Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Assad’s Death Factory - with Joseph Braude & Ahed Al Hendi

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

Many would consider the term ‘death factory’ to be associated with another era, one that is long in the past. But reports have emerged from inside Sednaya prison, bringing to light the horrific death camp and torture complex that was operated by the Assad regime until the regime’s collapse, just one week ago. It has been reported that 96,000 people have disappeared into Syria’s vast network of secret prisons, including thousands of women and children. The overwhelming majority were tortured to death.  The Center for Peace Communications (CPC), an NGO that works through media, schools and spiritual centers to resolve identity-based conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, gained unprecedented access to Sednaya. They have captured exclusive footage from inside its underground dungeons, and recorded testimonies of those lucky enough to survive what many have called a human slaughterhouse. This footage was released by and in partnership with The Free Press.  To discuss what we know about Sednaya prison and Syria’s path moving forward, our guests are Joseph Braude and Ahed Al Hendi.  Joseph Braude is the founder and president of the Center for Peace Communications. He is the author of four books on North Africa and the Middle East, and is a frequent contributor to English and Arabic newspapers and magazines. He has served as a consulting advisor to non-profit organizations, the U.S. government, and the private sector in the realms of Arab civil society engagement, strategic communications, and counterterrorism. Ahed Al Hendi is a Syrian affairs analyst. He is a former political prisoner in Syria, and was arrested for establishing a secular anti-regime student organization.  Exclusive footage and survivor testimony from inside the Sednaya prison, courtesy of the CPC and The Free Press: https://www.thefp.com/p/watch-assads-human-slaughterhouse-sednaya-prison

This is what a real genocide looks like. The intent is in evidence, the machinery is there, the massive scale, the cheapening of the word genocide, particularly over the past year and a half or so, has made it a word with very little meaning, and yet the meaning of the term needs to be restored. We always were blamed by fellow Palestinians who are telling us, you are attacking a regime that is supporting resistance against Israel. And Israel is the main evil, is the bet noir here. And now, ironically, after they saw what happened in Sadnaya, many of them they called and apologized and said, you were right.

It's 9 o'clock a.m. on Sunday December 15th here in New York City. It's 4 o'clock p.m. on Sunday December 15th in Israel as Israelis are winding down their day. Most people think that terms like death factories ended with the Nazi Holocaust with the Shoah, but last week with reports coming from inside Sidneya prison which was Assad's death camp and torture complex, that notion was at least for now put to rest. Death camps are not part of the past. We now know they are just heavily guarded and hidden from public sight. Over 96,000 people have disappeared into Syria's vast network of secret prisons including thousands of women and children, some as young as toddlers.

The overwhelming majority were tortured to death. An NGO called the Center for Peace Communications will refer to it in this podcast as the CPC. This NGO works through media schools and spiritual centers to work on resolving identity-based conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. The CPC gained unprecedented access to Sednaya, capturing exclusive footage from inside its underground dungeons and recording testimonies of its survivors, those lucky enough to emerge alive from what many have called a human slaughterhouse. CPC's early reporting from Sidneya has eerie echoes of what US forces discovered in the forests of Europe following World

War II at the end of World War II. With us today is the president of the Center for Peace Communications Joseph Browdy and Ahed al-Hendi, a former political prisoner in Syria who was arrested for establishing a secular anti-regime student organization in Syria. Joseph, Ahed, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, there. Joseph, I want to start with you and just explain what is Sidneya prison? explain what is Sidneya Prison? Sidneya Prison is the crown jewel of a massive prison

and execution system by the Assad regime that took in 1.3 million people since the revolution, 10% of whom died there. And one of the things that was on the minds of hundreds of thousands of Syrians who had loved ones who were disappeared by this regime, as rebels began to take major cities, was can we get in there?

