Syria Psyop Theater: Inside the Sednaya Jihad Incubator

How Western media distorted Syria's prisons to normalize the Al-Qaeda takeover and the Gaza genocide. Part one of a two-part series.

Since the Syria crisis began in 2011, a loose coalition of Western propaganda organs, intelligence-linked NGOs, and billionaire-funded human rights organizations have collaborated to produce a selective and highly distorted narrative of events, using evidence-free claims to portray former president Bashar Al-Assad as a genocidal dictator who imprisoned, mass murdered, buried, and cremated hundreds of thousands of innocent victims while downplaying and omitting the armed opposition’s atrocious human rights record, including by ISIS and Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, (formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, Syria’s Al-Qaeda affiliate), which now rules much of Syria.

This is the latest chapter in a nearly 15 year foreign-sponsored dirty war that has been characterized not only by displacement, destruction, and death, but by one of the most deceptive propaganda campaigns in history to rebrand Al-Qaeda as a benevolent force in Syria.

Following the Syrian government’s collapse, media outlets seized on Sednaya prison, located outside of Damascus. Sednaya is one of ten prisons which held not only non-violent political prisoners and innocents caught up in the highly corrupt Syrian security apparatus’ lumbering bureaucracy, but also militants loyal to the Islamic state, HTS, and an ever-shifting alliance of Islamist armed groups.

Prior to 2011, Sednaya prison had served as a de facto incubator for what would become Syria’s most violent terrorist groups, including Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra.

In 2004 and 2005, around 700 Syrian jihadists, who had returned after battling U.S. forces in Iraq, were captured and imprisoned in Sednaya. In 2008, the prisons inmates rioted, taking hostage numerous officials and guards before security forces killed nine prisoners. They later killed the prison’s warden.

When the Syrian crisis broke out in 2011, Western human rights groups pressured the Assad government to grant them amnesty. It complied, releasing what The New York Times later described them as “Saydnaya Prison’s most radical long-term prisoners, Islamists who would later lead rebel groups”. Assad’s acceding to these demands did not satiate the foreign-backed opposition, which sought nothing less than regime change.

“We were told by brothers with lots of experience [in jihad], who had spent a lot of time in Sednaya, that upon our release we should sit and not work,” Abu Othman recalled about the 2011 amnesty. “Just sit and wait.”

Within weeks, Abu Othman and hundreds of other militants released from Sednaya had mobilized to begin a violent campaign, targeting civilians and state security personnel alike to overthrow the government.

“Many of today’s Ahrar al-Sham leaders belong to the ‘Sednaya generation’ of Islamists who spent the latter part of the 2000s in Sednaya Prison,” noted Carnegie Endowment analyst Aron Lund in 2014.

Among those imprisoned were:

-Amr ‘Abu Atheer’ al-Absi, the Islamic state’s top kidnapper and recruiter of European jihadists.

-Zahran Alloush, who commanded Jaysh al-Islam, was accused of kidnapping Syrian human rights lawyer Razan Zaitouneh, and was one of Syria’s most dangerous terrorists until his death in 2015.

-Abu Khaled al-Suri, co-founder of Ahrar al-Sham.

-Hassan Al Aboud, co-founder Ahrar al Sham and Islamic state member.

-Al Aboud’s brother, Abu Shadi.

-Ahmed Abu Issa, founder of Suqour al-Sham, which carried out joint suicide bomb attacks with Jabhat al-Nusra. Among the attackers was American citizen Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha.

-Abu Othman, long time al-Qaeda and Jabhat al-Nusra member.

When Al-Jolani was dispatched by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from Iraq to establish an Islamic State branch in Syria, he made contact with the former Sednaya prisoners and began to form Jabhat al-Nusra, the group that, 13 years and two name changes later, would collapse the Syrian state.

Faux humanitarian concerns

While there is no doubt that Sednaya housed many violent criminals and terrorists, others were imprisoned on dubious charges by elements exploiting the long-standing Emergency Law and corruption in order to settle political and personal scores.

However, Sednaya’s violent Islamist prisoners were erased by human rights groups that published sensationalist and evidence-free reports, often prioritizing a preconceived political agenda over factual accuracy.

