Noureddine Safaya crouched on the filthy ground, his back hunched and his eyes fixed on the floor, crawling towards a tiny rectangular cell. Eight years ago, this is how he arrived at Sednaya, Bashar Al Assad’s most notorious prison, known as the “human slaughterhouse”.
He was one of a group of 27 detainees shackled together and forced to creep on the ground under the gaze of guards who treated them as nothing more than livestock.
“That was the hardest moment of my life,” he told The National, as he re-enacted his arrival, his ordeal still etched into his every move. He said the prisoners were stripped of their clothes and violently beaten, their blood forming a large pool on the ground.
Sednaya, located north of Damascus, is one of the most famous symbols of the brutal Assad regime. Human rights groups say tens of thousands of people were detained there during Syria's civil war and thousands executed after sham trials.
The National was among the first foreign newspapers to vis
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