Inside the prison, a pair of concrete buildings ringed by razor wire on a mountainside near Damascus, Assad’s regime carried out industrial-scale torture and death that likely killed tens of thousands of people over more than a decade. The regime orchestrated the killing in a bureaucratic manner rarely seen in recent history. Assad’s security apparatus kept meticulous records of the detainees’ transfer to the prison and other facilities, court documents and death certificates of those executed.“It’s the worst atrocity of the 21st century in terms of the number killed and the way a government was directly involved,” said Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes. “I do draw a line to the Nazis and to Soviet Russia in terms of the organized nature of state terror.”...In addition to the many thousands killed in organized executions, former detainees and war crimes experts say perhaps an equal number of people died in Saydnaya from torture and extreme conditions, including beatings with pipes and rods, along with starvation, thirst and disease....The hundreds who walked free in December represented a tiny minority among the many thousands of Syrians who went missing during the war. Some 160,123 Syrians were forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime throughout the war according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a respected watchdog group.
The war also displaced more than thirteen million people, millions of them still refugees in Europe and elsewhere.
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