Can we find our loved ones? Can we find a trace of them? And so Sidneya was a word that was on the lips of virtually every Syrian in the dramatic days that we've recently seen. Where physically was the prison? It's in the outskirts of Damascus, basically on a hilltop,

very near to a population center, and yet forebodingly distant. And Joseph, how did the CPC, your NGO, first learn about Sidneya Prison being liberated by the rebels? Like, how did your team, you guys got there first? Yeah, well, well before it was in the news, we knew that tens of thousands of people

were approaching the prison and beginning to try to pick the locks, figure out whether there were still guards there and understand how to get in. And that of course, Tahrir Sham, HTS, the group that is now in charge in Syria, was entering. So we have a team of researchers and reporters on the ground in Aleppo, Idlib, Hasakah, and now Damascus. And we organized to move them as close as possible to the prison and do everything that they had to do to gain access to the inside.

Ahead, you were working with CPC workers on the ground in Syria who were among the first to arrive at Sidneya. They immediately reported back to you. What did they witness upon the first hours of their arrival on this site of Sidneya? So the first thing they did, they called us and they were crying. What they saw is scene of horrors. They saw torture machines, they saw blood, they saw bones and moreover, they were hearing the screams coming from below them from prisoners who were locked underground

and nobody knew the passage to these prisons. Our team even helped the volunteers who approached the prison and were trying to unlock these doors and get the prisoners out. They saw families who have not seen their children since 10 years gathering in front of Sadmaya Prison to wait and see their loved ones. As you all know, during Assad regime,

visitation rights was not allowed. When they take someone as a prisoner, you don't have rights to see your lawyer, you don't have rights to see your family or to make phone calls to assure your family that you are safe. So it was an opportunity where like about 50,000 people gathered in front of Sednaya prison to see their loved one and make sure that they are still alive. So the family members knew they had loved ones at Sednaya, but was it commonly known, Ached, what Sednaya was? Do you know what I mean?

Was it a well-known place for everyday Syrians? Whether or not they had loved ones there or not, did they know, oh, that is a death factory? The majority of Syrians they knew about the prison, it was standing as a bully in front of all Syrians that nobody dare even to look at it. I remember traveling at that region when we were looking, even looking at the prison, my father, my mother would tell us like, don't look at the prison, don't look at it. It was like a curse.

But you could get near it, people could get near it? Not really near it. You can see it from far away. It has a very unique shape. It's like the Mercedes car like shape, the wings of the prison. So it has a very unique shape. It's like the Mercedes car-like shape, the wings of the prison. So it has a very unique shape, you can see it from far away. But for us, it was like a curse, like a haunted place. If you talk about it, you will end up being there. Because if anybody report a citizen discussing and talking about Saddamaya prison, they will end up in Saddamaya prison or in another prison. My personal experience, the reason why I was jailed in Syria

is for advocating for my friends who ended up in Saddamaya prison. And then I ended up but in another prison. I was lucky enough not to be in Saddamaya prison. So all Syrians knew about it, but a lot of them they did not want to really think and know about it much. Because if you know what's going on there

You will feel that you are responsible to do something if you want to do something you'll end up in the prison So Syrians were shocked later I mean, although they knew something where was happening there But they were shocked seeing kids in the prison seeing people who lost their mind People who were tortured in a very brutal way The most scary part when they saw the dead bodies, they were able to see torture signs on the dead body. So it's an open secret, said Naya Prasad, that everybody knew about, but they did not dare to speak about.

Ahead, as your workers were encountering, discovering this horrible place in the following hours after they arrived, as they got deeper and deeper into the complex Can you just take us through what they were discovering as they were discovering it? The first thing that caught our team in said Naya prison was the smell they told me we were able to smell the death Meaning that they were like fresh blood on the floor They saw bones a human bones on the floor packed all in a bag that Assad regime was trying to take out and bury it in mass graves, but could not have the chance because the regime fell before that. They saw their death chamber like a machine that they burned

dead body inside it. Assad regime, because due to the amount of people that lost their life inside the prison, they could not find enough places to put them in and bury them. They started to burn the dead body, including the torture machines, which is really horrible. They used to cut fingers of prisoners. They used to use carpentry machine. This is something that was really shocking to all the people, to the families. You're going to see the mothers crying next to these machines, the carpentry machine that you used to sew wood and iron. They used to do it on prisoners. It was like something coming out of, like, horror movie.

