Ruth Sherlock
speaker
937 appearances
123 recordings
4 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Ruth Sherlock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 88 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 19.
Appearances
Most prisoners were released by opposition rebels in the hours after the regime collapsed, but people believe there could be more cells, hidden underground where others might be alive. The commotion, the shooting in the air and people running towards the prisoners because we understand they've managed to open a new door. OK, we're inside the courtyard of the prison.
They've just closed the doors behind us because they want to stop the crowds. They believe they've found something and they need silence. They need calm to try to hear the voices of the prisoners. A rebel shouts for quiet, but it's too chaotic, with hundreds of people combing the jail. Some hack at the concrete floor with metal pipes, a desperate hope that someone could be underneath.
Anything seems possible in this place that Syrians have known for so long as a centre of torture, where prisoners were hung by ropes, beaten, starved. Isra Kouki says Sednaya is worse than anyone can imagine. A slaughterhouse, she says. Her brother was in here for years. She heard he'd been killed, but never received a death certificate. So all this time, she's kept a shred of hope.
Outside this section of the prison, we meet Aissa Hosseini. He's searching for his three cousins and asks us what we've seen inside. The Assad regime didn't usually tell families where the detained were held or even if they were still alive. Husseini searched every prison in the capital, every institution. It's too much. Some 100,000 Syrians disappeared into jails like these, say rights groups.
It's getting dark, and rescuers end their search in Sednaya. There are no more secret cells, no more hope for families like Husseini. As we leave, we meet Samer Haida. He's come with his four young children.
It's so they remember the bloody legacy of the Assad regime, he says. So that we never forget. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Sednaya Prison.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's just this kind of huge outpouring of grief happening right now. And Aisha, the United Nations is saying that some 150,000 people could still be missing. And in Sednaya prison, when the rebels threw open the cell doors, you know, only about 2,000 people apparently came out.
But there are tens of thousands of people who are believed to have been thrown into that prison during the course of the civil war.
This really was the big question for us. NPR's regional producer Jawad Rasallah and I, we started searching for people who might be able to help us find information, maybe witnesses to what happened inside Sidnaya. Jawad reached out to Syrian contacts and one person asked another. And in the way that happens, we were eventually put in touch with a former inmate and then another and then another.
And two of the men we spoke to had gotten out of the prison just days before, just when those doors were flung open by the rebels. they were really just shadows of their former selves. You know, they were like sickly thin. They had these like ribs protruding and these gaunt faces, their cheekbones were showing.
And one of the men, when we got to his house, his family had laid out this huge platter of sticky Syrian sweets to celebrate his return, but he couldn't touch them because he told us, you know, his stomach, it can't cope with anything that rich after years of what was basically starvation.
We interviewed the former prisoners all separately, and all three of the men's testimony of what went on in Sednaya was remarkably similar. One of those men who wanted to be known only by his first name, Adham, he actually decided to do this really difficult thing. He decided to go back to the prison he'd just come out of because he believed in showing it to us.
And so he took us through this labyrinth of concrete corridors, he said, Naya, to his cell where he lived constantly. in this crowded place with 17 others for nearly six years. We saw the tiny plastic cup that guards used to measure a meal size for a prisoner. And Aisha, it was like less than you'd feed a baby. And then something happened that just stopped me in my tracks.
I asked him about the nickname Sednaya had. It's often referred to as the slaughterhouse. But then he corrected me. This wasn't just a nickname. He said, it's an actual place, and it's upstairs. Here's that moment. NPR's Jawad Rizalla is with me, and he interprets.
What does he mean?
He takes us up to a huge empty room. Metal cages line the walls. He says this is where people were executed, hanged in large numbers. What we learned next from his testimony and the other prisoners is how that slaughterhouse operated. And here's part of that report.
32-year-old Talaat Hussein Tala says he never thought people could be so violent and evil. He says the killings followed a regular schedule.
The guards put these prisoners in a separate cell and kept them there without food or water until Wednesday. He says that was the killing day. Another freed Sadnaya detainee, who goes by the name Abu Hassan, picks up the story.
He says the guards would call the prisoners' names out, ten at a time. Then they beat them, within earshot of the other detainees. Then, after midnight, the executions began. None of the interviewees we spoke with saw the killings, but all three recount hearing a similar sound. They believe it was a table being snatched from under the prisoners' feet in the moments they were hung.
Former prisoner Talha says this would continue for hours.
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