Amnesty International published a report in 2019 titled Human Slaughterhouse, alleging that tens of thousands of Syrians were executed in mass hangings at Sednaya and other prisons. However, the report contained no evidence, instead saying it “estimates that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extrajudicially executed at Saydnaya between September 2011 and December 2015” – what it calls "extermination.” The bodies, it alleged, were buried in a small cemetery named Najha and a mass grave in Qatana.

The authors relied only on interviews conducted outside of Syria, mostly in southern Turkey, where the foreign-sponsored Syrian opposition based its operations.

Many of the interviews were furnished to Amnesty International by NGOs funded by Wwestern governments and billionaires, including SNHR and the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.

As Kit Klarenberg reported for Uncaptured Media, CIJA is an organization created by NATO state contractors at the outset of the Syrian conflict that paid huge sums to have “evidence” of Syrian government crimes smuggled out of Al-Qaeda and ISIS-controlled territory, but was found by the European Anti-Fraud Office to have engaged in “submission of false documents, irregular invoicing, and profiteering.” Nonetheless, his conviction was hailed as a “step towards justice” against the Assad government.

Despite the exaggerated claims about Sednaya, President Bashar Al-Assad in 2022 granted amnesty to 60 prisoners, including some who had been convicted on terrorism charges, excluding those whose actions led to death.

Prison break

A handwritten list of Sednaya’s prisoners has circulated on social media, apparently taken when HTS freed their comrades. Social media users posted a digital version too, with many comments from users searching for their family members.

Among the escapees, according to the list, were Saleh Mazen Bekdash And Omar Maddhi Asaad, who had car-bombed in 2013 an elderly Kurdish communist whose car was adorned with former president Hafez Al-Assad’s photo. Uncaptured Media is withholding the murdered man’s identity in order to protect his surviving family members, who remain in Syria.

Whitewashing the black flag

As HTS militants flung Sednaya’s doors open, a disinformation campaign was rolled out in the Western press and on social media. This propaganda amounted to a whitewashed, highly exaggerated, and outright deceptive campaign, similar to the Israeli government’s propaganda offensive to distort the nature of Hamas’ October 7 attack, which served to justify the ongoing genocide and motivate the soldiers carrying it out. This time, the narrative painted a simplistic, black and white picture, where anyone inside Syrian government prisons was an innocent victim of “dictator” Bashar al-Assad.

What the New York Times in 2015 called the “infamous jail near Damascus where the government warehoused those it considered Sunni extremists,” became in 2024 “a symbol of human rights abuses under his rule.” The Times documented in 2022 how Islamic state fighters had attacked prisons in order to free their fellow militants in both Syrian government and Kurdish-held territory, but now those Islamist militants were heralded as “rebel fighters” and “conquering rebels” who were merely searching for their family members.

While media outlets were careful to de-emphasize the radical and violent nature of some of the inmates, a CBS News report from an eastern Syria prison containing ISIS fighters, including many foreigners, noted that prison guards have been careful to not allow the inmates to find out that the Syrian government was toppled because it could be “dangerous” – suggesting they would be inspired by the former al-Qaeda affiliate’s takeover of Syria.

It was not only the prisoners’ character that became a key piece of propaganda, but their numbers too. In 2009, Human Rights Watch estimated that Sednaya held 1,500 inmates. However, amid the chaos, absurd and evidence-free claims that 100,000 to 150,000 prisoners were held in Sednaya prison spread like wildfire.

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However, the Turkey-based Association for Detainees and the Missing in Saydnaya Prison, which is fervently anti-Assad, published a document saying there were 4,300 detainees, 1,483 of which were held under charges of terrorism and military tribunals.

Videos said to show women and child prisoners liberated from Sednaya went viral on social media, promoted by outlets like the UK publication The Metro and The Guardian “open source investigations lead” Manisha Ganguly. Think tank Hassan Hassan, editor in chief of the U.S. government-funded New Lines Institute, Thomas Van Linge, also a New Lines writer, and self-declared Zionist Avi Bitterman promoted the footage too. However, an investigation from Verify-Sy showed that the footage was of opposition militants storming and ransacking a children’s charity, and that only men were imprisoned in Sednaya.

As family members of disappeared prisoners combed through Sednaya to search for their missing family members, propagandists claimed to show a machine used to execute and dispose of prisoners.

“Iron execution press in #SednayaPrison,” wrote Qusay Noor, a longtime propagandist associated with terrorist groups Faylaq al-Rahman and Jaysh al-Islam. “After he is hanged, they put him in the press and press him to become like paper. His body and bones are crushed. There are blood channels under the press.”

