The White Helmets, a Syrian rescue group, announced today that they have sought the help of the UN to obtain plans for Syria’s “secret prisons” from Bashar al-Assad, the ousted president who fled the country.

After being ousted from power by a coalition of Islamist rebels, Assad fled with his family to Russia.

“We appealed to the UN, through an international mediator, to plead with Russia to put pressure on the criminal (…) Bashar al-Assad” said the head of the organization, Raed al-Saleh, in a post on the X platform.

As he explained, he wants to obtain the maps where the locations of the secret prisons are recorded, but also the lists of the prisoners “so that we can get to them as soon as possible”.

Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, more than 100,000 people have died in Syrian prisons, mostly from torture, as estimated by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in 2022. At the same time the Observatory reported that some 30,000 people were being held in the notorious Sednaya prison, about 30 kilometers from Damascus, and only 6,000 had been released.

Amnesty International, for its part, recorded thousands of executions and denounced a “policy of extermination”, describing Sednaya as a “human slaughterhouse”.

As they entered Damascus on Sunday, Syrian rebels announced they had taken control of the prison and freed the prisoners.

The White Helmets reported today that they have completed searches of this prison, where they suspected there were underground caches. Some families, however, believe that many of their own people are still in the prison’s basement.

“The atrocities and unspeakable crimes of the former Assad regime are uncharacteristicsaid al-Saleh.