‘It was like I was reborn’: Sednaya prison’s former inmates adapt to a new Syria

Former prisoners endured hearing fellow inmates being executed – but they are the lucky ones, with 100,000 people still missing

Of all the horrors Mohammed Ammar Hamami remembers from his time in the Assad regime’s notorious Sednaya prison, the most vivid is the clanging of metal execution tables being moved around on the floor below.

About once every 40 days, prison guards would drag the tables away from under the feet of condemned men. Nooses around their necks and hands tied behind their backs, they would die by hanging. Most of the bodies were burned in Sednaya’s crematorium.

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