SYRIA

 NBC News - Saydnaya military prison is Syria's most notorious gulag, a dungeon of tiny concrete cells nicknamed "the human slaughterhouse." During the Assad family's 50-year rule, prisoners were "regularly tortured through severe beatings and sexual violence," Amnesty International claimed in a 2017 report, and "total silence is enforced" to inflict psychological suffering.Now, days after Bashar al-Assad's regime was toppled, Syrians have flocked to the jail in the rocky hills outside the capital, Damascus. They used pry bars, pickaxes and their bare hands in a desperate search to see if their loved ones were still alive. One woman NBC News spoke to had come in search of her son who had been missing for a decade. He was accused of being a militant; she said he was a nurse. Evidence of barbaric conditions was everywhere —  one room had an iron device that some people referred to as an "execution press," used to crush inmates to death.