Assad’s Death Factory - with Joseph Braude & Ahed Al Hendi AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Assad’s Death Factory - with Joseph Braude & Ahed Al Hendi) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (Call Me Back - with Dan Senor) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

Call Me Back - with Dan Senor episodes list: view full AI transcripts and summaries of this podcast on the blog

Episode: Assad’s Death Factory - with Joseph Braude & Ahed Al Hendi

Author: Ark Media
Duration: 00:26:44

Episode Shownotes

Many would consider the term ‘death factory’ to be associated with another era, one that is long in the past. But reports have emerged from inside Sednaya prison, bringing to light the horrific death camp and torture complex that was operated by the Assad regime until the regime’s collapse, just

one week ago. It has been reported that 96,000 people have disappeared into Syria’s vast network of secret prisons, including thousands of women and children. The overwhelming majority were tortured to death. The Center for Peace Communications (CPC), an NGO that works through media, schools and spiritual centers to resolve identity-based conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, gained unprecedented access to Sednaya. They have captured exclusive footage from inside its underground dungeons, and recorded testimonies of those lucky enough to survive what many have called a human slaughterhouse. This footage was released by and in partnership with The Free Press. To discuss what we know about Sednaya prison and Syria’s path moving forward, our guests are Joseph Braude and Ahed Al Hendi. Joseph Braude is the founder and president of the Center for Peace Communications. He is the author of four books on North Africa and the Middle East, and is a frequent contributor to English and Arabic newspapers and magazines. He has served as a consulting advisor to non-profit organizations, the U.S. government, and the private sector in the realms of Arab civil society engagement, strategic communications, and counterterrorism. Ahed Al Hendi is a Syrian affairs analyst. He is a former political prisoner in Syria, and was arrested for establishing a secular anti-regime student organization. Exclusive footage and survivor testimony from inside the Sednaya prison, courtesy of the CPC and The Free Press: https://www.thefp.com/p/watch-assads-human-slaughterhouse-sednaya-prison

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
This is what a real genocide looks like.

00:00:03 Speaker_00
The intent is in evidence, the machinery is there, the massive scale, the cheapening of the word genocide, particularly over the past year and a half or so, has made it a word with very little meaning, and yet the meaning of the term needs to be restored.

00:00:20 Speaker_02
We always were blamed by fellow Palestinians who are telling us, you are attacking a regime that is supporting resistance against Israel. And Israel is the main evil, is the bet noir here.

00:00:34 Speaker_02
And now, ironically, after they saw what happened in Sidnaya, many of them, they called and apologized and said, you were right.

00:00:52 Speaker_01
It's 9 o'clock a.m. on Sunday, December 15th here in New York City. It's 4 o'clock p.m. on Sunday, December 15th in Israel as Israelis are winding down their day.

00:01:04 Speaker_01
Most people think that terms like death factories ended with the Nazi Holocaust, with the Shoah.

00:01:12 Speaker_01
But last week, with reports coming from inside Sidnaya prison, which was Assad's death camp and torture complex, that notion was, at least for now, put to rest. Death camps are not part of the past.

00:01:26 Speaker_01
We now know they are just heavily guarded and hidden from public sight. Over 96,000 people have disappeared into Syria's vast network of secret prisons, including thousands of women and children. some as young as toddlers.

00:01:44 Speaker_01
The overwhelming majority were tortured to death. An NGO called the Center for Peace Communications, we'll refer to it in this podcast as the CPC.

00:01:55 Speaker_01
This NGO works through media schools and spiritual centers to work on resolving identity-based conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. The CPC gained unprecedented access to Sednaya,

00:02:08 Speaker_01
capturing exclusive footage from inside its underground dungeons and recording testimonies of its survivors, those lucky enough to emerge alive from what many have called a human slaughterhouse.

00:02:22 Speaker_01
CPC's early reporting from Sidnaya has eerie echoes of what U.S. forces discovered in the forests of Europe following World War II, at the end of World War II.

00:02:35 Speaker_01
With us today is the president of the Center for Peace Communications, Joseph Browdy, and Ahed Al-Khendi, a former political prisoner in Syria who was arrested for establishing a secular anti-regime student organization in Syria.

