Ruth Sherlock
Appearances
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-26-2025 4PM EDT
The European Commission says it's trying to better prepare Europeans to deal with natural disasters, cyber attacks and geopolitical crises, including the possibility of a war. Europe in recent years has dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. the conflict in Ukraine and extreme weather events linked to climate change.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-26-2025 4PM EDT
The document says, quote, none of the major crises of the past years were isolated or short-lived. Europe cannot afford to remain reactive. Among the many recommendations listed, the Commission says Europeans should begin to stockpile food and identify possible shelters to protect them in a crisis. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Rome.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-09-2025 7PM EST
The baby girl was born just minutes before rescuers found the migrant boat in the Atlantic Ocean trying to reach Spain's Canary Islands from northwest Africa. Spanish rescuers posted a photo on social media showing a naked baby amid the dozens of people crowded on board.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-09-2025 7PM EST
The baby was born during Spain's Epiphany holiday, when children traditionally receive presents to honour the biblical story of the three kings meeting baby Jesus. The crew of the ship that rescued the newborn baby and her mother wrote on social media, Christmas ends in the Canaries with the rescue of a baby born in the middle of a journey at sea.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-09-2025 7PM EST
Aid groups say last year more than 9,000 people died trying to make this journey. But this baby and her mother, who were transferred to a hospital in Lanzarote, are said to be both doing well. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Rome.
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Syria's New Reality, Shooting Suspect's Ideology, Judges Block Grocery Merger
Well, you know, you might be able to hear the high caliber rounds being fired behind me. It's the rebels testing weaponry they've acquired. But apart from these explosions, they seem to be trying to keep a pretty light touch here, Michelle.
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Syria's New Reality, Shooting Suspect's Ideology, Judges Block Grocery Merger
You know, they swept down from this rural province of Idlib and they seem to be trying to show Damascenes, people from here, that they can go about their business. And there's not even a lot of checkpoints, for example. And what is quite extraordinary is is they seem to now be handling a relatively managed handover of power. They've formed this new transitional government.
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Syria's New Reality, Shooting Suspect's Ideology, Judges Block Grocery Merger
And this even includes some politicians from the old regime. They're pardoning soldiers who were conscripted into the military service, but they are dismantling the feared security apparatus, the intelligence bases of the regime, and saying that they will bring war criminals to justice.
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Syria's New Reality, Shooting Suspect's Ideology, Judges Block Grocery Merger
A lot of the new faces in this new government are similar to those in the Islamist-led government in the rebel-held province of Idlib that they controlled for years. They are projecting moderate stances for now, saying women can dress as they please, for example. But, you know, many Syrians say it's still really too early to know how this will go.
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Syria's New Reality, Shooting Suspect's Ideology, Judges Block Grocery Merger
Well, look, a big priority here is the missing. You know, this regime ruled with fear and rights groups estimate tens of thousands of people disappeared into prisons and detention centres of the regime's main intelligence agencies. And under Assad, their families weren't even told where they were being held, why they were being held, or even if they were alive. So we went to Sednaya prison.
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Syria's New Reality, Shooting Suspect's Ideology, Judges Block Grocery Merger
That's one of the most feared complexes known for torture, mass executions. And now it's just open. You can walk right in. And the prisoners were released by rebels in the first hours after the regime fell. But so many more are still missing and now the prison is full of relatives.
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Syria's New Reality, Shooting Suspect's Ideology, Judges Block Grocery Merger
They're searching for clues about their loved ones that were taken in jail and mainly, you know, maybe trying to find some kind of closure. One elderly man, Ratib Zamalkani, he was walking away from the prisoners we walked up and he had this rope tied like a noose in his hand and he said he believed this was used to hang prisoners. He's saying, why did they have to put my son in cells underground?
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Syria's New Reality, Shooting Suspect's Ideology, Judges Block Grocery Merger
Where is he? Where is he? He asks. And he tells us he took the noose from the prison to show the world the cruelty of the Assad regime.
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Syria's New Reality, Shooting Suspect's Ideology, Judges Block Grocery Merger
Well, Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes in Damascus and around to stop what it calls strategic weapons from falling into the wrong hands. The Russians still have their air base here and a naval port in Syria's Tartus. And the Americans are still here with a mission to help Kurdish allies fight the extremist group ISIS that is still operating in the central Syrian desert.
