flour.
Others say he walked out with visitors dressed as a guard.
No one knew.
Everyone talked.
The impossible happened. And the prison was awash with talk.
For the guards, the murder meant little.
Violence was routine.
But an escape?
That was rebellion.
A prisoner dead. Sharia law behind bars. Loose prisoners. Corruption running amok.
Chaos at Saydnaya had stirred power beyond the walls.
The prison director was transferred. His replacement came down hard.
Gas for cooking was removed, electricity for heating and dim bulbs was cut off, ‘breathing time’ became a luxury, and the ‘invoice system’ that brought privileges and perks that helped prisoners survive was rolled back.
Every Salafi prisoner was monitored or faced draconian punishments.
For two years, as the iron-fist endured, prisoners bent rules. Being caught could land you in solitary or a torture chamber but desperation for a morsel of food outside dour army rations and warmth, light to read encouraged risk taking. Squeezed to breaking point, a prison drowning in desperation and fanaticism, a fire was rising in the prison.
For two years, this system endured.
Two years of pressure.
Two years without relief.
Until the pressure snapped.
In spring, a light bulb was discovered by an officer. In the ensuing argument, insults were hurled and the prisoners attacked the outnumbered guard.
Battered and bruised, he returned to the prison director.
The prisoners weren’t punished, instead the prison direct promised them running water and electricity.
Celebrating, prisoners went down to the showers to wash their matted hair, tangled beards, and the filth from their bodies after weeks without washing. Soldiers with thick cables descended upon them, whipping the soles of their feet as they scrambled, clad in nothing but dirty towels and clothes wrapped around their waists.
They had been betrayed but power panicked.
Throngs of men surrounded the police. The guards were outnumbered, largely unarmed, and without the right gear.
The inmates lashed out with punches and kicks as panic set in.
Fearful jailers ran, slamming the heavy metal doors behind them - to no avail. Lockdown failed. One by one, the cell doors swung open or were forced apart as over a thousand prisoners cascaded out of their wings.
Illustration created with AI tools for artistic and explanatory purposes. Not an original photograph or evidentiary reconstruction.
A sharp, metallic clink - then a bloom of smoke arced through the air. Canisters tumbled across the concrete with a vicious clatter, trailing ghostly tendrils behind them as tear gas seeped into the halls. Gunfire cracked overhead as panicked guards fired warning shots into the air.
Atop the “white building,” smoke curled into the sky as crude piles of wood and old blankets burned on the rooftops - a signal, a desperate flare to an apathetic world.
As chaos reigned, a message came: it was time for negotiation. The prisoners submitted their demands to the authorities - an end to torture, fair family visits, trials in civilian not military courts, the abolition of solitary confinement, better food and healthcare.
Reasonable requests, in a normal prison.
The demands were submitted to the prison director, Military Intelligence, and several senior commanders. Miraculously, they were accepted.
Prisoners could scarcely believe it. They celebrated. The riot was over. Almost as suddenly as it had begun, the fires were extinguished.
An uneasy quiet fell over Saydnaya, as prison security slackened its grip almost completely.
Some celebrated. Others were uneasy. Something wasn’t right. No prison in Syria loosens its obsessive grip so willingly - not in Assad’s paranoid police state, where every operative spies on the other.
Behind the scenes, the regime was preparing for war.
A disturbances in the shower turned riot had been escalated to the Office of National Security.
Reports were no longer filtered through the prison director and military police for petty retaliation.
They were now being passed directly to very architects of Saydnaya; Military Intelligence, the most powerful and aggressive of all the security branches in Syria.
Summer: July
Morning sun crept into the sky. Cheers of joy rang down the halls.
“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,” echoed from wings.
Rumours swirled that a general amnesty was in the offing, a similar one offered by President Hafez Assad in the early 1990s.
Thousands had been released, now it was their turn.
The doors of the cells and dormitories opened.
Police, fresh faced recruits, came like factory-made soldiers, encased in black polymer and fibreglass, their faces sealed behind visors.
Cables in the hand the beatings began and prisoners were placed under arrest - again.
Prisoners were bound, the zip of tightening plastic, loops coiling shut, biting into skin turning wrists purple as names were checked off lists and men were dragged across floors.
Forced labourers and informants seized what they could, trinkets, odds and ends, televisions, small gas stoves; anything of value to the prisoners, courtesy of the prison director for their loyalty.