00:02:52 Speaker_01
Joseph, Ahed, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, there. Joseph, I want to start with you and just explain, what is Sidnaya Prison?

00:03:03 Speaker_00
Sidnaya Prison is the crown jewel of a massive prison and execution system by the Assad regime that took in 1.3 million people since the revolution, 10% of whom died there.

00:03:17 Speaker_00
And one of the things that was on the minds of hundreds of thousands of Syrians who had loved ones who were disappeared by this regime as rebels began to take major cities was, can we get in there? Can we find our loved ones?

00:03:32 Speaker_00
Can we find a trace of them? And so Sidnaya was a word that was on the lips of virtually every Syrian in the dramatic days that we've recently seen.

00:03:42 Speaker_01
Where physically was the prison?

00:03:44 Speaker_00
It's in the outskirts of Damascus, basically on a hilltop, very near to a population center and yet forebodingly distant.

00:03:54 Speaker_01
And Joseph, how did the CPC or NGO first learn about Sidnaya Prison being liberated by the rebels? Like, how did your team, you guys got there first?

00:04:04 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, well before it was in the news, we knew that tens of thousands of people were approaching the prison and beginning to try to pick the locks, figure out whether there were still guards there, and understand how to get in.

00:04:20 Speaker_00
And that, of course, Tahrir al-Sham, HTS, the group that is now in charge in Syria, was entering. So we have a team of researchers and reporters on the ground in Aleppo, Idlib, Hasakah, and now Damascus.

00:04:37 Speaker_00
And we organized to move them as close as possible to the prison and do everything that they had to do to gain access to the inside.

00:04:46 Speaker_01
Ahed, you were working with CPC workers on the ground in Syria who were among the first to arrive at Sidnaya. They immediately reported back to you. What did they witness upon the first hours of their arrival on this site of Sidnaya?

00:05:03 Speaker_02
So the first thing they did, they called us and they were crying. What they saw is a scene of horrors.

00:05:09 Speaker_02
They saw torture machines, they saw blood, they saw bones, and moreover they were hearing the screams coming from below them from prisoners who were locked underground and nobody knew the passage to these prisons.

00:05:23 Speaker_02
Our team even helped the volunteers who approached the prison and were trying to unlock these doors and get the prisoners out.

00:05:30 Speaker_02
They saw families who have not seen their children since 10 years gathering in front of Sidmaya prison to wait and see their loved ones. As you all know, during Assad regime, visitation rights was not allowed.

00:05:43 Speaker_02
When they take someone as a prisoner, you don't have rights to see your lawyer, you don't have rights to see your family or to make phone calls to assure your family that you are safe.

00:05:52 Speaker_02
So it was an opportunity where, like, about 50,000 people gathered in front of Sidnaya prison to see their loved one and make sure that they are still alive.

00:06:00 Speaker_01
So the family members knew they had loved ones at Sidnaya, but was it commonly known, Ahed, what Sidnaya was? Do you know what I mean? Was it a well-known place for everyday Syrians?

00:06:12 Speaker_01
Whether or not they had loved ones there or not, did they know, oh, that is a death factory?

00:06:17 Speaker_02
The majority of Syrian, they knew about the prison. It was standing as a bully in front of all Syrians that nobody dared even to look at it.

00:06:26 Speaker_02
I remember traveling at that region when we were looking, even looking at the prison, my father, my mother would tell us like, don't look at the prison, don't look at it. It was like a curse. But you could get near it. People could get near it.

00:06:39 Speaker_02
Not really near it. You can see it from far away. It has a very unique shape. It's like the Mercedes car-like shape, the wings of the prison. So it has a very unique shape. You can see it from far away.

00:06:50 Speaker_02
But for us, it was like a curse, like a haunted place. If you talk about it, you will end up being there. Because if anybody report a citizen discussing and talking about Sidnaya prison, they will end up in Sidnaya prison or in another prison.

00:07:05 Speaker_02
My personal experience, the reason why I was jailed in Syria is for advocating for my friends who ended up in Sidnaya prison. And then I ended up, but in another prison. I was lucky enough not to be in Sidmaya prison.