People could not believe this is really happening at this time in 2024 in a place that everybody can see from outside, sitting on a top hill. And everybody knew that something crazy is happening inside, but nobody dare to look or talk about that. And question for you, Joseph, my understanding is that there were so many Syrians who followed in those who first discovered Sidneya,

who were spending hours and days there looking for their loved ones. So it wasn't like the prison is liberated and everyone who's alive comes out. There was this belief that the prison could be quote unquote liberated, and there were prisoners alive who they can't find because they are levels and levels down,

hidden as Ahed said, behind completely sealed doors that are impossible to penetrate under normal circumstances and you can't hear them screaming. So there are literally living prisoners lost in these dungeons that the various authorities, new authorities and other NGOs and journalists can't find. Well our team had to not only gain access to the prison but also to make their way through some 50,000 people who were crowding, swarming the prison, trying to get in to find their loved ones.

This is not a prison in which you're going to find order, files, et cetera, so easily. And it took a special kind of expertise to even find where to look. It's like the New York subway system. No one really knows the full map of it. And so it is in fact for some an ongoing search. Even though most of the searching is now done, no one can be absolutely sure that they have

found everyone there is to find. I strenuously resist making comparisons to images from the Shoah. I'm particularly sensitive to this as a son of a Holocaust survivor and as a grandson of someone who was killed in the crematoria at Auschwitz. But one of the images that always haunts me after I have visited Auschwitz, which I've now been there three times, is the image of the shoes. You know, every day thousands of Jews arrive at Auschwitz and they are stripped of all their belongings and their belongings are largely preserved, including their shoes.

And there's one area at the Auschwitz Memorial at Auschwitz, Birkenau today, where you can see thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of shoes just all piled together. And you're just reminded that as evidence of every one of those pairs of shoes was a life. And I saw some images floating from Sednaya of shoes. Shoes and piles, vast piles of clothing. Every piece of clothing in those piles was the clothing of someone who had been killed there. And bones, as Ahed has mentioned, bags and bags of bones.

And the machinery that was used to dispose of these things and turn them into dust, of course, and not only crematorium, but also a type of vast steel press that had hundreds of tons of weight that were designed to turn bodies into liquid. And that is what you found there. You told me not during the recording of this podcast, but you mentioned putting the numbers in context. Can you just explain the totality of the numbers we know at least so far?

Of the whole prison system there. Sure, of the whole prison system in the period that begins with the Syrian revolution, in other words, I'm not going way back, because then the numbers would get even bigger. So you're going back to when? Let's say 2011. So the beginning of the Syrian civil war,

so you're not going to the beginning of the Baathist regime No, that would then the numbers would get a lot bigger. So you're literally going back 13 years in 13 years 1.3 million people went through that prison system and 10% of them died there Wow, let me also say that when I say that 10% of the prisoners were killed there, that is a conservative estimate. There is a strong case that it could have been larger, it could have been as high as 20%, but you're on very solid ground when you say that at least 10% of the 1.3 million prisoners died in prison. I wanna play a few clips of testimonies of Syrians

and Ahed maybe how about you translate what these people are saying as we're watching them. Sometimes this regime use crematoriums. Other times they used presses like how iron is compressed and melted with extreme compression so that flesh no longer remains in any form. Imagine that!

They had a method of torture that if we described each one individually, believe me, even Satan hasn't heard of them. The largest number of prisoners were men of course, but there is also a significant number of children and women. We are talking about 8,500 women and about 3,700 children. Over here we can see diapers for young children. Assad was sending a message of terror to Syrian society. That he'll go even after your children, even your women, he will not spare anyone.

