Yasmine was 22 years old when she was accused of terrorism and locked away in one of Bashar al-Assad’s dismal prisons, notorious for the unflinching cruelty of the guards.
She had never drank alcohol before, but that didn’t stop a man called Nader forcing arak down her throat as he raped her repeatedly over the next 25 days.
Soon, Yasmine was transferred to the notorious Sednaya Prison, known as Branch 215, or the ‘Branch of Death’ for being synonymous with the torture and mass-execution of Assad’s dissenters during the 13-year uprising against his Baathist regime.
Human rights groups estimate that at least 181,000 people were forcibly disappeared or arbitrarily detained after anti-government protests began in 2011, with most vanishing into Assad’s sprawling prison network.
Surviving Branch 215 was a miracle, but for Muslim women like Yasmine, death would have felt like mercy: as a survivor of rape, she was ostracised from her conservative community, forced to pay the price everyday for what Assad’s jailers did to her.
As soon as women entered hellscapes like Sednaya, they were ritualistically humiliated: stripped of their hijabs and clothes and left to live in their underwear, they took turns to sleep in their cramped cells that could pack hundreds.
Despite being a virgin, Yasmine was told her crime was engaging in ‘Jihad al-nika’ or ‘sex jihad’ – offering herself up to a rebel fighter in the name of holy war.
Her punishment was languishing for four months in jail, where she was tied up and raped so many times she stopped counting. To this day, a decade later, she flinches when her husband touches her, because the memory of Nader still haunts her.
A band saw stands beside two bone cutting saws in a room flooded with excrement inside Sednaya Prison, where thousands of people were detained and tortured
A bed is seen in a prisoners cell inside Sednaya Prison, nicknamed the ‘Branch of Death’ by former detainees
An aerial picture taken with a drone shows Sednaya prison, dubbed by Amnesty International as the ‘Human Slaughterhouse’, near Damascus, Syria, December 9, 2024
Efforts to establish the ‘Branch of Death’ date back to 1978, when the Syrian government confiscated land from local owners and assigned it to the ministry of defense to build a prison.
Estimates suggest that more than 30,000 detainees were killed within its walls in the years after the start of the Syrian war in 2011, with up to 50 people being taken from their cells and hanged in bi-weekly executions during the dead of night.
There were two buildings on the Sednaya site, 17 miles north of Damascus, which between them could contain 10,000 to 20,000 prisoners.
In 2011, the Arab Spring protests that swept the region spread to Syria, with thousands demanding an end to the Assad family’s autocratic rule. A violent crackdown ensued, and Sednaya became a primary site for detentions and executions.
During the civil war, many arrived to the facility without ever having seen a judge, and did not know the crime they were charged with before they were tortured, deprived of medical care or died from starvation.
‘There are no interrogations at Sednaya,’ Amnesty International wrote. ‘Torture isn’t used to obtain information, but seemingly as a way to degrade, punish and humiliate. Prisoners are targeted relentlessly, unable to “confess” to save themselves from further beatings.’
Prisoners were segregated based on status, with military personnel detained for crimes or misdemeanours kept in the ‘white’ building, while security inmates charged with fabricated allegations of terrorism based on their political activities were locked up in the ‘red’ building.
The Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) said Sednaya ‘effectively became a death camp’ during the revolution, while Amnesty said it was a ‘human slaughterhouse’.
As evidence of the mass killings, the prison even had purpose-built salt rooms used as mortuaries to preserve dead bodies in the absence of refrigerated morgues.
Sednaya Prison is known as the ‘Branch of Death’ for being synonymous with the torture and mass-executions of Assad’s dissenters during the 13-year uprising against his Baathist regime
Estimates suggest that more than 30,000 detainees were killed in Sednaya in the years after the start of the Syrian war in 2011
A woman reacts as relatives dig up the floor in Sednaya prison to look for her son, December 17, 2024
There were two buildings on the Sednaya site, 17 miles north of Damascus, which between them could contain 10,000-20,000 prisoners
The Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) said Sednaya ‘effectively became a death camp’ during the revolution
When Islamist insurgents led by Abu Mohammed al-Golani stormed the prison last December, thousands of detainees – mainly opponents of the Assad regime – were liberated and reunited with their families.
Assad was toppled by Islamist rebels Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in a rapid 11-day offensive that ended a 13-year civil war, and many thought a new era had finally arrived in Syria.
But for rape survivors like Yasmine, the horrific memories from Sednaya are permanent scars.
‘The torture began as soon as I arrived. I was blindfolded. There wasn’t really an interrogation. They were just pretending,’ she told France24, using an anonymous name to protect her identity.
She’s describing her experience in another prison, where she was detained for 25 days before entering Sednaya, but which was no less nightmarish.
There, she found herself trapped in a basement with an officer who taunted her with objectifying comments, such as: ‘You’re beautiful, I love your body, your buttocks.’