However, social media users pointed out that the supposed murder machine is likely to be a veneer press, used for laminating wood.

Within days, Syrians reported encountering violent criminals, including rapists, who had been released.

None of these outlets mentioned that HTS itself has long run prisons in Idlib province, which it has occupied since 2015. A UN report noted that the group held civilian men and women, as well as Syrian soldiers, whom they tortured and executed. HTS also employs makeshift religious courts where summary executions of prisoners is common.

The report notes “women and children being separated from their male relatives and being held in squalid conditions, with little food. They were forced to pray. The former detainees described hearing men screaming while being beaten by members of Jabhat Al-Nusra. Both also heard Government soldiers being brought into the prison and pleading for their lives before being executed by shooting.”

Protesters in Idlib have called HTS prisons “slaughtershouses”, but media and human rights groups have avoided using this term, in sharp contrast to Amnesty International’s infamous characterization of Sednaya.

Cancel culture queen

Among the outlets participating in this propaganda campaign is The Free Press, a neoconservative outlet run by Bari Weiss. It published a video report from inside the Sednaya prison, which was emptied of all prisoners in the immediate aftermath of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.

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Weiss is a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, a loosely affiliated group of pseudo-intellectuals that was formed amid the “cancel culture” phenomenon, and include pro-Israel figures like Eric Weinstein, then a manager of tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s investment firm, his brother Brett, who denounced calls for a ceasefire as Israel slaughtered men, women, and children in Gaza.

As a pro-Israel student activist at Columbia university, Weiss pressed for the firing of Palestinian-American professor Joseph Massad. Upon graduation, she began climbing up the Zionist media ladder, first at Tablet Magazine, then onto the Wall Street Journal, where she worked with neoconservative Bret Stephens. Weiss followed Stephens to the New York Times, where she became a columnist. After three years, Weiss resigned as a protest against “wokeness”, claiming to be a victim of cancel culture herself.

Following the October 7 Hamas attack, Weiss served as a stenographer for the Israeli government’s mass propaganda campaign, taking the cancel culture she made a career railing against to lethal proportions.

When Refaat Alareer, a world renowned professor, writer, and poet in Gaza poked fun on X at macabre Israeli propaganda which falsely claimed that Hamas militants had burned an Israeli baby in an oven, Weiss wrongly accused him of joking about burning an Israeli baby, singling him out as Israel carried out its genocidal military campaign.

Alareer, flooded with death threats on X, wrote in a post that “If I get killed by Israeli bombs or my family is harmed, I blame Bari Weiss @bariweiss and her likes. Many maniacal Israeli soldiers already bombing Gaza take these lies and smears seriously and they act upon them.”

Weeks later, Israeli airstrikes indeed targeted Alareer, killing him and several of his family members in what the Euromed Human Rights Monitor called an "apparently deliberate” attack.

The Israel lobby

The Free Press’s Sednaya video was done in collaboration with the Center for Peace Communications, a New York-based nonprofit founded by Joseph Braude, a neoconservative Iraqi-American who works closely with the U.S. government. CPC’s board of directors include pro-Israel former U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross and Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, described by former Israeli military-intelligence officer Sima Vaknin-Gil as an Israeli government asset.

The video, titled “Tour of Assad’s Slaughterhouse,” showed the now emptied cells of Sednaya prison, with a description of summary executions and torture methods, falsely claiming that women and children were imprisoned inside. The video also repeated the claim that the veneer press was used to flatten human remains and that bodies were also burned in crematoriums.

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The video then shows men breaking down walls into what they claim is an underground section of the prison. This video reinforced claims promoted in Western media outlets like the BBC, which reported that the White Helmets (a propaganda operation funded by the U.S., U.K. and Qatari governments that has participated in staged massacres and public executions) sent five “specialised emergency teams" to rescue prisoners. A video of a White Helmets member with a rescue dog searching through piles of rubble for an entrance to a secret entrance went viral.

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This was accompanied by cartoons showing a vast underground complex below a prison, which also went viral on social media platforms, including X, Instagram and Facebook, gardening

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Similarly, an image said to be of a man emerging from Sednaya’s underground complex went viral, garnering millions of impressions on X, Facebook and other platforms.