Here, the liberator of the prison, they are trying to figure out one of the prisoners' name to send them back to his family. What's your name? What's your name? Where are you from? But the prisoner is not responding. He seems to have forgotten his name. Every one of those testimonies is gut-wrenching, and we're just providing a small sampling here. The one I had that really got me is this idea of people forgetting their names. Taking away someone's name is one of the most insidious and sadly effective tools of dehumanization.

If they had been in the prison for so long and they had been so damaged mentally and emotionally through this torture that they had stopped using their name to the point that they forgot their name? Then I can't really relate to what happened to these people. I myself was jailed not as much as these people. I have not endured what they have endured. But when I was in the prison, I was not allowed to use my real name. My name was 232.

And that for a month. And these people were not allowed to use their name. They were not allowed to talk, even to their cellmates. So imagine a person putting him in 10 years in a prison with an everyday torture. Usually, in a progressive regime, they would torture people to extract information. In an acid prison, they torture people just for vengeance, to take revenge from prisoners, to bully them. Our reporters told us that inside the prison, they saw live streaming cameras with high definition cameras. Some of these videos of torturing prisoners were sold on the dark web for people who have

mental sickness and they enjoy to watch these sadism. So basically imagine a person not allowed to say his name or her name and they're a daily torturer. A lot of them would really forget their name. They don't believe that Assad is gone. Can we now say our name or we cannot say our name? Many of the prisoners couldn't believe it. They were walking and even though the media, people who liberated them were telling them

Assad is gone, you can walk. They could not believe it. I saw people on cameras that really don't know their name, don't know their father's name. All what they know is the name of their city. A guy was only saying Halab. Halab is a city in Syria, which is Aleppo in English. This is what he said. They tell him, what's your name?

He said, Halab. What's your father's name? Halab. What they went through is unbelievable, and I really can relate to that. Joseph, how is Syrian society, at least as we understand it, thus far responding to these reports? Syrian society is hyper-polarized between the many who oppose the Assad regime and the smaller but significant number of people who were going along with that system. And so the people who were pro-Assad didn't allow themselves to believe that any of this was happening.

They were persuaded by pictures of Assad eating shawarma with his son and riding a bicycle that all of this stuff about the brutality, the genocide, the mass killing was somehow rebel propaganda. And that vast swath of the population are now coming to terms with the fact that all of those claims were true, and it might actually have been worse because the worst stories weren't even being told. And so if there is any hope for Syrian society to reconcile, to develop into a polity going forward, the question of reconciliation among those who were with this regime and those who were suffering from it has only just begun.

I would argue it hasn't begun. I mean, my experience having observed some of this and worked on some of these issues in Iraq after the fall of Saddam's regime, it's not so easy to create the conditions for that. As you know, Dan, there was one experiment at a partial effort of truth and reconciliation in 1999-2000 in Morocco after the passing of Hassan II, the so-called years of lead, that's what they called the brutality of the regime then, where there was some acknowledgement of the suffering of families in the prisons of that

monarchy and compensation. It didn't go so far as the kind of airing of grievance and acknowledgement of fault that we saw in the original Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And that takes leadership and it takes a willingness to move past vengeance in order to develop a society. And that's going to take a lot of courage if anything like that is going to happen in Syria. Right. And we don't even know who is going to lead Syria going forward. We can't even imagine what the government, the future government of Syria is going to

look like. So understanding that will at least partially inform whether or not there can be some version of a truth and reconciliation process, some version of, you know, the Nuremberg trials. One hopes for all of these stages, but again, a lot of it is predicated on who's in charge. Joseph, you said something to me offline about the term genocide and how the term genocide has been loosely thrown around, especially in the last year, try to attribute a term to how Israel was responding defensively to the war that was launched on Israelis by Hamas. How do you think about that term in the context of what we're learning in Syria?

