A Syrian civil-society group on Monday launched a web-based Syria Prisons Museum in the capital, using 3D walkthroughs, survivor testimony, and a searchable archive to document decades of detentions under the Assad family and to support future accountability efforts. The project, created by the Prisons Museum Foundation and unveiled at the National Museum, seeks to fix evidence in one place as new authorities pursue transitional-justice plans announced in May.
The virtual museum offers reconstructions of notorious facilities, digitized case files, and interviews with former detainees and families of the missing. Project founder Amer Matar called the site both a memorial and an evidence locker: “The museum seeks to preserve the dark Syrian memory associated with violence, murder, and prisons,” he said, adding that the team has already entered 70 former sites to record conditions before they are altered or demolished. “We were afraid that these prisons would be destroyed before we could document them,” he said.
Give the gift of hope
We practice what we preach:
accurate, fearless journalism. But we can't do it alone.
- On the ground in Gaza, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and more
- Our program trained more than 100 journalists
- Calling out fake news and reporting real facts
- On the ground in Gaza, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and more
- Our program trained more than 100 journalists
- Calling out fake news and reporting real facts
Join us.
Support The Media Line. Save democracy.
Rights monitors estimate that more than 2 million Syrians have been detained over the past half-century, with mass arrests peaking after the 2011 protests that triggered a 14-year war. Monitors also attribute more than 200,000 deaths to incarceration, executions, and torture; Sednaya Prison became shorthand for industrial-scale abuse after outside investigators labeled it a “human slaughterhouse.” Earlier exposés—such as the “Caesar” photo trove of corpse images smuggled out of security hospitals—helped establish patterns of abuse that the new platform now systematizes.
Following the ouster of Bashar Assad in December, Syria’s new Islamist-led authorities announced a commission on the missing and a separate body for transitional justice. The foundation says its goal is to elevate survivors’ accounts and prepare case files usable by prosecutors at home or abroad; as Matar put it, the aim is “trying to build a living digital archive.”