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Syria's New Reality, Shooting Suspect's Ideology, Judges Block Grocery Merger
So there are a lot of foreign countries involved here still. That is NPR's Ruth Sherlock and Damascus.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Former prisoner Talha says this would continue for hours.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Talal's cell was close to the shower rooms used by the guards. He says after the long killing nights, he could hear them shouting at each other.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Abu Hassan remembers Thursdays were less violent.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
And this routine of gathering prisoners from Saturday and then executing them by Wednesday, it came to rule prison life.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Well, these interviews are not the first to talk about Sednaya being essentially a killing factory. The US State Department said it believed executions were happening there and even published at one point the satellite footage of the prison showing a smokestack coming out of one of the buildings that they suggested could be evidence of an incinerator.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
And some years ago, Amnesty International published a report in which they had similar accounts to those that we gathered saying And they said that as many as 13,000 people were killed. But the testimony in their report ended in 2015. And so the accounts we've gathered show these executions continued right up until last year. And they really demonstrate how this was apparently systematic.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
And this is the question we looked at, too. Where did the bodies go? Rights groups have been tracking possible mass grave sites in Syria remotely for years. And in the days after the regime fell, locals in Damascus began taking reporters to places where they believed bodies were buried.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
That's right. But I had an important contact. His name is Muaz Mustafa, and he leads this group, the Syrian Emergency Task Force, based in Washington, D.C. He's maybe best known for bringing a man known as Caesar before the U.S. Congress. Caesar presented lawmakers with tens of thousands of photos that he'd smuggled out of Syria that showed...
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
the torture that was happening in these regime detention centers. And Mustafa, he's also in touch with lots of people who were inside this regime system and witnessed the brutality. And it just so happened that he and I were staying in the same hotel in Damascus. And then when I went up to him and I asked him if he could connect me with people associated with the mass graves, he said, yes.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
And that is just what happens. Here's my report. A couple of hours later, a man arrives at the hotel. He seems in his 50s, weathered looking, not surprising since he's spent his life working outdoors. He's friendly, but clearly also nervous. We sit down with coffee to chat. He asks to be known by his nickname, Abu Fadi, and then he really opens up. Mustafa interprets.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Abu Fadi dug trenches in one of Syria's biggest mass graves. He's a municipal worker. In 2012, he says, Syrian intelligence came to speak with his boss. They summoned him and other workers for a job at a cemetery near Damascus.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
It was night by this point. He says the workers were told not to touch their phones or even smoke a cigarette. The officers wanted pitch darkness.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Abu Fadi watched as the funeral workers pulled the corpses from the trucks into the trenches he'd made. Then the security officers ordered a man operating a bulldozer to cover the filled trenches with soil.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
But the intelligence officials ordered him to continue. They told him to roll on the exposed corpses, to flatten them into the trench.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Soon, regime officials called Abu Fadi again, this time to an area of flat scrubland near the town of Kotefa, outside of Damascus. He became one of the workers creating a new mass grave. For a year and three months, he says, he was told to dig new trenches. He says he believed it was too dangerous to refuse.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Abu Fadi's own brother was disappeared by the regime, and he was a soldier in the Syrian army, so Abu Fadi doesn't know why he was taken. He eventually learned his brother had been jailed in Sednaya, the detention centres where prisoners were executed in groups. And then Abu Fadi had no more news. In searching for your brother, did you go to the mass grave site?
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
He says he took his brother's photo to the manager of the site and showed other grave diggers. He asked them if they'd seen him among the dead. As we speak, I notice that Abu Fadi rarely references the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad by name. Is it hard to say? Is it strange to talk about his name to the media?
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
As we wrap up our interview, Abou Fadi agrees to take us to the site of the mass grave he helped to dig. So the next day we head out there. No one knows for sure, but it's thought tens of thousands of people could be buried here. At the site, Fadi walks along the barely visible traces of the trenches he says he dug. Abou Fadi
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
So where there is shrubbery, that's where there's a trend?
