Searching for Loved Ones in a Newly Liberated Syrian Prison

Up on the roof, three men pointed at a reinforced hatchway, from which a pipe protruded. Perhaps, they suggested, it was an air vent to the secret underground prison. There was a rank smell seeping from it, but it seemed like the stench of sewage, not of bodies. As I prepared to climb back down into the prison through a hole bashed through the concrete, they called out again, pointing to a hatch at the far end of the roof. Another vent there had an even worse smell—but that, too, seemed like nothing more than waste. The men went on, aimlessly looking for whatever they could find.

Everywhere I went in Sednaya, it was the same story. The Syrian people had been so terrorized and disenfranchised, so thoroughly cut off from their missing relatives, that they were reduced to a kind of ad-hoc forensic anthropology. One man, who had lost two brothers and three cousins to Sednaya, told me that he had been able to visit them once, back in 2016. But he was told afterward that he could not return, and since then there had been only silence. I asked if he had tried to come back, despite the order, to check on his family members. He replied, with a stricken look, “My relatives told me not to ask about them, that it could be bad for them, and so I stopped.”

As I walked down a stairwell, a young man beckoned to me, cupping his other hand over his mouth and nose. A friend of his had made a hole in the wall about six feet up and was crouched in the opening. “Please smell,” the young man asked me. This time, I thought, it did possibly smell like death. The man in the hole began tearing at the masonry and hurling aside debris. A knot of onlookers gathered, looking up through the bars of a locked doorway below. For the moment, their faces were hopeful. ♦