00:07:18 Speaker_02
So all Syrians knew about it, but a lot of them, they did not want to really think and know about it much. Because if you know what's going on there, you will feel that you are responsible to do something.

00:07:28 Speaker_02
If you want to do something, you will end up in the prison. So Syrians were shocked later.

00:07:33 Speaker_02
I mean, although they knew something was happening there, but they were shocked seeing kids in the prison, seeing people who lost their mind, people who were tortured in a very brutal way.

00:07:43 Speaker_02
The most scaring part when they saw the dead bodies, they were able to see torture signs on the dead body. So it's an open secret, said Nayeh President, that everybody knew about, but they did not dare to speak about.

00:07:55 Speaker_01
Ahed, as your workers were encountering, discovering this horrible place in the following hours after they arrived, as they got deeper and deeper into the complex, can you just take us through what they were discovering as they were discovering it?

00:08:11 Speaker_02
The first thing that caught our team in Sidnaya prison was the smell. They told me we were able to smell the death, meaning that there were like fresh blood on the floor.

00:08:21 Speaker_02
They saw bones, human bones on the floor, packed all in a bag that Assad regime was trying to take out and bury it in mass graves, but could not have the chance because the regime fell before that.

00:08:33 Speaker_02
They saw the death chamber, like a machine that they burned dead body inside it. I said regime because due to the amount of people that lost their life inside the prison, they could not find enough places to put them in and bury them.

00:08:46 Speaker_02
They started to burn the dead body, including the torture machines, which is really horrible. They used to cut fingers of prisoners. They used to use carpentry machine. This is something that was really shocking to all the people, to the families.

00:09:01 Speaker_02
You're going to see the mothers crying next to these machines, the carpentry machine that used to saw wood and iron. They used to do it on prisoners. It was like something coming out of a horror movie.

00:09:14 Speaker_02
People could not believe this is really happening at this time, in 2024, in a place that everybody can see from outside, sitting on a top hill, and everybody knows that something crazy is happening inside, but nobody dares to look or talk about that.

00:09:30 Speaker_01
And question for you, Joseph, my understanding is that there were so many Syrians who followed in, those who first discovered Sidnaya, who were spending hours and days there looking for their loved ones.

00:09:41 Speaker_01
So it wasn't like the prison is liberated and everyone who's alive comes out.

00:09:45 Speaker_01
There was this belief that the prison could be quote-unquote liberated, and there were prisoners alive who they can't find because they are levels and levels down, hidden, as Ahed said,

00:09:56 Speaker_01
behind completely sealed doors that are impossible to penetrate under normal circumstances, and you can't hear them screaming.

00:10:03 Speaker_01
So there are literally living prisoners lost in these dungeons that the various authorities, new authorities and other NGOs and journalists can't find.

00:10:15 Speaker_00
Well, our team had to not only gain access to the prison, but also to make their way through some 50,000 people who were crowding, swarming the prison, trying to get in to find their loved ones.

00:10:30 Speaker_00
This is not a prison in which you're going to find order, files, etc. so easily. And it took a special kind of expertise to even find where to look. It's like the New York subway system. No one really knows the full map of it.

00:10:47 Speaker_00
And so it is, in fact, for some, an ongoing search. Even though most of the searching is now done, no one can be absolutely sure that they have found everyone there is to find.

00:11:00 Speaker_01
I strenuously resist making comparisons to images from the Shoah. I'm particularly sensitive to this as a son of a Holocaust survivor and as a grandson of someone who was killed in the crematoria at Auschwitz.

00:11:15 Speaker_01
But one of the images that always haunts me after I have visited Auschwitz, which I've now been there three times, is the image of the shoes.

00:11:26 Speaker_01
You know, every day thousands of Jews arrive at Auschwitz, and they are stripped of all their belongings, and their belongings are largely preserved, including their shoes.

00:11:37 Speaker_01
And there's one area at the Auschwitz Memorial at Auschwitz, Birkenau today, where you can see thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of shoes just all piled together.

00:11:48 Speaker_01
And you're just reminded that as evidence of every one of those pairs of shoes was a life. And I saw some images floating from Sednaya of shoes.