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Standing at this site, Abu Fadi says, of course he feels guilty. And he still wonders if his own brother is buried here, underneath this soil.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Muaz Mustafa from the Syrian Emergency Task Force watched this site on Google Earth for years and saw it change into what it is now.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Mustafa brought a grave digger who'd worked at this site to testify before the U.S. Congress. He says after that, the regime seemed to get nervous. And that's when it erected the high walls. And he says flattened the earth to make this place look less conspicuous.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
As the sun sets, we leave. And in the car, Mustafa calls up the grave digger who testified and now lives in Germany. Mustafa interprets. On the phone, he tells us even more details about how this mass grave site worked. The trucks would come at night. This man says he oversaw a group of men whose job it was to drag the bodies into the grave.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
He says the trucks brought people from a military hospital in Damascus that seemed to be a gathering point for corpses of people killed in Syria's many intelligence branches. But the bodies of people killed in Sednaya prison, they arrived separately. NPR's Jawad Rizalla takes over interpreting.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
His account tallies with what our witnesses, the former prisoners at Said Naya, told us, right down to the timings. They said the killings happened on Wednesday nights and he says the bodies often arrived on a Thursday.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Both the gravedigger and Abu Fadi, the excavator driver, said they were horrified by their work, but too terrified for their safety to stop. The gravedigger on the phone eventually managed to flee the country, and Abu Fadi says he did what he could to work slowly and poorly until eventually he was fired.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
It's right about now, during this phone call in the car on the way back from the mass grave site, that the strangest thing happened. I know it! Abu Fadi realises he knows the guy on the phone, the gravedigger. In the middle of these grim stories, a sort of reunion, there's a kind of joy, almost hilarity in the car. It feels maybe like a release after the horror. Mustafa interprets for us.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
They're in tears at this point, and remember the plots they hatched, small rebellions against this awful work.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Perhaps for these men it's about not being so alone in reliving this period of their lives and about connecting in this shared realisation that it is all over. Assad is gone.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
The thing about the Assad government is that they kept meticulous notes. So every person that was detained and disappeared and what happened to them, all of that was written down in every intelligence branch. And there are dozens of them, even just around Damascus. There are these piles of documents with all this information about what happened to these people.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
But the thing is, it's hard for the new authorities to secure all that. One of the problems is manpower. And also there's so much else going on in that moment. And the problem is these documents are exposed. I think some places have been secured now. But when we were there, you know, in Sednaya prison, there was documents just flying around and people trampling all over them.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
In one case, I heard about some Bedouin sheep herders had used some documents they found to kind of burn a fire to keep warm outside. And this is a possible trove of evidence if it can be secured in time. And a lot of that will be extremely valuable to be able to, you know, hold trials and bring those responsible for these atrocities to justice.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Of course, you know, this is one of the pressing issues for Syrians. But there's all these different complicated layers when it comes to justice in Syria that you have to think about. There is, you know, the question of whether Assad himself, who has fled to Russia, whether Russia might consider sending him back for prosecution to Syria one day.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
There's the question of those high level security officers and what should happen to them. I mean, many of the officials from the regime will have fled or gone into hiding. And even to people with no power who are kind of unwillingly forced into doing the bidding of the regime.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
And since those first days when Assad fell, the new authorities in Damascus have been calling for calm, trying to stop acts of revenge with civilians taking matters into their own hands. And they say that they are seeking to prosecute top officials. And then there's the question of the whole fabric of society in Syria, the kind of neighbor to neighbor question.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
This is a place with many different religions. And during the war, we did see sectarian killings. There were villages where people were slaughtered in their homes, both Sunni Muslims and Alawites. And there's real trauma here and hatred. You know, I think many Syrians know that kind of going down that route of sectarian revenge killings would be a disaster for the country.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
But at the same time, they're going to have to find a way to live with each other and potentially find a path towards meaningful reconciliation.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
There's these metal gates between the walls, but it's barricaded by a mound of earth. But the gate has opened a crack, so we're going to climb over the mound to get inside.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
I mean, it was just surreal. Just even being able to cross the border from Lebanon would have been, you know, almost impossible for a Western journalist. Syria had become such a closed country. But just a couple of days after the fall of the regime, we did just that. We drove across and, you know, we were stamped out of the Lebanese side.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
And on the Syrian side, we just passed an empty immigration office. Nobody even looked at my passport. By the customs, there was a group of rebel fighters, but they kind of just grinned at us and waved at us as if they even couldn't believe what was happening. And then it's a short drive to Damascus, just over 40 minutes.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
And on the road, we passed these burnt out tanks and military uniforms that had been discarded by soldiers as they were fleeing. And the air in the capital, it was thick.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
thick and heavy and toxic partly from the fires that people had set alight in kind of government buildings and then also from the dust from the debris caused by israeli airstrikes they were bombing hitting military installations that used to belong to the regime because there is so much uncertainty about who the new leadership and what comes next
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, these massive, terrible human rights abuses have been widely documented, but it is really something else to be able to go to these places, to these dozens of intelligence branches and see where torture happened. And I think it's only now that we're really getting a clearer picture of how many people were killed in this system.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Shortly after I visited the mass grave near Damascus, Stephen Rapp, a former US ambassador at large for war crimes, he went to the same location and he says the Syrian regime had established a, quote, machinery of death and that nothing like this has been seen, quote, since the Nazis arrived.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
