When Ibesh visited there on Sunday, he saw several newly freed people clearly in a traumatised state, he told the BBC.
A group of people surrounded two men who had just been released, trying to help them.
“[They] had been held in the prison for several years and they were disorientated,” Ibesh said. “They didn’t even know the time zone.”
“People around them were asking ‘what’s your name’ and ‘how old are you?’, but they could not even answer those questions.”
It was hard to tell how old they were from looking at them, Ibesh said, adding: “The men were totally lost, they were just staring ahead.”
The Assad regime imprisoned hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. The Turkey-based Association of Detainees and The Missing in Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP) group described Saydnaya as a “death camp”.
Throughout the civil war, which began in 2011, government forces held hundreds of thousands of people in detention camps, where human rights groups say torture was common.