00:11:59 Speaker_00
Shoes and piles, vast piles of clothing. Every piece of clothing in those piles was the clothing of someone who had been killed there. And bones, as Ahed has mentioned, bags and bags of bones.

00:12:15 Speaker_00
And the machinery that was used to dispose of these things and turn them into dust, of course, and not only crematorium, but also a type of vast steel press that had hundreds of tons of weight that were designed to turn bodies into liquid.

00:12:35 Speaker_00
And that is what you found there.

00:12:38 Speaker_01
You told me, not during the recording of this podcast, but you mentioned putting the numbers in context. Can you just explain the totality of the numbers we know, at least so far, of the whole prison system there?

00:12:49 Speaker_00
Sure. Of the whole prison system in the period that begins with the Syrian revolution. In other words, I'm not going way back because then the numbers would get even bigger. So you're going back to when?

00:12:59 Speaker_01
Let's say 2011. So the beginning of the Syrian civil wars. You're not going to the beginning of the Baathist regime? No, then the numbers would get a lot bigger.

00:13:08 Speaker_00
So you're literally going back 13 years. In 13 years, 1.3 million people went through that prison system and 10% of them died there. Wow. Let me also say that when I say that 10% of the prisoners were killed there, that is a conservative estimate.

00:13:29 Speaker_00
There is a strong case that it could have been larger. It could have been as high as 20%. But you're on very solid ground when you say that at least 10% of the 1.3 million prisoners died in prison.

00:13:44 Speaker_01
I want to play a few clips of testimonies of Syrians and Ahed, maybe how about you translate what these people are saying as we're watching them.

00:13:55 Speaker_02
Sometimes this regime used crematoriums. Other times they used presses, like how iron is compressed and melted with extreme compression so that flesh no longer remains in any form. Imagine that!

00:14:10 Speaker_02
They had method of torture that if we described each one individually, believe me, even Satan hasn't heard of them. The largest number of prisoners were men, of course, but there is also a significant number of children and women.

00:14:25 Speaker_02
We are talking about 8,500 women and about 3,700 children. Over here, we can see diapers for young children. Assad was sending a message of terror to Syrian society that he'll go even after your children, even your women, he will not spare anyone.

00:14:48 Speaker_02
Here, the liberator of the prison, they are trying to figure out one of the prisoner's name to send him back to his family. What's your name? What's your name? Where are you from? But the prisoner is not responding. He seems to have forgotten his name.

00:15:08 Speaker_01
Every one of those testimonies is gut-wrenching, and we're just providing a small sampling here. The one I had that really got me is this idea of people forgetting their names.

00:15:19 Speaker_01
Taking away someone's name is one of the most insidious and sadly effective tools of dehumanization.

00:15:27 Speaker_01
If they had been in the prison for so long, and they had been so damaged mentally and emotionally through this torture, that they had stopped using their name to the point that they forgot their name?

00:15:37 Speaker_02
Then I can really relate to what happened to these people. I myself was jailed, not as much as these people. I have not endured what they have endured. But when I was in the prison, I was not allowed to use my real name.

00:15:50 Speaker_02
My name was 232, and that for a month. And these people were not allowed to use their name. They were not allowed to talk, even to their cellmates. So imagine a person putting him in 10 years in a prison with everyday torture.

00:16:06 Speaker_02
Usually, in a progressive regime, they would torture people to extract information. In Assad prison, they torture people just for vengeance, to take revenge from prisoners, to bully them.

00:16:18 Speaker_02
Our reporters told us that inside the prison they saw live-streaming cameras with high-definition cameras. Some of these videos of torturing prisoners were sold on the dark web for people who have mental sickness and they enjoy to watch these sadism.

00:16:36 Speaker_02
So basically imagine a person not allowed to say his name or her name under a daily torture. a lot of them would really forget their name. They don't believe that Assad is gone. Can we now say our name or we cannot say our name?

00:16:49 Speaker_02
Many of the prisoners couldn't believe it. They were walking and even though the media, people who liberated them were telling them, Assad is gone, you can walk. They could not believe it.

