Inside Syria’s Most Fearsome Prison Tens of thousands of Syrians were thrown into Sednaya during the Assad regime. The New York Times created a 3-D model of the prison.

No place in Syria was more feared than Sednaya prison during the Assad family’s decades-long, iron-fisted rule.

Situated on a barren hilltop on the outskirts of Damascus, the capital, Sednaya was at the heart of the Assads’ extensive system of torture prisons and arbitrary arrests used to crush all dissent.

By the end of the nearly 14-year civil war that culminated in December with the fall of President Bashar al-Assad, it had become a haunting symbol of the dictator’s ruthlessness.

Over the years, the regime’s security apparatus swallowed up hundreds of thousands of activists, journalists, students and dissidents from all over Syria — many never to be heard from again.

Most prisoners did not expect to make it out of Sednaya alive. They watched as men detained with them withered away or simply lost the will to live. Tens of thousands of others were executed, according to rights groups.

David Guttenfelder/The New York Times Ehab Mouma from Damascus was imprisoned in 2018 after joining the rebel uprising against the Assad government. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times Fares al-Diq, who joined the rebel movement, was taken at a checkpoint in central Syria in July 2019. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times Mohammad al-Abdallah from Homs, in western Syria, was arrested in March 2020, within months of his brothers Akram and Khalid al-Abdallah.

David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Munzer al-Uthman from Homs was arrested in 2020 after defecting from mandatory military service.

The New York Times visited Sednaya several times, including the day after the regime fell. We interviewed 16 former prisoners and two former prison officials, and built a comprehensive 3-D model of the prison using more than 130 videos filmed on site by journalists for The Times who surveyed the vast complex.

We also spoke with prisoners’ relatives and a prisoner advocacy group to corroborate the details surrounding their arrests.

Former prisoners told The Times that they were tortured, beaten and deprived of food, water and medicine. Some of them saw prisoners or were themselves beaten by doctors responsible for treating them, leaving them swollen and often bleeding until they died.

Some of the former prisoners’ accounts included descriptions of violence that could not be independently verified, but that were largely consistent with one another and with rights groups’ reports on Sednaya.

Family members in search of missing relatives foraged through papers i