The Syrian civil defense group known as the White Helmets said it was investigating reports from survivors of the country's notorious Sednaya prison that people were being held in hidden underground cells.
The group wrote on the X website that it had deployed five “specialized emergency teams” to the prison, assisted by a guide familiar with the prison’s design.
Saydnaya is one of the prisons that was liberated as the rebels took control of the country.
Authorities in Damascus Governorate reported that efforts were continuing to free the prisoners, some of whom were “almost suffocating to death” due to lack of ventilation.
The Damascus Countryside Governorate appealed, via social media, to former soldiers and prison workers of the Bashar al-Assad regime to provide opposition forces with underground electronic door codes.
They say they were unable to open it in order to release “more than 100,000 detainees who can be seen on surveillance screens.”
A video has been circulated online and through media outlets including Al Jazeera, of what appear to be attempts to gain access to the lower parts of the prison.
In it, a man can be seen using a pole to destroy a lower wall, revealing a dark space beyond.
Other footage showed the release of prisoners, including a young child detained with his mother. It appears in a video clip of women who were released, published by the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and Missing Persons in Saydnaya Prison.
A voice in the video says: “He (the lion) has fallen. Do not be afraid,” apparently trying to reassure the women that they are now safe.
A video verified by AFP showed Syrians rushing to find out if their relatives were among those released in Saydnaya, where thousands of opposition supporters were said to have been tortured and executed under the Assad regime.
Rebel forces have swept across Syria, freeing prisoners from government prisons as they go.
Throughout the civil war that began in 2011, government forces detained hundreds of thousands of people in detention camps, where human rights groups say torture was common.
Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham said on Saturday that it had released more than 3,500 detainees from Homs military prison as the group took control of the city.
The group was founded in 2012 under the name Jabhat al-Nusra. It was allied with Al Qaeda but later severed its ties – although the US, UK and a number of other countries still consider it affiliated with the jihadist organisation.
In 2016, the group took its current name, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, and later merged with other rebel factions. They are the most important of several opposition groups participating in this latest attack.
As opposition fighters entered the capital hours later early Sunday, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham declared “the end of the era of tyranny in Saydnaya prison,” which has become synonymous with the darkest abuses of the Assad era.
In its 2022 report, ADMSP Saydnaya said “It effectively became a death camp” after the civil war began.
Its estimates indicate that more than 30,000 detainees were executed or died as a result of torture, lack of medical care, or starvation between 2011 and 2018. Citing accounts from a small number of released prisoners, at least 500 more detainees were executed between 2018 and 2021. He said.
In 2017, Amnesty International Saydnaya described as a “human slaughterhouse”in a report that claimed that the executions had been authorized at the highest levels of Assad's government.
The government at the time rejected Amnesty International's claims as “baseless” and “devoid of truth”, insisting that all executions in Syria followed due process.
admspA video cited by Reuters showed fighters shooting the lock on the Saydnaya prison gate and using more gunfire to open the doors leading to the cells, as men streamed into the corridors.
Other footage, which Reuters says was taken on the streets of Damascus, appears to show recently released prisoners running in the street.
In it, a passerby asks what happened.
“We overthrew the regime,” they reply, eliciting an enthusiastic laugh from the former prisoner.
Of all the symbols of the repressive nature of the Assad regime, the network of prisons into which those expressing any form of dissent have disappeared has cast the longest and darkest shadow.
In Saydnaya, torture, sexual assault and mass executions were the fate of thousands. Many of them are never seen again, and their families often do not know for many years whether they are alive or dead.
Omar Al-Shaghri, a survivor of the ordeal, told the BBC on Sunday about what he endured during three years of imprisonment when he was a teenager.
“I know the pain, I know the loneliness and the despair you feel because the world let you suffer and did nothing about it,” he said.
“They forced my cousin, whom I loved so much, to torture me, and they are forcing me to torture him, otherwise we will be executed.”
The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that more than 130,000 people have been detained in these conditions since 2011. But the history of these deliberately terrifying institutions goes back much further.
Even in neighboring Lebanon, the fear of disappearing into a Syrian dungeon was prevalent during the many years that Damascus was the dominant foreign power.
The deep hatred for the Assad regime – father and son – that has been simmering beneath the surface in Syria is due in large part to a machinery of widespread torture, death and humiliation that was intended to intimidate the population into submission.
For this reason, in their blitzkrieg across Syria that toppled President Assad, the rebel factions were keen to go to the central prison in every city they captured and release the thousands detained there.
The image of these people emerging from the darkness that has clouded some for decades will be one of the defining images of the downfall of the Assad family.
