Syria’s most notorious jail Saydnaya has been a journalistic blank spot. Now ex-detainees and architects have built an accurate model, using ‘ear-witness’ testimony, of the president’s hellish torture house.

A Secret complex brought to life in a harrowing interactive digital model as part of Amnesty International’s work to raise awareness.





‘satellite’ image of Saydnaya prison





A black spot on the human rights map, the high-security prison has been off limits to journalists and monitoring groups in recent years. It stands 25km north of Damascus, near the ancient Saydnaya monastery where Christians and Muslims have prayed together for centuries. A mute concrete trefoil is discernible from Google Earth, standing in the centre of a 100-hectare desert compound.





To coincide with the launch of a damning new report, which estimates that 17,723 people have died in custody in Syria since the crisis began in March 2011, Amnesty has collaborated with the Forensic Architecture agency at Goldsmiths, University of London, to reconstruct the site.





Amnesty’s reconstruction of Saydnaya prison. Photograph: Amnesty International/Forensic Architecture.





For Amnesty, the team began an intensive process of interviewing former detainees of Saydnaya prison to build up a detailed picture of the facility.





“As we pieced together the model, we realised the building isn’t only a space where incarceration, surveillance and torture take place,” says Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture, “but that the building is, itself, an architectural instrument of torture.”





The digital modelling team at work. Photograph: Amnesty International/Forensic Architecture.

Weizman’s team is practically unique in the field of “architectural forensics”, using the designer’s spatial toolkit to build damning bodies of evidence used in both UN investigations and trials in the international criminal court.

Source: 'The worst place on earth': inside Assad's brutal Saydnaya prison