‘It was like I was reborn’: Sednaya prison’s former inmates adapt to a new Syria Former prisoners endured hearing fellow inmates being executed – but they are the lucky ones, with 100,000 people still missing.
Of all the horrors Mohammed Ammar Hamami remembers from his time in the Assad regime’s notorious Sednaya prison, the most vivid is the clanging of metal execution tables being moved around on the floor below.
Mattresses are strewn about the dry land] A week later, the mechanic wanted to return to Sednaya, on the outskirts of Damascus, to retrieve clothes left behind in the chaos – but also, he said, to try to understand that what he had lived through in what he called “the killing machine” was real.
Hamami was freed from Sednaya after five hellish years on 8 December, when Syria’s longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country in the face of a lightning-fast Islamist rebel offensive.
Along with the 20 other men held in his dirty, dark and unfurnished cell, he heard shouting in the corridor before collapsing in astonishment when his father’s face appeared in the cell door’s small window.