The police and their accomplices spread across the prison.
Eager newbies plunged into enemy territory
But suddenly they found themselves cut off and surrounded in a maze of unknown corridors and dank, dark cells.
Screaming, angry-faced prisoners wielding makeshift shivs and metal bars confronted them, hardened convicts, some battle-hardened soldiers of Al-Qa’ida.
Fear crept up their spines. Cold feet set in. Units withdrew, not before slamming the doors behind them, leaving the prisoners with hostages.
Bargaining chips for a regime that had betrayed them yet again.
But what of the informants?
In prison, being labelled a snitch was a death sentence.
Informing meant condemning fellow prisoners to torture, solitary, or worse.
With the balance of power shifted, those who had whispered to the guards now face the wrath of the fellow inmates.
They were harshly interrogated in one of the wards.
For some factions, that was not enough.
The door to the ward burst open.
Standing in the doorway were those loyal to Al-Qa’ida and Islamic State. They had business with the snitches and traitors.
In one of the wings, Salafi prisoners spoke the charges as the bruised informants were held by the arms or kneeling.
Informing on brothers carried a harsh sentence. They had betrayed the Ummah. The sharia court had made its decision.
The prisoners were hauled away.
Thuds. Screams. Screeches as their new guards got to work.
Six informants were later found sprawled across the ground floor.
Grudges harbored by the zealots against heretics were also being settled in anarchy as they took control.
A prominent human rights activist was found crumpled, limbs twisted.
His skull had been shattered, the face turned to bloody pulp, unrecognisable after being taken away by masked men.
No one was safe, caught between the fundamentalists and regime soldiers.
The sharp crack of gunfire could now be heard outside, inside it was closer and sharper, the pop-pop-pop of rifles down the concrete halls.
These were no longer warning shots, but fired with intent to kill.
Prisoners reverted to stoking fires atop the prison, a plea for help.
Power panicked.
The prison director lifted the receiver.
Down the road, less than an hour away, help waited winding through the Qalamoun Mountains toward the capital.
At the Ministry of the Interior, fear spread: a botched military police raid had spiralled into a hostage crisis.
Saydnaya was no longer a prison. It was a battlefield.
Army trucks, special forces, and counter-terrorism units rolled in, encircling the compound. Boots hit the dirt.
The siege of the prison began.
The prisoners barricaded entrances to wings and made the roof impossible to land on.
They were unable to prevent food and water from falling into the army’s hands.
The prison went dark. Prisoners were calling into radio stations with smuggled smartphones and mobile devices.
Stories of shot prisoners and hostages filtered through before the signal was cut.
Negotiations eventually began after months of stalemate.
The prisoners wanted water and food for hostages.
Some battered hostages, stripped to their underwear, and the wounded were released from the main building, now pockmarked by sniper bullets.
Fighting resumed as the army tightened the noose and families of detainees were left in the dark on the fate of relatives, dead or alive.
As the lights went out at Saydnaya, global human rights groups urged for immediate investigations into the deaths.
‘Amnesty International is calling upon the Syrian authorities to establish immediately an independent body to investigate reports that at least 23 detainees were killed in disturbances,’ it issued in a short statement. ‘Anyone reasonably suspected of involvement in the killings must be held accountable and brought to justice.’
Concerns abroad fell on deaf ears as days became weeks and weeks became months.
Starvation and thirst set in. Supplies dwindled.
Many prisoners were running out of patience, opening a separate channel to the regime, breaking with Al-Qa’ida and Islamic State.
“I was scared of the army and the [jihadists] inside the prison who wanted to kill us so we couldn’t get out. They tried to kill [the negotiators],” said one prisoner.
Leaders amongst the prisoners, blindfolded and handcuffed, were ferried to Damascus to talk and after months of negotiation, the majority of them were quietly transferred to other prisons.
Before them stood none other then Assef Shawkat, Bashar Al-Assad’s brother-in-law of the president and the former head of Military Intelligence.
The earthquake in Saydnaya had reached the ears of the palace itself.
Shawkat offered terms.
A pardon for the unfortunate events of the past few months, more visits, and new prisons while they dealt with the zealots.
In batches, the surrendering prisoners were moved out in batches to new prisons across Syria.
Eighty-eight detainees remained.
The final assault began.
