Its history of torture and mass killings casts a long shadow, even as Syrians celebrate the downfall of a dynasty

STORY: When she heard that rebels had toppled Syria’s brutal decades-old regime, Hayat al-Turki went to search for her brother and five more relatives at a notorious prison.Sednaya is nicknamed the ‘human slaughterhouse,

Since then, as the war intensified, the prison became, by all accounts, even more terrible. In 2021, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights calculated that as many as thirty thousand people had been executed there since the war began.