The rebel fighters descended the stairs into the gloom. The rhythmic beat of the sledgehammer was the only sound as it increased in speed. Eventually, a small hole appeared in the wall of Bashar al-Assad’s “human slaughterhouse”.
All morning thousands of civilians trudged up the hill to Sednaya, a prison on the outskirts of Damascus where, among the broken glass and discarded documents, they came to find clues to the whereabouts of thousands of Syrians jailed, tortured and killed by the regime.
They scoured through every record they could find, desperate for names, for any trace of their loved ones. They clawed at concrete with their hands and took sledgehammers to walls, all to no avail.
How Assad’s regime finally fell in Syria
Then, just as it seemed there would be no