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In reality, the image was taken from an AI-generated video posted to Tiktok on December 3.

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The claim was debunked by iVerify, a project of the Centre for Excellence in Journalism at the Institute of Business Administration University in Karachi, Pakistan.

An image of an emaciated prisoner went viral, though it was taken at Ho Chi Minh Wax Museum in Vietnam.

A BBC update included a statement from the ADMSP which said that "There is no truth to the presence of detainees trapped underground, and the information contained in some press reports is inaccurate.” The White Helmets too confirmed that there were no prisoners underground.

Days after the report was debunked, The Free Press continued to promote the deception.

The video report also interviews Fadi Abdulghany, head of the dubious and opaque NGO Syrian Network for Human Rights. This organization, while working with Western governments, media outlets and human rights groups, has scrubbed information from its website admitting that it is funded by “states”, a fact glossed over by The Free Press’s propaganda piece. SNHR has downplayed deaths committed by ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Syrian conflict and openly called for foreign military intervention.

Abdulghany claimed that 96,000 people were forcibly disappeared and 40,000 imprisoned but provided no evidence.

An X account called HamasAtrocities posted a video claiming to show prisoners “found deep in the dungeons of the Sednaya prison in Damascus.”

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However, the video was taken from a Persian-language Instagram account that aggregates content.

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Days later, CNN’s Clarissa Ward filmed what appeared to be a prisoner found lying under a blanket inside Sednaya, unaware that HTS had freed his fellow prisoners days before. However, an investigation from Verify-Sy found that the prisoner was a Syrian intelligence officer who had been jailed for taking bribes.

It was not the first time Ward has produced shady propaganda in Syria. In 2017: she hired American Al-Qaeda propagandist Bilal Abul Kareem to produce a documentary in Idlib province. CNN then obscured his role to cover its tracks, irking Abdul Kareem.

Ward told former CIA director Michael Morell in 2021 that she was so incensed by the U.S. not overthrowing Assad that she wrote angry emails to then deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes chastising the Obama administration for not doing enough, although it carried out the most expensive intelligence operation in history to overthrow Assad.

The U.S. government in 2017 alleged that the Assad government had built a crematorium in Sednaya, distributing satellite photos labeled “probable crematorium” to back its claim.

“The attempt to cover up mass murders in the Assad crematorium is reminiscent of the 20th century’s worst offenses against humanity,” said then-ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, likening Syria to Nazi Germany.

Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones assured reporters that evidence of the crematorium would be presented to the world. However, the U.S. government never did present evidence, and since Western reporters have had access, none have bothered to verify Washington’s incendiary claims.

Weiss turns to Al-Qaeda to smear Hamas

The Sednaya disinformation piece was not The Free Press’s only foray into pro-Al-Qaeda propaganda.

In October, as Israel attempted to undo the PR disaster resulting from its publication of the last moments of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, The Free Press published a video interviewing three residents of Idlib, in northwestern Syria.

Idlib fell from Syrian government control in 2015 and is firmly under the control of HTS, headed by the notorious terrorist Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, for whom the U.S. government had offered a $10 million reward.

Al-Jolani was dispatched from Iraq to Syria in by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in order to found Jabhat al-Nusra as the Islamic state’s Syrian branch but betrayed Al-Baghdadi and swore fealty to then-Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri. Al-Jolani consolidated power in Idlib province, described by Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL Brett McGurk as the “largest Al-Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.” Jabhat al-Nusra officially broke ties with al-Qaeda and rebranded under the name Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (Front for the Conquest of the Levant), and then to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant). However, the U.S. Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) profile of HTS notes that Jolani “broke with al-Qa‘ida in 2016 because of strategic disagreements,” rather than ideological ones. Journalist Jenan Moussa’s 2017 documentary Undercover in Idlib, which documented the total dominance there of al-Qaeda, demonstrated that the break with al-Qaeda was indeed, as the ODNI noted, only cosmetic.

The UN Human Rights Office reported that HTS “detained, tortured, and executed civilians expressing dissenting opinions, including journalists”, and that “female media workers were doubly victimized, as the terrorist group continued to systematically discriminate against women and girls, including by denying their freedom of movement.”