One of the first places we headed to straight after we crossed the border was Sednaya prison. Tens of thousands of Syrians were jailed there, people suspected of opposing the regime. And under Assad, you wouldn't speak about this place in public. Even if you had, for example, a relative inside, you'd just avoid any association with it.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
But now people were crowding into the prison, this enormous complex surrounded by high walls and barbed wire fences on a hill north of Damascus. And they were going because they were going to look for people who'd been jailed there.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Hundreds of people walk up the snaking dirt paths that lead up the hill to Sadnaya prison. Many are immaculately dressed, as if they hope that today they might finally meet their loved one that disappeared here. Nader Sabsabi says his brother was detained in 2012. He searches a handwritten ledger he's found with names of the detainees for clues.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
My brother went out of the house to buy bread. He was stopped at a checkpoint, and that's all we know. Sabsebi has made the hours-long journey from his home city of Dera to here every day since the regime fell to search.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Most prisoners were released by opposition rebels in the hours after the regime collapsed, but people believe there could be more cells, hidden underground where others might be alive. The commotion, the shooting in the air and people running towards the prisoners because we understand they've managed to open a new door. OK, we're inside the courtyard of the prison.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
They've just closed the doors behind us because they want to stop the crowds. They believe they've found something and they need silence. They need calm to try to hear the voices of the prisoners. A rebel shouts for quiet, but it's too chaotic, with hundreds of people combing the jail. Some hack at the concrete floor with metal pipes, a desperate hope that someone could be underneath.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Anything seems possible in this place that Syrians have known for so long as a centre of torture, where prisoners were hung by ropes, beaten, starved. Isra Kouki says Sednaya is worse than anyone can imagine. A slaughterhouse, she says. Her brother was in here for years. She heard he'd been killed, but never received a death certificate. So all this time, she's kept a shred of hope.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
There's a bone here. The weather has worn a lot of it away. It's white and partially eroded. I just want to take a moment and
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Outside this section of the prison, we meet Aissa Hosseini. He's searching for his three cousins and asks us what we've seen inside. The Assad regime didn't usually tell families where the detained were held or even if they were still alive. Husseini searched every prison in the capital, every institution. It's too much. Some 100,000 Syrians disappeared into jails like these, say rights groups.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
It's getting dark, and rescuers end their search in Sednaya. There are no more secret cells, no more hope for families like Husseini. As we leave, we meet Samer Haida. He's come with his four young children.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
It's so they remember the bloody legacy of the Assad regime, he says. So that we never forget. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Sednaya Prison.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's just this kind of huge outpouring of grief happening right now. And Aisha, the United Nations is saying that some 150,000 people could still be missing. And in Sednaya prison, when the rebels threw open the cell doors, you know, only about 2,000 people apparently came out.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
really think about what we're doing here because it's easy to not comprehend the truth of what this place could be but when you hear the stories you hear every day truck after truck after truck piled high with corpses of people who'd been executed or died in detention under the Syrian regime were brought here and it's chilling to think that many of those people might be under this ground
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
But there are tens of thousands of people who are believed to have been thrown into that prison during the course of the civil war.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
This really was the big question for us. NPR's regional producer Jawad Rasallah and I, we started searching for people who might be able to help us find information, maybe witnesses to what happened inside Sidnaya. Jawad reached out to Syrian contacts and one person asked another. And in the way that happens, we were eventually put in touch with a former inmate and then another and then another.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
And two of the men we spoke to had gotten out of the prison just days before, just when those doors were flung open by the rebels. they were really just shadows of their former selves. You know, they were like sickly thin. They had these like ribs protruding and these gaunt faces, their cheekbones were showing.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
And one of the men, when we got to his house, his family had laid out this huge platter of sticky Syrian sweets to celebrate his return, but he couldn't touch them because he told us, you know, his stomach, it can't cope with anything that rich after years of what was basically starvation.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
We interviewed the former prisoners all separately, and all three of the men's testimony of what went on in Sednaya was remarkably similar. One of those men who wanted to be known only by his first name, Adham, he actually decided to do this really difficult thing. He decided to go back to the prison he'd just come out of because he believed in showing it to us.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
And so he took us through this labyrinth of concrete corridors, he said, Naya, to his cell where he lived constantly. in this crowded place with 17 others for nearly six years. We saw the tiny plastic cup that guards used to measure a meal size for a prisoner. And Aisha, it was like less than you'd feed a baby. And then something happened that just stopped me in my tracks.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
I asked him about the nickname Sednaya had. It's often referred to as the slaughterhouse. But then he corrected me. This wasn't just a nickname. He said, it's an actual place, and it's upstairs. Here's that moment. NPR's Jawad Rizalla is with me, and he interprets.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
He takes us up to a huge empty room. Metal cages line the walls. He says this is where people were executed, hanged in large numbers. What we learned next from his testimony and the other prisoners is how that slaughterhouse operated. And here's part of that report.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
32-year-old Talaat Hussein Tala says he never thought people could be so violent and evil. He says the killings followed a regular schedule.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
The guards put these prisoners in a separate cell and kept them there without food or water until Wednesday. He says that was the killing day. Another freed Sadnaya detainee, who goes by the name Abu Hassan, picks up the story.
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Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
He says the guards would call the prisoners' names out, ten at a time. Then they beat them, within earshot of the other detainees. Then, after midnight, the executions began. None of the interviewees we spoke with saw the killings, but all three recount hearing a similar sound. They believe it was a table being snatched from under the prisoners' feet in the moments they were hung.