He escorted her to his office and showed her a bundle of men’s belts, telling her that all those men were dead, and she will be joining them in a few hours. Yasmine believed him and pleaded that she would be able to tell her parents where she died.
In less than a month, she was raped 15 times by the jailer Nader, who forced her to drink so much arak she vomited.
‘The pain was unbearable. Unimaginable,’ she said. Yasmine would often bleed, but couldn’t wash myself because there was no bathroom for the inmates.
Before long, she was transferred to Sednaya, where somehow, her misery only intensified.
Teams investigate allegations of a secret compartment in Sednaya Military Prison after armed groups, opposing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime take control in Damascus, Syria on December 9, 2024
A woman walks past Sednaya prison in Sednaya, Syria, December 19, 2024
When Islamist insurgents led by Abu Mohammed al-Golani stormed the prison last December, thousands of prisoners were liberated and reunited with their families
‘As soon as we arrived, they forced us to undress. I was completely naked. The soldiers watched us and laughed,’ Yasmine said.
She was the youngest in a cell of 40 women, all of whom were given pills every day around noon. At first, Yasmine assumed they were for her headache, until a married woman told her they were contraceptive tablets.
Each night, 20 women stayed awake, while the other 20 slept on their sides, with new arrivals sometimes being forced to stay in the toilets due to a lack of space. Opposite their cell, girls as young as 13 were detained.
Five days after entering Sednaya, Yasmine was raped by her interrogator, who only ever asked her substantial questions when his boss was present. Otherwise, he quizzed her about what underwear she liked best – its size, its colour.
Then, she was raped by the jailers in the archive room. Such attacks occurred so many times that she lost count, but they always happened in the same room, with the same metal cabinets.
‘My hands were tied, but I wasn’t blindfolded. They put my hands on the desk and a piece of sponge in my mouth. One soldier raped me and two others stood at the door to watch. When the first one had finished, another took over. And so on.’
Soon, Yasmine thought about killing herself. ‘I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I didn’t want to leave, I was praying for death,’ she said.
But inmates weren’t only subjected to abuse themselves, they were forced to witness it.
After female prisoners like Yasmine were interrogated in the hallway blindfolded, they were escorted to the ‘torture chamber’ and made to watch the bloodshed and barbarity that defined day to day existence in Sednaya.
‘There were men hanging on the wall. One of them had no flesh left on his back. You could see his spine. Some were dead, others had lost consciousness. There was blood everywhere on the floor. Horrible scenes,’ Yasmine said.
‘I will never be able to forget them. Nor the screams.’
A picture of Syria’s ousted president Bashar al-Assad is tossed out of a window from the prison facility run by the ‘Palestine Security branch’ of Syria’s Military Intelligence Directorate in Damascus on December 13, 2024
An inside view of the ‘Palestine Branch’ detention centre, which was used as an interrogation and torture prison by the collapsed Baathist regime in Syria for more than half a century and is known with its horror among the people, in Damascus, Syria on December 16, 2024
A vehicle sits amidst debris in front of Sednaya prison, December 17, 2024
Women and girls were raped and sexually assaulted in at least 20 intelligence branches in Syria, and men and boys in 15 of those, according to a United Nations human rights commission
Yasmine might be physically free, but she still suffers from the social and psychological consequences of being a rape survivor in a community that punishes and shuns women for the perceived loss of honour.
Many women have been divorced by their husbands after coming out of jail, with some even receiving death threats from their pro-government families.
Yasmine has a ‘good’ and ‘kind’ husband, but intimacy is difficult after the trauma of her experience.
‘The smell of Nader never leaves me, not even for a single day. It doesn’t go away. I smell it everywhere. It’s inside me. Sometimes I feel like he’s really there,’ she said.
Women and girls were raped and sexually assaulted in at least 20 intelligence branches in Syria, and men and boys in 15 of those, a United Nations human rights commission reported last year.
Another one of the infamous prisons known for the systematic sexual abuse of women was Far’ Falastin, or Branch 235, also known as the feared Palestine branch.
The jail, located in the southern outskirts of Damascus, was originally named for its role in the surveillance of Palestinian groups, but soon the cavernous labyrinth became the prime location where countless women were subjected to sexual torture.
When Assad’s regime fell in December 2024 and Branch 235 was emptied of inmates, evidence of the women’s daily degradation was immediately visible: small white food bowls, a pink cotton bra, and a metal vaginal speculum no-doubt used to inflict maximum pain during intimate cavity searches.
Asma, 43 (not her real name), born into a family of pro-regime officers, was arrested in 2016 for treating the besieged population of Eastern Ghouta, an eastern suburb of Damascus.
In the Palestine branch, she was hand-picked by a female inmate collaborator to ‘entertain’ the prison officer.
‘He would change his “toy” every two or three days, otherwise he would get bored,’ she told France24.
Not only was she raped by him in his office, but several men in the interrogation room.
