For many Syrians, the fall of President Bashar al-Assad provides an opportunity — at last — to try to discover the fates of loved ones who disappeared into a notorious military prison that has become a symbol of human rights abuses under his rule.
The rebels who swept across Syria and claimed to have taken the capital, Damascus, appear to have also captured the prison complex of Sednaya, where human rights groups say Mr. al-Assad kept large numbers of political prisoners, according to reports and videos circulating on social media on Sunday.
For more than a decade, human rights groups and news organizations including The New York Times have documented the torture, sexual assault and mass execution of detainees in the government’s network of prisons, of which Sednaya, on the northern outskirts of Damascus, was the most notorious and feared.
For relatives and friends, the absence of information about those imprisoned has been agonizing, compounded by the knowledge that detainees may have been tortured or killed.
The rebels appear to have made the prisons a central focus of their campaign.
On Sunday, media outlets in the Arab world aired a video of a group of men who said they were broadcasting from a Syrian state television studio. The men, who said they represented rebel forces, announced “the liberation of the city of Damascus, the toppling of the dictator Bashar al-Assad and the liberation of all oppressed prisoners from the regime’s jails.”
On social media, Syrians posted photos and identification numbers of loved ones who had been detained, hoping that someone might have spotted them finally free.
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