Helicopters buzzed overhead as soldiers rappelled onto the roof of the ‘white building’. One of the gates was forced open.
Plainclothes and uniformed men poured into the facility.
The message was simple; no prisoners.
The radicals who had murdered their own, and several regime police and soldiers, knew the final outcome.
The soldiers haphazardly clambered through the prison, windows covered to deter sniper fire and makeshift sandbags and fortifications made by the detainees.
As they swept through the prison, insults were hurled at them as the jihadists they fought to the last, trading bullets for martyrdom.
Only three survived, hauled off to Branch 291, a branch Military Intelligence in Damascus for further interrogation and torture.
Some sat resting. Soldiers stood quietly, rifles tucked under their arms or slung over their shoulders as others clambered over discarded belonging, bodies and shattered brick and concrete, strewn across the courtyard.
Others gleefully recorded the macabre spectacle of smoke and death.
The siege was over. The massacre, hidden.
The killing of over one hundred prisoners - and where they were buried burials - remained a mystery.
Some were hastily disposed of beneath the broken surface of the prison, entombed in the very place designed to make them vanish in life.
“We want to know whether they are dead or alive,” said the mother of one inmate, sentenced for creating an online discussion group and publishing articles.
The fate of the human rights activist beaten beyond recognition by jihadist prisoners remained undisclosed even after his sentence expired in April 2009 - nearly a year after his death and three months after order had been restored, though the regime had not killed him.
“A whole year has passed, and yet no one knows what has happened to these people,” said the Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The Syrian government should end the anguish of the prisoners’ families, disclose the names of those injured or killed, and immediately grant them access to their loved ones.”
Where the regime said nothing, its sloppiness spoke volumes.
From smartphones, from computers free from surveillance, locked behind basically encrypted VPNs, and digital cameras, people watched.
The regime was caught out.
One day, grainy videos began to appear on Facebook - a sleek, blue-and-white portal where real identities met a new kind of public square.
Other clips surfaced on a place called Twitter, where users posted 140-character updates known as “tweets,” free from regime surveillance in internet cafés, linking Syrians to the world.
Syrians stared at screens quietly, logging on to group pages and platforms.
A pile of mutilated corpses.
Shaky footage of bodies buried underground.
Snipers firing from cranes.
A man casually filming corpses strewn across a courtyard.
A destroyed prison and a mass killing cut through the regime’s silence.
The first images ever seen of Saydnaya by the outside world were not just of death, but of impunity - the truth of Assad’s Syria laid bare.
A regime so confident in its violence, it no longer cared.
When the riot fell silent and the smoke thinned, Saydnaya stood charred but intact - a tomb and system with locked doors and freshly buried truths.
But the fire that broke loose inside its walls had not stayed there.
Saydnaya was not an anomaly.
It was a microstate - a distilled version of the wider Middle East.
The same architecture of repression, the same rituals of humiliation, the same economy of fear.
What happened behind those concrete walls was a mirror of what was stirring from Damascus to Tripoli to Cairo in the 2000s: youth suffocated, ideologies colliding, regimes ageing into paranoia, and the storm of rebellion gathering in the wind.
Saydnaya’s uprising was a mirror of what Syria would become in miniature. The prison uprising was a warning of the conflicts to come, and of the new country to emerge from the ashes of the Assad regime.
Rebellion and protests in Syria. Where repression and force failed, escalation to massacre and mass murder. A world paralysed by inaction, or blissfully unaware. Innocents caught between two extremes, that of militant Salafi extremism and the dictatorial brutality of the Assad regime.
With the regime gone, vendettas and extra-judicial killings have followed.
And now silence again, empty cells, scars and broken things.
Today, the regime that built Saydnaya has fallen.
Its leader has fled.
The gates, at last, torn from their hinges.
Cells sit empty,
names and numbers scratched into concrete,
some waiting for light that never came in time.
Saydnaya is broken open -
and the ghosts have room to breathe.
But the question remains:
when concrete crumbles and tyrants fall,
what rises in their place?
Memory, or revenge?
Justice, or just another order built on bones?
In the end, the walls of Saydnaya cracked -
not because they were weak,
but because the people inside
refused to disappear.
And the lesson that escapes with them is simple:
A nation can bury its truth in darkness,
but it cannot stop the day
when the doors finally open.
This story isn’t finished.
Not for the survivors, not for the families,
and not for the country still living with its ghosts.