Exclusive: According to a report, almost 1,000 Syrians perished at Assad’s airport prison

A report to be released Thursday links the execution, torture, or maltreatment of over 1,000 Syrians who perished in captivity at a military airport outside of Damascus to seven potential grave sites. The deaths were widely expected.

The Syria Justice and Accountability Centre told Reuters in an exclusive report that it used a combination of satellite imagery, witness accounts, and documents taken at the military airport in the Mezzeh suburb of Damascus following the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad in December to identify the grave sites.

A few of the locations were on the airport property. Others were located throughout Damascus.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the mass graves’ existence through its own analysis of satellite images and did not analyze the materials. However, pictures of many of the locations identified by SJAC did show evidence of disturbed earth, according to Reuters reporters. Two of the locations—one near a cemetery in Najha and one on the grounds of the Mezzeh airport—clearly display evidence of lengthy trenches that were excavated at times that align with SJAC witness accounts.

One of the report’s authors, Shadi Haroun, claimed to be one of the prisoners. He spoke of daily interrogations that included physical and psychological torture aimed at coercing him into making unfounded confessions during a protest planning event that lasted for many months in 2011–2012.

He told Reuters that death could take many different forms.

Detainees might hear “occasional shootings, shot by shot, every couple of days,” but they could only see their cell walls and the interrogation chamber.

And then there were the wounds that their tormentors had caused.

Haroun described a cellmate’s predicament by saying, “One of the detainees suffered a minor wound on his foot from a whipping he received during torture, which was left unsterilized or untreated for days, which gradually turned into gangrene and his condition worsened until it reached the point of amputation of the entire foot.”

Along with acquiring the documents, SJAC and the Association for the Detained and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison conducted interviews with eight former members of Syria’s security agency, air force intelligence, which was responsible for monitoring, detaining, and murdering regime opponents, as well as 156 survivors.

Former regime officials are prohibited from speaking in public by a decree issued by the new government, and none were accessible for comment.

A colonel in the Interior Ministry of the new government, who went by his military alias Abu Baker, stated, “Even though some of the graves mentioned in the report had not been discovered before, the discovery itself does not surprise us, as we know that there are more than 100,000 missing persons in Assad’s prisons who did not come out during the days of liberation in early December.”

“One of the greatest legacies left by the Assad regime is finding the fates of those missing people and looking for more graves,” he stated.

Since 2011, when Assad’s assault on protestors turned into a full-scale war, hundreds of thousands of Syrians are thought to have died.

Rights organizations, foreign governments, and war crimes prosecutors have long accused Assad and his father Hafez, who was president before him and passed away in 2000, of carrying out numerous extrajudicial executions, including mass executions inside the nation’s prison system and using chemical weapons against the Syrian people.

According to the SJAC, every survivor it spoke with had been tortured.

The initial years of the rebellion, from 2011 to 2017, are the subject of the report. However, some of the former regime officers who were stationed in Mezzeh described the events leading up to the regime’s downfall in their testimonies.

According to the research, the Mezzeh military airport, which housed at least 29,000 detainees between 2011 and 2017, was a crucial component of the Assad government’s apparatus of enforced disappearance.

The paper claims that by 2020, air force intelligence had turned over a dozen Mezzeh hangars, offices, and dorms into prisons.

SJAC, a Syrian-led human rights organization based in the United States and supported by European and, until recently, U.S. governments, said its estimate of the dead is based on two air force intelligence datasets that list 1,154 detainees who died there between 2011 and 2017. As the dictatorship fell, the datasets were leaked in a Facebook group that SJAC kept an eye on. The organization then cross-checked the data against documents and witness accounts. Those who were put to death after receiving a death sentence at a military field court held within a hangar are not included in the estimate.

The report’s witness evidence states that citizens were hung and officers and soldiers were put to death by firing squad. Numerous people who were executed were buried close to the hangar, according to two witnesses.

Two senior Syrian air force intelligence officials were charged with war crimes in December by the U.S. Justice Department for “the infliction of cruel and inhuman treatment on detainees under their control, including U.S. citizens, in detention facilities at the Mezzeh Military Airport.”