After the fall of the Assad regime on December 8, 2024, thousands of people were liberated from the government’s torture prisons. For some, like prominent activist Mazen Al-Hamada, help arrived too late. He is believed to have been executed shortly before the regime’s collapse.

His body was reportedly found at a morgue in the Harasta Hospital, linked to the notorious Sednaya prison, also known as “the human slaughterhouse”. The Assad regime disposed of inmates' bodies at the hospital’s morgue before burying them in mass graves. Mazen’s body had visible signs of torture and beatings, according to reports.

Since 2011, after a series of protests broke out in Syria, tens of thousands of men, women and children had been forcefully disappeared into secret detention centers. Survivors accuse the regime of crimes against humanity.

This documentary, first released in 2017, sheds light on the brutality of Syria’s fallen regime. In it, Mazen Al-Hamada shares his accounts of his first imprisonment between the years 2012 and 2013. Survivors of the prisons and the families of other victims recount their pain and despair.

Bill Wiley and his team of war crime investigators smuggled material out of Syria to a secret location in Europe. By 2017 they had extracted around 600,000 pages of official government documents – a wealth of potential evidence against the Assad regime that could help build the case for a criminal prosecution along the lines of the Nuremberg trials. The paper trail led the prosecutors to the fate of the protestors who took to the streets in 2011.

As of December 2024, Wiley and his team have secured around 1.3 million documents that enable them to investigate the crimes of the Assad regime.

#documentary #dwdocumentary #dwdocs #syria #assad
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