00:17:00 Speaker_02
I saw people on cameras that really don't know their name, don't know their father's name. All what they know is the name of their city. A guy was only saying Halab, Halab. Halab is a city in Syria, which is Aleppo in English. This is what he said.

00:17:13 Speaker_02
They tell him, what's your name? He say, Halab. What's your father name? Halab. What they went through is unbelievable. And I really can relate to that.

00:17:20 Speaker_01
Joseph, how is Syrian society, at least as we understand it, thus far responding to these reports?

00:17:28 Speaker_00
Syrian society is hyper-polarized between the many who oppose the Assad regime and the smaller but significant number of people who were going along with that system.

00:17:39 Speaker_00
And so the people who were pro-Assad didn't allow themselves to believe that any of this was happening.

00:17:46 Speaker_00
They were persuaded by pictures of Assad eating shawarma with his son and riding a bicycle that all of this stuff about the brutality, the genocide, the mass killing was somehow rebel propaganda.

00:18:00 Speaker_00
And that vast swath of the population are now coming to terms with the fact that all of those claims were true. And it might actually have been worse because the worst stories weren't even being told.

00:18:12 Speaker_00
And so if there's any hope for Syrian society to reconcile, to develop into a polity going forward, the question of reconciliation among those who were with this regime and those who were suffering from it has only just begun.

00:18:30 Speaker_01
I would argue it hasn't begun. I mean, my experience having observed some of this and worked on some of these issues in Iraq after the fall of Saddam's regime, it's not so easy to create the conditions for that.

00:18:43 Speaker_00
As you know, Dan, there was one experiment at a partial effort of truth and reconciliation in 1999-2000 in Morocco.

00:18:52 Speaker_00
after the passing of Hassan II, the so-called Years of Lead, that's what they called the brutality of the regime then, where there was some acknowledgement of the suffering of families in the presence of that monarchy and compensation.

00:19:08 Speaker_00
It didn't go so far as the kind of airing of grievance and acknowledgement of fault that we saw in the original Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

00:19:19 Speaker_00
And that takes leadership and it takes a willingness to move past vengeance in order to develop a society. And that's going to take a lot of courage if anything like that is going to happen in Syria.

00:19:33 Speaker_01
Right. And we don't even know who is going to lead Syria going forward. We can't even imagine what the government, the future government of Syria is going to look like.

00:19:41 Speaker_01
And understanding that will at least partially inform whether or not there can be some version of a truth and reconciliation process, some version of, you know, the Nuremberg trials.

00:19:51 Speaker_01
One hopes for all of these stages, but again, a lot of it is predicated on who's in charge. Joseph, you said something to me offline about the term genocide and how the term genocide has been loosely thrown around, especially in the last year.

00:20:05 Speaker_01
Try to attribute a term to what, how Israel was responding defensively to the war that was launched on Israelis by Hamas. How do you think about that term in the context of what we're learning in Syria?

00:20:18 Speaker_00
Simply that this is what a real genocide looks like. It's the very high bar of the actual definition of genocide that includes genocidal intent.

00:20:30 Speaker_00
The intent is in evidence, the machinery is there, the massive scale, the victims themselves, the cheapening of the word genocide, particularly over the past year and a half or so,

00:20:43 Speaker_00
has made it a word with very little meaning and yet the meaning of the term needs to be restored. Because there really is genocide and among other places it happened in Syria.

00:20:56 Speaker_00
Part of what we're doing here is to show people what an actual genocide looks like by filming it.

00:21:02 Speaker_00
by showing the machinery, by hearing from the victims, and we felt that it's a matter of human concern for people to understand what this means and the fact that it actually has happened in the Middle East right up until last week.

00:21:18 Speaker_01
Ahed, where are the people that operated this prison? They were the day-to-day instruments of the implementation of this genocide that Joseph is describing. Where are they? Have they just completely scattered and

00:21:31 Speaker_01
and just kind of they're blending back into what exists of Syrian society today. Do people know who they are?

00:21:37 Speaker_02
Dan, if I may add something to what Joseph said, then I can add this question.

00:21:42 Speaker_01
Sure.

00:21:42 Speaker_02
Earlier, even before 2011 and during the Arab Spring 2011, when we as Syrian used to speak and be active against Assad, we always were blamed by fellow Palestinians who are telling us, you are attacking a regime that is supporting resistance against Israel.

