Calls for accountability as Syrian regime prisoners emerge from Sednaya

As pictures and videos of thousands of people being freed from various prisons operated by the former regime of Bashar al Assad flood social media streams, rights groups and experts are calling for accountability.

Since anti-regime groups captured Damascus on December 8, forcing Assad to flee Syria and his military to collapse, thousands of people have emerged from cramped cells and dark dungeons of the Sednaya Prison in Damascus.

There are now calls for collecting testimonies of prisoners and prosecuting those responsible for torturing and executing opponents of the regime.

"The violations under the Assad regime were numerous and systematic and cannot be summed in words or numbers," said Almoutassim Al Kilani, a Human rights lawyer and International criminal law expert in Paris.

Rights groups say that at least 136,600 people were in detention throughout Syria in the Assad regime's notorious prisons.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, called on Monday for accountability for perpetrators of abuse under Bashar al-Assad's regime.

"(Accountability) is going to be a key piece of the transition, because we cannot afford that we go back to those periods where indeed impunity reigns."

More than 100,000 people disappeared during the years-long civil war, the UN said.

The atrocities committed at the Sednaya prison are particularly horrific.

"After the execution of the detainee, his body is placed in the press machine and turned on, and the two sides are pressed together, the bone is completely broken, and the blood comes out of the body completely, the body becomes like a carpet, and the human carpets are collected before being thrown away or burned," Al Kilani told TRT World.

Al Kilani fled Syria in 2014 as he witnessed his close friends being tortured in Assad's torture dungeons.

As an International legal expert, Al Kilani summed up the rights violations carried out by the Assad regime into several categories: torture to death in detention centres, absence of fair trials, extrajudicial executions, destruction of cities, displacement of populations, use of internationally banned weapons, killing of civilians and everything worse you can think of

Quoting a report published by a rights group on tortures in Sednaya Prison in 2016, he said, " It is not a prison it is a slaughterhouse. Nazi prisons were perhaps more merciful than Assad's prisons, imagine it."

There have been documented cases of children beaten with plastic hose pipes, waterboarded and given electric shocks by Assad's intelligence service.

While elaborating on the blatant violations in prisons, Al Kilani said: "They used sexual violence and rape as weapons of war. Men and women were raped. Deprived of their life, soul and honour to extract forceful confessions."

Caesar photographs

Human Rights Watch located and charted 27 detention facilities in 2012 in Syria with several of them located in the capital, Damascus.

Then, in January 2014, it was reported that a defector from the Assad regime had taken tens of thousands of photos out of Syria, many of which featured the bodies of inmates who had perished in the country's prisons.

The defector, code-named "Caesar," was interviewed by a group of international lawyers and Syrian activists.

He claimed that, in his capacity as a Military Police official forensic photographer, he had taken thousands of similar photos and personally photographed the bodies of deceased detainees bearing marks of torture, amputations, and missing body parts.

However, according to Al Kilani's documentation, Caesar's photos are not related to Sednaya prison.

"Caesar's photos are of detainees in other security centres, who were killed under torture and were photographed. In Sednaya prison, the bodies are burned after being put in the pressing machine," he says.