One government memo urged personnel to complete paperwork to protect officials from future prosecution.

The prison system is an integral part of the war effort.

While the Syrian military, backed by Russia and Iran, fought armed rebels for territory, the prison system was the government’s main weapon against the civilian opposition. Imprisonment and torture crushed the civil protest movement and helped drive the opposition into an armed conflict it could not win.

Torture is routine.

Detainees are regularly beaten, hung by their wrists, beaten while crammed inside tires, shocked with electricity and sexually assaulted.

More baroque forms of torture include forcing detainees to act like animals, beat or kill one another, and dousing them with fuel and burning them.

A United Nations panel said conditions amounted to ‘extermination.’

Cells are often so crowded that detainees take turns lying down to sleep.

Food is scarce. Toilets are often absent, diarrhea rampant. Injuries and illnesses, usually left untreated, lead to lingering deaths.