Sednaya Prison
Sign in to saveAlso known as Sednaya military prison, Saydnaya Prison
Syrian military jail, near Damascus
Key facts
- Location
- Sednaya , Rif Dimashq Governorate , Syria
- Status
- Defunct
- Opened
- 1986 ; 40 years ago ( 1986 ) (construction began in 1981)
- Closed
- 8 December 2024 ; 18 months ago ( 2024-12-08 ) ( Fall of Damascus )
- Managed by
- Ministry of Defence of Syria (1986–2024)
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- prison
- Country
- Syria
- Located in
- Damascus
- Operator
- Syria
- Image
- Sednaya prison after the Fall of Assad.png
Show 5 more facts
- inception
- 1987-00-00
- on focus list of Wikimedia project
- WikiProject Human rights
- native label
- سجن صيدنايا
- Commons category
- Sednaya Prison
- dissolved, abolished or demolished date
- 2024-12-08
Sources (3)
via Wikidata · CC0
~30 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Sednaya Prison (Arabic: سجن صيدنايا Sijn Ṣaydnāyā), also known as the "Human Slaughterhouse" (المسلخ البشري), was a Syrian military prison and death camp that the Assad regime operated near Damascus from 1986 until the 2024 Syrian opposition offensives. For just over the first two decades after the first group of inmates arrived in 1987, the prison routinely held civilian detainees and political prisoners, but after the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, it was also used to hold anti-government rebels.
The prison was notorious for being the site of severe human rights violations and war crimes perpetrated by Syrian government forces, including torture, rape, and mass executions. In January 2021, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated that 30,000 prisoners had been killed by the Assad regime at Sednaya since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, while Amnesty International estimated in February 2017 that between 5,000 and 13,000 people had been victims of extrajudicial killings at the prison between September 2011 and December 2015.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Sednaya Prison” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.