More than 1000 Syrians died in detention at a military airport on the outskirts of Damascus, they were executed or died from torture and mistreatment, according to a report by the Syrian Justice Center, which Reuters reviewed.
Based on witness testimonies, satellite images, and documents, another prison and a mass grave were found on the airport grounds in the suburb of Mezzeh after the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad. The Association for the Affairs of Detainees and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison interviewed 156 survivors and eight former employees of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence — a security service tasked with surveillance, imprisonment, and killing critics of the regime.
The report focuses on the early years of the uprising, from 2011 to 2017. However, some testimonies from former regime officers stationed in Mezzeh detail events up to the fall of Assad.
Shadi Haroun, one of the report's authors, said he was among the prisoners in 2011-2012 for organizing protests. He reported daily interrogations involving physical and psychological torture aimed at forcing him to make unfounded confessions. Haroun recounted how a small wound on his cellmate's foot, sustained from torture, went untreated for several days, leading to gangrene and necessitating amputation of the foot.
Haroun also claims that every couple of days he heard "periodic gunfire, shot by shot."
"Although some of the graves mentioned in the report had not been discovered earlier, the discovery itself does not surprise us, as we know that 100,000 people went missing in Assad's prisons, who did not gain freedom during the liberation days in early December," said a colonel from the interior ministry of the new government.
It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed since 2011, when Assad's crackdown on protests escalated into a full-scale war. Assad and his father Hafez have long been accused by human rights groups, foreign governments, and war crimes prosecutors of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions in the country's prisons and the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people.
The Mezzeh military airport was an integral part of the enforced disappearances mechanism established by Assad's government, and from 2011 to 2017 it held at least 29,000 detainees, according to the report. By 2020, according to the report, the Air Force Intelligence had converted more than a dozen hangars, dormitories, and offices in Mezzeh into prisons.
The US-based Syrian human rights group SJAC stated that its estimate of the death toll is based on Air Force Intelligence data listing a total of 1,154 detainees who died there from 2011 to 2017. The count does not include people who were executed after being sentenced to death by a military field court established in a hangar. According to witness testimonies cited in the report, officers and soldiers were executed by shooting, and civilians by hanging. According to two witnesses, many of the executed were buried near the hangar.
In December, the US Department of Justice charged two senior officers of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence with war crimes related to "cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees under their control, including US citizens, in detention facilities at the Mezzeh military airfield."
Photo: Reuters