I did not first hear of the infamous Saydnaya Prison after the Syrian revolution. I had already heard about it—and about others, particularly Tadmor Prison, which may have been even more horrific—three decades earlier. I heard chilling accounts of the terrifying cells of Syria’s many intelligence agencies, which fill the country’s cities, especially Damascus. Friends of mine, many of whom had endured these horrifying experiences—whether for a few months or over ten years—shared their stories with me.

As I listened to my friends recount their time in detention, I would sometimes feel a shiver run through my body, a sense of shock and disbelief. My imagination would take me to places I could hardly comprehend, leading to disturbing, terrifying nightmares.

I would picture one of my friends—helpless, stripped of their humanity, reduced to nothing but test subjects for unimaginable torture. In these prisons, the goal was not just to extract information or humiliate; it was torture for the sake of torture. This is far crueler than killing, because death brings an end, but torture prolongs suffering beyond what a human can endure.

Yet it was not only direct physical torture that made these prisons unbearable. The very act of living in these places was a form of torture—a suffering beyond imagination. And this suffering was multiplied in places like Saydnaya, Tadmor, or the basements of intelligence agencies—places that belonged neither to the world of the living nor the dead. They were not simply prisons, but graveyards for the living, spaces of horror that defied humanity itself.

Syrian prisons are unlike any other in the world. The Assad regime’s prisons do not simply strip detainees of their freedom, legal rights, privacy, dignity, or humanity. They rob them of their very sense of self, their spirit, their emotions—they reduce them to something unrecognizable.

Imagine that the only “crime” of these detainees was simply holding a different opinion—daring to say something that contradicted the regime’s narrative, demanding freedom, dignity, and political participation. Some were arrested merely for reading a pamphlet from an opposition group, for unknowingly hosting a dissident in their home, or for being falsely reported by an informant. Others were deliberately erased from life by political or military figures for reasons known only to them.

In Friends’ Footsteps

On February 14, 2025, Palestinian journalist Waseem Humeida invited me to participate in the announcement of the Association for Political Prisoners of Saydnaya Prison. It was during this event that I had the chance to meet Adnan Al-Qassar, the champion equestrian and former prisoner, who spent 22 years in Syria’s prisons, including Saydnaya. His crime? Beating Bassel al-Assad—Hafez al-Assad’s eldest son—in a horse-riding competition. In a fit of rage, Bassel had him thrown in prison for 22 years.

This visit had been on my mind for a long time—I had always wanted to go. I wanted to understand where my friends had spent their years, to see the place they had been held. I wanted to know where they slept, how they ate, how they washed, how they passed their time. I wanted to understand what they saw from their cells, what they dreamed of, what kept them going.

Something deep inside me compelled me to seek these answers. Perhaps it was a sense of gratitude and recognition for those who had laid the groundwork for the fall of the Assad regime—a regime that had long treated Syria as a private estate for a corrupt, mafia-like family, a regime that revealed itself to be nothing more than a collection of small, vile, and insignificant men, utterly disconnected from Syria and its people.

On my visit to Saydnaya Prison, I carried in my mind all of my friends who had endured years of imprisonment: Aslan Abdul Karim, Samir Al-Hassan, Anwar Badr, Ali Al-Kurdi, Akram Al-Bunni, Fadl Al-Saqqal, and Nabil Ibrahim—most of whom spent over 12 years in Syria’s prisons, especially in Saydnaya. Many of them emerged to find that their children, whom they had last seen as infants, were now fully grown adults—robbed of the most precious years of their lives.

In the mid-1980s, Saydnaya Prison also held dozens of members of the Palestinian Fatah movement, abducted from refugee camps across Syria by the Assad regime.

The moment I entered the prison, I felt a sense of dread. Visitors must walk a long, grueling road from the main outer gate to the inner prison gate—a journey that can take half an hour on foot, through scorching heat or freezing cold. This was deliberate—a form of psychological torment for the families of detainees who were occasionally allowed visits.

As I traveled along this road by car, climbing the barren hill on which the prison stood like a lifeless fortress, I remembered the stories of mothers and sisters who had walked this very path.

I recalled Um Samir and his sisters, Amal and Hanan, who had told me countless times about the agonizing trek to visit their brother. They had to walk the entire distance, each of them pushing a cart loaded with food, clothes, and personal items allowed by the prison authorities. I thought, too, of Mona Asaad, who endured the same ordeal to visit her husband Anwar, bringing along their young daughter Yara—so she could at least recognize her father.

Maze of Death

The prison, in its structure, is nothing but iron and reinforced concrete. It looks like a monstrous building, or rather, a slaughterhouse—a name it has rightfully earned. From the moment you enter, you find yourself in a labyrinth of endless iron gates, each leading to another, until you finally reach a narrow corridor with small, high-set windows. This corridor contains several dormitory cells, each locked by an enormous iron door, with ventilation openings above and below.

The prison itself is surrounded by multiple walls and stretches across an area comparable to an entire town. But the problem is, behind every wall, there is another wall—accompanied by minefields, barbed wire, and armed guards. In other words, escape is impossible.

Inside each of these overcrowded cells, dozens of detainees lived shoulder to shoulder, cut off from the outside world. They slept, woke up, talked, ate, walked, and relieved themselves together, enduring the cold, the heat, despair, and fleeting hope—all in the same confined space.

Scattered across the cell floors were abandoned clothes—the same ones the prisoners had worn before they were liberated, before the collapse of Syria’s prison system alongside Assad’s flight. It was as if each piece of clothing told a story of the horrors endured within these walls.

The Fall of an “Eternal” Rule

The day I visited Saydnaya Prison was one of unimaginable sorrow, grief, and rage. As I left, something struck me—the prison is located on the road to Saydnaya and Maaloula, two beautiful towns steeped in history and once a tourist destination for visitors from around the world. The same could be said for Tadmor Prison, no less horrifying than Saydnaya. As if Assad’s tyranny and oppression were not enough, he had to further disfigure Syria’s landscape with these monuments to cruelty. This is what Assad did to Syria—its people, its geography, and its history. But there is hope: that Syria’s people will one day rid themselves of the legacy of this regime forever.

As we exited the prison, passing through the first of many walls, Adnan al-Qassar pointed toward the farthest wall, snaking like a serpent around the vast perimeter of the prison. Gesturing toward it, he said: “This was the only ‘horizon’ we saw throughout all the years of our imprisonment here.”

To the world: The mere downfall of Assad’s hereditary dictatorship—which ruled Syria for nearly six decades through fear, terror, corruption, and oppression—is a revolution in itself. If there were ten reasons to overthrow any given authoritarian regime, there are a hundred reasons to bring down the Assad regime once and for all.