‘There were four or five of them each time. They raped me with their fingers, their hands… with everything. The pain was unbearable. I was blindfolded, but I could hear their voices,’ she said.
Often, the rape of women would be used as a method of psychological torture to inflict on men who were handcuffed to the prison walls and made to watch.
‘When they assaulted me with sharp objects in my private parts, it was a way of torturing a man hanging on the wall,’ Asma said.
‘He screamed louder than me, even though I was the one being tortured. They did this to scare him. Once, they shoved an iron bar into my vagina. I told God that I didn’t want to go out. I just wanted to die.’
The conditions were notoriously deplorable. ‘In Palestine, there was nothing to eat,’ she said.
‘We were given bulgur wheat in a plastic box. We had to eat with our hands. There were bugs in the food. Everything was disgusting… The guard would urinate in the water tank and force us to drink it.’
On release, she fled to Turkey and realised she was five months pregnant by one of her rapists. She tried to get a fatwa [a legal ruling in Islamic law] allowing her to have an abortion, but the was told her it was haram [forbidden].
Unable to get her hands on the right medication, she performed an at-home abortion, desperate to rid her body of any remnant of the men who abused her. But the trauma of the self-administered procedure remains.
‘I can forget the rape and the pregnancy, but I will never be able to forget the abortion,’ she said. ‘For me, it’s as if I had killed someone. I am incapable of hurting an insect.’
Another disturbing testimony comes from Ayda (not her real name), who in the Palestine branch had cigarettes burnt into her breasts, according to a 2017 report by Lawyers and Doctors for Human Rights (LDHR).
She wad forced, with the 20 other women in her cell, to watch a group of young male detainees be stripped naked, tortured and have bottles forced into their anuses.
A woman in the cell recognised one of the victims as her son, and had a heart attack.
Zahira (not her real name) was 45 when she was arrested at her workplace in a suburb of Damascus in 2013. When she arrived at Al Mezzeh Military Airport, she was strip searched, tied to a bed and gang-raped by five soldiers.
Before she was even taken to the Palestine branch, she was electrocuted and beaten with a water hose, shackled by the abdomen to male detainees including her husband, and beaten.
When in prison, she was kept in a cell which was about 129 sq ft, with around 48 other women, who were allowed to the toilet once every 12 hours, and to shower once every 40 days.
On release, she had hepatitis, pneumonia and anemia and suffered with faecal-urinary incontinence resulting from multiple rapes.
Syria’s burned Palestine Branch prison, with its piles of documents of interrogations and reports, and its dark, dank collection of cells, shows the systematic cruelty of the toppled regime of Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria on December 17, 2024
Satellite images show the increase in mass graves at a cemetery near Damascus between 2010, left, and 2016, right. Amnesty International said that bodies of prisoners executed in Sednaya Prison were buried there
Satellite images show the increase in mass graves at a cemetery near Damascus between 2010, left, and 2016, right. Amnesty International said that bodies of prisoners executed in Sednaya Prison were buried there
An aerial photo shows people gathering at the Sednaya prison in Damascus on December 9, 2024
More than 230,000 civilians, including 30,000 children, are reported to have been killed in the brutal Syrian civil war.
Now, many of the survivors of torture and rape in Assad’s prison complex are demanding justice, and want to see the perpetrators behind bars.
Several of Assad’s agents have already been put on trial and sentenced in courts throughout Europe, including in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands.
In a landmark French trial in May 2024, three high-ranking Syrian officials of Assad’s regime were found guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes, and were sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment.
In March this year, a German court handed a life sentence to a Syrian man for leading a Hezbollah-backed militia that committed atrocities against Sunni Muslim civilians and gave its support to Assad during the civil war
And in a watershed moment in November, Syria began the first trial of suspects in a wave of bloodshed in March, during which pro-government fighters killed nearly 1,500 members of the Alawite minority.
Officials say the authorities are committed to accountability in this new era that ends a dark phase of secretive authoritarian rule, noting it was previously unheard of in Syria to put members of the security forces on trial for crimes.
But despite transitional President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s supposed commitment to the rule of law, at least 97 people have been abducted or disappeared since January this year.
‘Eleven months since the fall of the former government in Syria, we continue to receive worrying reports about dozens of abductions and enforced disappearances,’ spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Thameen Al-Keetan told reporters in Geneva.
As Syria approaches a year since the astonishing fall of more than five decades of Assad family rule, the female survivors are trapped between the trauma of the past and hope for a better future.
‘If I speak today, it’s so that this doesn’t happen again. It’s to protect our children, our grandchildren,’ Houda, 28 (not her real name), another victim of the Palestine branch, told France24.
She’s waiting for her rapists to be prosecuted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the turmoil they put thousands of women through.
‘Now, Syria is liberated. We must be a priority for the state. We want to be compensated so we can rebuild our lives. We deserve a new life.’
