Assad's regime 'hanged up to 13,000 people in mass executions at military prison'

The Syrian regime has executed up to 13,000 people in secret mass hangings carried out in the basement of a military prison near Damascus, according to Amnesty International.

A new report by the human rights group alleges that Bashar al-Assad’s security forces carried out “a calculated campaign of mass hangings and extermination” at Saydnaya, a military prison outside the capital. 

“Saydnaya Military Prison is where the Syria state quietly slaughters its own people,” the report reads. “The victims are overwhelmingly ordinary civilians who are thought to oppose the government.” 

Prisoners are kept in the “red building” of the hulking three-winged prison until they are taken before a military court in Damascus. There they are sentenced to death in show trials “which last between one and three minutes,” according to the report. 

Detainees are then brought back to the prison and blindfolded and then transferred to the prison’s “white building”.

In a dark basement room, nooses are put around their necks and they are hanged in groups of between 20 and 50 people, Amnesty said. 

“Throughout the process, the victims remain blindfolded,” the report states. 

“They are only told that they have been sentenced to death minutes before the executions are carried out; they are never told when their executions will be carried out; and they do not know how they will die until the nooses are placed around their necks.”

The bodies are then disposed of in mass graves. Medical reports usually give the cause of death as heart or lung failure, according to Amnesty. 

Researchers interviewed former prisoners and prison guards at Saydnaya and concluded that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were killed there between September 2011 and December 2015.

The killings are believed to be continuing even today. 

Amnesty alleges that the scale of the killing means the hanging programme must have been “authorised by officials at the highest levels of government”. 

Individual death sentences are supposed to be approved by either the minister of defence of the chief of staff of the army, both of whom are authorised to act on behalf of Mr Assad. 

The report may bolster critics of Donald Trump who have been alarmed at his apparent willingness to work with Russia and the Assad regime in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).  

“I don’t like Assad at all, but Assad is killing [Isil],” Mr Trump said during the second presidential debate against Hillary Clinton.

The Amnesty report also describes how prisoners at Saydnaya are subjected to “maximal physical and psychological suffering” before their executions, including rape and severe beatings. 

One student named Omar told researchers that prison guards would take one of the smaller male prisoners and make him face a wall and then instruct a larger male prisoner to rape him. 

“Sometimes psychological pain is worse than physical pain, and the people who were forced to do this were never the same again.”