At the entrance, under the three-star flag representing free Syria, we can read: “Sednaïa Prison, the human slaughterhouse: we will not forget, we will not forgive”.

Parents carry photos of their children with only a little hope. Some go into the narrow holes they have dug underground and tap the bars with sticks to see if they hear a sound. The others dig through thousands of scattered documents in the mud and read them to see if they can find traces of their loved ones. Posters of the missing hang on the walls. People try to find the names of their missing loved ones by examining the visitation booklet placed nonchalantly on a trolley at the entrance.

The walls smell of death. Windowless cells and personal belongings are abandoned by prisoners who ran without looking back when they learned they were free. Some mattresses are in the hallways. They are said to have been taken out of their cells to rape inmates. The smell of blood mixes with the smell of urine on the lowest floors, where the sun never penetrates.

An old couple approaches from the front, holding a photo. Their two sons are missing; they don’t even know if they were brought to Sednaya. One was 18, the other 21 when they were taken. Parents have been looking for them for 13 years old. “We heard the Turks were coming for it. Is this true? they ask us. The next day, the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) began search and rescue operations in Sednaya with a team of 120 people.

There is much to say about our part in the Syrian victory and what we have won, but if your country can be a beacon of hope in the eyes of a desperate mother, you have won.

The two hours I spent in Sednaya Prison were one of the most significant traumas of my life. When I came out of the press room where the corpses were placed for destruction, I realized that we could not even imagine what the hundreds of thousands of people who were brought there as prisoners endured.

Sednaya is an exceptional place, a killing machine, a place without rules, without order, where the only leaders are the guards who leave human beings at the mercy of human beings in the most brutal way. Just yesterday, two more mass graves for 75,000 people were discovered in Damascus. The Syrian woman who shouted to the UN delegation that came to Sednaya: “You don’t need to come anymore. They are all dead,” revealing in the name of all of us the farce we call “international order.”

If Agamben had visited Sednaya, he would have rewritten “Homo Sacer”; Foucault is said to have rewritten “The Birth of the Prison”. As Muslims who have seen Sednaya, we have a responsibility to write our own history so that the memory of Sednaya does not fade. And at the beginning we will write this: “We will not forget. We will not forgive!”

The Sabah Daily News Bulletin

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