Discarded shoes lie in a Syrian prison described as a human slaughterhouse, in a flashback to some of humanity’s darkest hours. As experts begin counting the human toll of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, one warned that a probe will be bigger than the Nuremberg trials of Nazis in the wake of the Second World War. And Sednaya prison in Damascus, where people have gathered seeking news of their long-disappeared loved ones, contains further grim parallels.
Along with piles of clothes and shoes left behind by Assad’s victims, there are bone saws, crush tables and other torture devices. Aerial shots in the Hosseiniya area show mass graves and the UN estimates that since 2011, more than 300,000 civilians have been killed and at least 100,000 have vanished.
After Assad fled to Moscow with wife Asma and children Hafez, 21, Zein, 20, and Karim, 19, a worldwide search has been under way for his henchmen. Bill Wiley, of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, has collected 1.3 million documents that span Assad’s reign.
The 61-year-old told the Sunday Times: “This is the most documented repression in history. Like the Nazis, only with computers.” And ex-prisoner Mohammad al Abdallah, of the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre in the US, said: “It was a bureaucratic killing machine.”.
