Damascus, June 27 (SANA) In the heart of the Syrian desert, specifically in the ancient city of Palmyra, the walls of the notorious Tadmor Prison bore witness on June 27, 1980, to one of the most horrific mass massacres in modern Syrian history.
Forces of the so-called “Defense Saraya,” then under the command of criminal Rifaat al-Assad, stormed the prison and carried out a mass killing of hundreds of unarmed detainees.
The massacre came just one day after a failed assassination attempt targeting criminal Hafez al-Assad, turning the overcrowded cells into a theater of mass extermination carried out without trials or any legal process, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of political prisoners.
Storming the Prison: The Dawn of Revenge
According to survivor testimonies and human rights reports, Defense Saraya troops were airlifted to Tadmor Prison via military helicopters on the morning of June 27, just before the assault began.
Khaled al-Oqla, a former Tadmor detainee and survivor of the massacre, recounted the details of that day in media interviews, stating that the usual daily routine for checking on prisoners changed abruptly that morning. The inspection took place at 8:00 a.m. instead of the afternoon, and detainees were gathered in groups without their names being called, treated as mere numbers.
Al-Oqla added: “It took only a few hours for the operation to turn into a mass killing inside the dormitories. This was preceded by the deployment of army troops inside the prison, amidst the sound of military boots and the loading of weapons, which sparked panic among the detainees, who had no idea what was happening.”
“It never crossed our minds that they would kill us. We were silently watching from the windows as the detainees were being moved. Then the gunfire started. At 9:00 a.m., the massacre actually began when grenades were thrown into dormitories 5 and 6, followed by intense gunfire,” al-Okla said.
He described the moments of horror as blood began seeping from under the doors, pooling in the dormitory courtyards until it reached a depth of about 20 centimeters.
Transporting the Bodies and Erasing the Evidence
After the killing operations concluded, the bodies were carried out by dozens of military personnel to the prison courtyards, where the troops ensured the victims were dead before loading them onto military trucks.
Survivor testimonies indicate that some of the wounded were subsequently executed to ensure there were no survivors.
According to unofficial accounts, the bodies were buried in mass graves outside the prison in the Wadi Awaida area, without any official announcement or documentation of the burial sites, leaving the victims’ families in a state of continuous, ambiguous loss to this day.
Human rights estimates of the death toll range between 1,000 and 1,200 detainees killed in just a few hours, while the exact identities of the victims remain unknown to this day.
Tadmor Prison: A Regime of Systematic Terror
The massacre was not an isolated event, but rather occurred within a long context of abuses inside Tadmor Prison, which former detainees have described as one of the most brutal detention centers in Syria.
One survivor, Hassan al-Nayyifi, said: “The dormitories were not meant for human beings, and there was constant surveillance through cell peepholes. Any infraction was met with punishment.”
He added, “When new detainees arrived, they were subjected to 200 to 400 lashes before entering the cells, all aimed at breaking their will.”
The Families’ Memory and the Legacy
For decades, the families of the missing lived in forced silence, terrified of the security apparatus, where merely asking about the fate of a son or brother in Tadmor could expose the inquirer to arrest or enforced disappearance.
The true dimensions of the massacre only became known to the outside world in the 1990s, after some survivors escaped and Syrian officers defected and confessed, revealing the details.
Organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International subsequently issued detailed reports documenting the crime as a “crime against humanity.”
A Legacy Without Justice
Forty-six years after the massacre, no one has been held accountable for the crime, and the victims’ families are still searching for the truth, or even for their sons’ graves.
The Tadmor massacre remains a symbol of one of the most brutal mass crimes in modern history, a testament to the criminality of the ousted Assad regime, and a stark reminder of the absence of justice and the persistence of impunity.
Iman Alzuheiri/MZ
