Syria Prisons Museum Opens in Damascus

In a project unthinkable before the fall of the Assad regime, a new museum in Damascus memorialises the heartbreaking stories of those who suffered in the country’s prisons.

Created by international media collective Alshare with support from IWPR, the Syria Prisons Museum includes virtual reconstructions of sites such as the notorious Sednaya detention centre as well as detailed documentation of survivor testimony.

It combines a physical exhibition in the National Museum of Damascus - itself a highly symbolic setting - with a digital platform that uses state-of-the-art technology and recorded oral histories alongside educational content on justice and accountability.

The Sednaya Military Prison was a key symbol of the repression of the regime Bashar al-Assad, who was toppled in December 2024. Tens of thousands of civilians detained during the Syrian uprising that began in 2011 were sent there, and many remain unaccounted for.

Survivors of Sednaya who attended the September launch of the museum in the Syrian capital said that they felt that the wider public could finally have some insight into their horrific experiences.

“Since my release in 2019, I have been trying to show the world, families, and friends the hell that detainees suffered under the Assad regime,” said former Sednaya detainee Baraa. “But I always felt that people couldn’t truly imagine or understand.

“This is where the Syria Prisons Museum is so important — it preserves memory and shows the world the scale of the crimes and injustice in Syria during the Assad regime’s era.”

For bereaved families and relatives of the disappeared, the museum provided a way of both connecting to their loved ones and the possibility of finding out their fate.

Um Ahmad’s son Ahmad Attah was arrested in 2013 and detained in Sednaya for five years before the Assad regime informed the family of his death. They were never given his body or any information about how he died.

“Since they arrested him, I have been thinking about how he was living, eating, where he was sleeping, how he changed his clothes, took a shower, how they tortured him, where he took his last breaths, who killed him, and the faces of his jailers and perpetrators,” the 54-year-old said through her tears.

“Seeing Sednaya prison today virtually and being able to move through its parts gave me the chance to feel and see a piece of what I have spent years imagining. The hope that these testimonies and pieces of evidence could help uncover the fate of my son and other innocent missing persons means so much to us as families.”

The Alshare initiative, in partnership with IWPR through the Aswat Sourya project, has been working for years to document the experiences of Syria’s detainees and their families.

A previous project created a vast archive of the network of prisons run by Islamic State (IS) when they controlled parts of Syria and Iraq between 2014 and 2019.

The evidence collected - including over 70,000 documents – is not only being used by a number of European countries in prosecutions against former IS members, but also remains  accessible for journalists, researchers and human rights organisations.

It was also used to create a similar digital museum with 3D virtual experience facilitating immersive storytelling and memorialisation.

Thanaa Jebbi, IWPR Syria programme manager who worked closely on both projects, said that they fed into a broader mission to strengthen Syrian civil society and promote justice and truth-telling.

Having attended the latest project launch, she said that its location within Syria’s national museum was a powerful gesture of reclaiming public memory “in the very place where official history is told”.

“Professionally, it is deeply meaningful to see years of effort completed successfully,” she continued. “Personally, as a Syrian who dreams of justice for all victims and accountability for perpetrators, it was a profoundly emotional moment.”