Simply that this is what a real genocide looks like. It's the very high bar of the actual definition of genocide that includes genocidal intent. The intent is in evidence. The machinery is there. The massive scale, the victims themselves, the cheapening of the word genocide, particularly over the past year and a half or so has made it a word with very little meaning. And yet the meaning of the term needs to be restored because there really is

genocide and among other places it happened in Syria. Part of what we're doing here is to show people what an actual genocide looks like by filming it, by showing the machinery, by hearing from the victims. And we felt that it's a matter of human concern for people to understand what this means and the fact that it actually has happened in the Middle East right up until last week. Ahead, where are the people that operated this prison? They were the day-to-day instruments of the implementation of this genocide that Joseph is describing. Where are they? Have they just completely

scattered and just kind of, they're blending back into what exists of Syrian society today? Do people know who they are? Dan, if I may add something to what Joseph said, then I can add this question. Sure. Earlier, even before 2011 and during the Arab Spring 2011, when we as Syrian used to speak and be active against Assad, we always were blamed by fellow Palestinians who are telling us, you are attacking a regime that is supporting resistance against Israel. And Israel is the main evil, is the bet noir here. And now, ironically, after they saw what happened in Sadnaya, many of them they called and apologized

and said, you were right. This is a real monster. And this is why, as Joseph said, that the word genocide should not be used in a broad way, in a broad term, because really that offended hundreds of thousands of Syrians who were really under real genocide inside Syria. There was a real ethnic cleansing inside Syria. Most of the prisoners belong to a certain ethnic group in Syria, while the oppressor, they are from another ethnic group.

And nobody's speaking about that. Now speaking about the prison guards, they left, they escaped. Some of them they left with Assad, the top officers to Russia. Some of them went to Iraq, some of them went to Iran, some of them went to Lebanon, and some of them went to their villages in the mountainous region of Syria on the coast. Unfortunately, most of the prison guards belonged to the Assad tribe, which is the Alavi tribe, a sect of Islam. They took refuge now in the Alawite mountain in Syria.

Are Syrians expecting Sadnaya's operators to be brought to justice? I mean, Syrians is a loose term, but generally speaking, because I know it's a very polarized society and there's a lot of demographic, you know, sectarian splits within Syria, but generally speaking, the Syrians you know, the Syrians you're encountering, are they expecting the operators of Sednaya to be held accountable? Yes, yes, this would help to avoid any possible conflict in Syria or any new civil war in the country.

Even people who were pro-Assad and specifically from Assad ethnic group are calling now publicly that we should surrender these criminals. Assad should be brought into the Syrian justice system because that would spare the country and other civil war. The fact that most of the prison guards belongs to Assad ethnic group could potentially lead to a civil war if justice was not brought. So all Syrians, including those who were on the side of Assad are calling for justice. Steve McLaughlin

Joseph, just in wrapping up, I guess every revolution that we know of has its iconic image. Obviously, there are the iconic images during the fall of the Soviet Union. I was in Iraq in April of 2003 when there was the image of those Iraqis in Baghdad pulling down the statue of Saddam. There's always this enduring iconic image. Will Sidneyah be that image? Sidneyah should be that image for the sake of Syrians to begin with, because it's about telling the truth about what happened, revealing the truth about what this regime did to its own population. Because the first step toward reconciliation is truth, is acknowledging, recognizing, and remembering a horrific injustice

as first step in having a dialogue that will enable people to blaze a path forward. A lot of Syrians today, Dan, are talking about turning Sidneya into a museum, a permanent memorial, and that idea comes from a good place. They're instinctually grasping that the memory of this place is an opportunity to begin to have a civil conversation about what a viable future for this country looks like. Okay, we will leave it there. There's so much more here to discuss. I'm sure we'll have both of you back to unpack what we're learning because I'm sure, I hate to say it, but as horrible as Sidney is, it feels to me like we're just scratching the surface of what we'll be learning about Syria.

So Joseph Braude, Ahed Al-Hendi, thank you both really for being here and having this difficult but important conversation with us. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Dan. That's our show for today. We thank Joseph and Ahed and our friends over at The Free Press who jointly published with the CPC the first footage that the CPC captured upon arriving at Sednaya and we'll provide a link to that footage in our show notes.

Call Me Back is produced and edited by Alain Benatar, our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huérgou. Research by Gabe Silverstein. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Sinor.