Digital Prisons Museum Documents Executions and Mass Graves at Syria’s Sednaya

The Syria Prisons Museum launched Sept. 15 with online 3D tours, survivor testimony and document archives that investigators say reconstruct mass executions, torture and the disposal of corpses at Sednaya Prison — one of the most notorious detention centers run by the Assad regime.

Researchers at the project say they documented physical evidence and combined it with eyewitness testimony and administrative records to identify the mechanics of mass killings, including a makeshift metal gallows and stored nooses, and to trace the movement of bodies from the prison to mass graves or military hospitals. The museum team said it hopes the material will support legal cases and help families of the disappeared understand what happened to their relatives.

The initiative adapts methods developed for an earlier project that documented ISIS-run prisons. That project filmed interiors with 360-degree cameras, recorded inscriptions and objects left behind, collected more than 70,000 documents and interviewed hundreds of survivors; evidence from that work has been used in at least one German criminal conviction. The Syria Prisons Museum applied the same approach inside Sednaya after the facility was entered by a team a few days following its reported liberation on Dec. 8, when the Time report says surviving prisoners were freed as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad left for Moscow.

According to the museum's account published in Time, survivors and former prisoners reported that the names of those sentenced to death were called weekly, that condemned men were chained together, and that prisoners designated for execution were held in specific cells for the last three days of life and deprived of food and water to hasten death. Investigators said accounts from inmates who were held in cells above the prison reception hall described hearing heavy metal objects dragged on execution nights. Comparing those accounts to physical evidence — scattered metal pipes and bags containing nooses — the team reconstructed a gallows made of metal pipes large enough to execute several people at once.

The museum team also said it found administrative documents showing distinct postmortem routes. People executed on the gallows were, the records indicate, moved directly to mass graves unless fighting blocked roads; in those cases bodies were placed temporarily in a so-called "salt room" to slow decomposition. The documents suggest that those who died under torture, starvation or neglect were sometimes taken to military hospitals, where officials recorded fabricated causes of death such as "respiratory failure due to tuberculosis and fluid-electrolyte imbalance disorder."

Prisons have been central to Assadist rule since Hafez al-Assad seized power in 1970, the museum's reporting notes, establishing a system of surveillance, detention and torture that activists say suppressed dissent for decades. Syrians rose up in 2011 amid the broader Arab Spring; the uprising, and the regime’s response, evolved into a civil war that human rights organizations and analysts say claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced millions.

A Syrian human rights network estimated in August that at least 160,000 people remained arbitrarily detained or forcibly disappeared. Human rights investigators have documented mass graves and exhumations in recent years; the museum says its work is intended to preserve perishable evidence inside prison buildings and to create a centralized digital record that survivors and investigators can use.

The Prisons Museum said the project seeks multiple aims: to support criminal investigations and prosecutions, to counter denial of crimes, and to build a public record for Syrians and international audiences. The Time article notes the potential legal value of meticulous documentation; the ISIS Prisons Museum’s archived material contributed to a German court conviction of militants involved in abuses in ISIS detention sites.

The museum also frames its work as part of preventing renewed cycles of violence. It said that in some cases the government in Damascus has released figures accused of atrocities and incorporated former militia leaders into official security structures while attempting to consolidate authority. The museum and other analysts warn that absence of transparent, legal accountability could fuel vigilantism, revenge attacks and sectarian spillover that would hamper social recovery.

The online platform offers virtual tours of Sednaya, witness interviews and detailed reports on the prison’s history and administration, and the project team said it will publish further investigations on both the Syria and ISIS prisons museum websites. Investigators emphasized that the Assad regime and ISIS both produced bureaucratic records of their own crimes, records that the museums say can be cross-referenced with forensic analysis and survivor testimony to produce corroborated case files.

Human rights groups have urged comprehensive, impartial investigations and prosecutions for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria. The Syria Prisons Museum's organizers say their digital documentation will be one element in a larger effort to establish what happened inside detention facilities and to provide evidence to courts, truth commissions or other accountability mechanisms that might pursue legal or restorative outcomes in the future.

The initiative arrives amid an ongoing and contested transition in parts of Syria where authorities, former combatants and communities are negotiating security, governance and memory of the conflict. Museum organizers said the work is intended not only to document past atrocities but also to contribute to a record that may deter future abuses and offer some measure of closure to victims' families.