Former detainees in the "death camp" in Syria tell the horror of the "salt rooms"

He had not tasted the taste of salt since he entered the notorious Sednaya prison two years ago, where the people in charge of it prevent the prisoners from eating salt. Abdo told Agence France-Presse: "First of all, I said to myself (God does not help them) do they have all this salt and they don't put it in our food?".

On a winter day in 2017, before being transferred from prison to court, a guard pushed Abdo into a room he had never seen before, with his bare feet drowning in quantities of rock salt.

He had not tasted the taste of salt since he entered the notorious Sednaya prison two years ago, near Damascus, and the people in charge of it prevent the prisoners from eating salt, so he took with his fist a quantity of salt that was found to cover the room, and enjoyed its taste.

A few minutes later, he froze in terror when he stumbled upon a lanky body lying on the salt with two more bodies next to it. He tells Agence France-Presse the "most terrifying" experience of his life in a prison that former detainees describe as a "grave", a "death camp" and a "cancer".

The Association of Detainees and Missing Persons at Sednaya Prison documents in a report that will soon be published for the first time by the "salt rooms", which serve as mortuaries that began to be used during the years of the conflict that erupted in 2011, with the increase in the number of dead inside the prison.

Since Sednaya Prison lacks refrigerators to store the bodies of detainees who fall almost daily into it as a result of torture or poor detention conditions, the prison administration apparently resorted to salt that delays the decomposition process.

Based on the association’s report and interviews conducted by the French press agency with former detainees, it was found that in Sednaya Military Prison there are at least two “salt rooms” in which the bodies are placed until it is time to transfer them, while salt is completely absent from the few quantities of food that detainees enjoy, most likely to weaken them physically.

Abdo, 30, told AFP, asking not to reveal his real name for fear of members of his family still living in regime-controlled areas in Syria: "First, I said to myself (God does not help them) they have all this salt and they don't put it in our food? ".

After taking some salt, he went to the empty bathroom in the corner of the room, and after getting out of it, he stumbled upon the first body. "I stepped on something cold, she was one of them," he says.

Abdo froze in fear after seeing the three bodies lying on the salt, and more of it was sprinkled on them, and his legs started trembling.

He says from his home in Lebanon: "I thought that this would be my fate... and that it was my turn to execute and kill me. I could no longer move, so I sat near the wall and started crying and reciting the Qur'an."

"my heart is dead"

Abdo did not move for about an hour and a half.

He adds, "This was the most difficult thing I've seen in Saydnaya because of the feeling I experienced thinking that my life had ended here."

Abdo only breathed a sigh of relief when the jailer returned, put him in the prisoner transport car, and made sure he was on his way to court.

On his way out of the room, he saw near the door stacked empty black body bags, the same bags in which, on one day, and by order of the guards, the bodies of detainees were taken.

"In Saydnaya, my heart died," said Abdo, who was released in 2020. "Nothing affects me anymore. Even if someone told me that my brother died, it became normal for me."

He adds: "As a result of the death, torture and beatings that I saw, everything became normal."

Based on the testimonies of detainees and former prison employees, the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons at Sednaya Prison believes that the first “salt room” was found in the second half of 2013, with the intensification of torture and the deteriorating conditions in the prison.

"We were able to identify at least two salt rooms, each of which was used to collect the bodies of people who died under torture or died from diseases or starvation," the association's co-founder, Diab Sariya, from the association's office in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, told AFP.

He adds that the bodies were kept between two and five days in the dormitories alongside the detainees as a method of punishment, before being transferred to the salt rooms to "delay their decomposition."

The bodies are then left for two days inside the "salt chambers" waiting to be collected before being taken to a military hospital for death documentation and then to mass graves.