00:22:02 Speaker_02
And Israel is the main evil, is the bet noir here. And now, ironically, after they saw what happened in Sidnaya, many of them, they called and apologized and said, you were right. This is a real monster.

00:22:16 Speaker_02
And this is why, as Joseph said, that the word genocide should not be used in a broad way, in a broad term, because really that offended hundreds of thousands of Syrians who were really under real genocide. inside Syria.

00:22:30 Speaker_02
There was a real ethnic cleansing inside Syria. Most of the prisoners belong to a certain ethnic group in Syria, while the oppressor, they are from another ethnic group. And nobody's speaking about that.

00:22:43 Speaker_02
Now, speaking about the prison guards, they left, they escaped. Some of them, they left with Assad, the top officers to Russia. Some of them went to Iraq.

00:22:53 Speaker_02
Some of them went to Iran, some of them went to Lebanon, and some of them went to their villages in the mountainous region of Syria on the coast.

00:23:01 Speaker_02
Unfortunately, most of the prison guards belonged to Asad tribe, which is an Alawite tribe, a sect of Islam, and they took refuge now in the Alawite mountain in Syria.

00:23:15 Speaker_01
Are Syrians expecting said Naya's operators to be brought to justice?

00:23:20 Speaker_01
I mean, I mean, Syrians is a loose term, but generally speaking, cause I know it's a very polarized society and it's, there's a lot of demographic, you know, sectarian splits within Syria, but generally speaking is the Syrians, you know, the Syrians you're encountering, are they expecting the operators of said Naya to be held accountable?

00:23:37 Speaker_02
Yes, yes. This would help to avoid any possible conflict in Syria or any new civil war in the country. Even people who were pro-Assad and specifically from Assad ethnic group are calling now publicly that we should surrender these criminals.

00:23:54 Speaker_02
Assad should be brought into the Syrian justice system because that would spare the country another civil war. The fact that most of the prison guards belongs to Assad ethnic group could potentially lead to a civil war if justice was not brought.

00:24:12 Speaker_02
So all Syrians, including those who were on the side of Assad, are calling for justice.

00:24:18 Speaker_01
Joseph, just in wrapping up, I guess every revolution that we know of has its iconic image. Obviously there are the iconic images during the fall of the Soviet Union.

00:24:26 Speaker_01
I was in Iraq in April of 2003 when there was the image of those Iraqis in Baghdad pulling down the statue of Saddam. There's always this enduring iconic image. Will Sidnaya be that image?

00:24:40 Speaker_00
Sidnaya should be that image for the sake of Syrians to begin with, because it's about telling the truth about what happened, revealing the truth about what this regime did to its own population. Because the first step toward reconciliation is truth.

00:24:57 Speaker_00
is acknowledging, recognizing, and remembering a horrific injustice as first step in having a dialogue that will enable people to blaze a path forward.

00:25:05 Speaker_00
A lot of Syrians today, Dan, are talking about turning Sidnaya into a museum, a permanent memorial. And that idea comes from a good place.

00:25:16 Speaker_00
They're instinctually grasping that the memory of this place is an opportunity to begin to have a civil conversation about what a viable future for this country looks like. Okay.

00:25:30 Speaker_01
We will leave it there. There's so much more here to discuss.

00:25:35 Speaker_01
I'm sure we'll have both of you back to unpack what we're learning, because I'm sure, I hate to say it, but as horrible as Sidnaya is, it feels to me like we're just scratching the surface of what we'll be learning about Syria.

00:25:48 Speaker_01
So Joseph, Browdy, Ahed, Al-Khendi, thank you both really for being here and having this difficult but important conversation with us.

00:25:57 Speaker_02
Thank you, Dan.

00:25:58 Speaker_01
Thank you, Dan. That's our show for today. We thank Joseph and Ahed and our friends over at the Free Press who jointly published with the CPC the first footage that the CPC captured upon arriving at Sidnaya.

00:26:19 Speaker_01
We'll provide a link to that footage in our show notes. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Alon Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Research by Gabe Silverstein. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.