“HTS, moreover, indiscriminately shelled densely populated civilian areas, spreading terror amongst civilians living in Government-held areas,” the report added. “Women, men and children that we interviewed faced the ghastly choice of being bombarded or fleeing deeper into HTS controlled areas where there are rampant abuses of human rights and extremely limited humanitarian assistance.”

“The acts by HTS members amount to war crimes,” said Commissioner Karen Koning AbuZayd.

Amnesty International Syria specialist Diana Seeman noted in a 2018 BBC interview that HTS carried out numerous war crimes including, “summary killing of civilians, especially activists, human rights defenders, beheading, and the stoning of women.”

In 2020, American Al-Qaeda propagandist Bilal Abdul Kareem was imprisoned by HTS, held in solitary confinement for six months, threatened with beatings, and frequently heard torture.

“Almost every day of every week, I had to listen to the screams of torture just a few metres away from me. Everyone in the prisons can always hear the torture,” he told Middle East Eye.

Al-Jolani, then furnished an interview with PBS, claim that there was no torture.

“Just to sum up the whole thing: Abu Mohamed al-Jolani, point blank, he lied,” Abdul Kareem insisted.

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In this repressive environment, the fervent Zionist Weiss found ideological allies against the Palestinian resistance movement of Hamas.

“In my view, he got what he deserves,” remarked one Idlib man on Sinwar’s killing.

“He was on the side of Assad, the regime we are against,” another man explained.

A hidden agenda

The collaboration highlights the tacit alliance between Zionism and Al-Qaeda, both of which Washington supports in order to destabilize and promote regime change wars against governments in the Middle East that pursue a foreign policy independent of U.S. interests.

Indeed, throughout the Syrian dirty war, Israel played a key role in arming jihadist militants and providing them with medical care. Netanyahu even met with opposition militants receiving medical treatment in Israeli hospitals before they were sent back to Syria to continue fighting. In 2018, Israel evacuated the White Helmets from Syria.

Moti Kahane, the Israeli-American businessman whose firm is seeking to run biometric concentration camps in the Gaza Strip in collaboration with former CIA director David Petraeus, was a longtime supporter of the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army, a collection of rival factions that contained many former Al-Qaeda and ISIS fighters and served as a “larger Islamist and jihadist factions, including Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate.”

When the FSA attacked Kurds in 2019, Kahane publicly denounced them.

As the recent HTS offensive unfolded, so-called "opposition activists" appeared on Israel’s public broadcaster to profess their support for Israel.

"We love Israel and have never been its enemies, because Israel is not hostile to those who are not hostile to her,” they said.

This was the first in a series of statements from HTS-aligned figures who welcomed Israel’s bombing of their country.

While the video compares Sednaya with Nazi Germany and Rwanda, it makes no mention of the Israeli prison Sde Teiman, where guards starve, torture, gang rape, burn, amputate limbs from, and murder Palestinian detainees, around 9,500 of whom are held in Israel’s prison archipelago, including hundreds of women and children, according to the United Nations. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published a report entitled “Welcome to Hell,” saying that “Sde Teiman is only the tip of the iceberg.”

Amnesty International, which deemed Sednaya the “human slaughterhouse”, is tepid in its reporting on Sde Teiman. It avoids such characterizations, instead calling its July 2024 report “Israel must end mass incommunicado detention and torture of Palestinians from Gaza.” The BBC’s December 9 report borrowed Amnesty’s “slaughterhouse” title for Sednaya, while its August 5 article only referred to “abuse” in its headline. The New York Times report on Syria’s prison was titled “Syria Shudders as Assad’s Prison Atrocities Come Into the Light” while it used softer language to describe Sde Teiman, titling its article “Inside the Base Where Israel Has Detained Thousands of Gazans.”

The Jerusalem Post seized on the propaganda campaign too in order to discredit popular protests against the Gaza genocide and justify Israeli conduct.

“Assad’s regime represents dehumanization on a mass scale, yet the global response has been indifferent at best. Those who claim to champion human rights on the world stage remain conspicuously quiet,” wrote Zina Rakhamilova “While the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is a legitimate concern, anyone with a moral compass can discern the difference between a war initiated by a terror organization and crimes against humanity like those we are now uncovering in Syria.”

The Times of Israel, which has published calls for genocide and lebensraum, described Sednaya as a “death dormitory.”

As HTS consolidated power and Western media outlets that had published deceptive reports about Syria now had access to the country, the propaganda campaign has reached a new level.