Sednaya Military Prison

Sednaya Military Prison (Arabic: سجن ضيدنايا العسكري sijn ṣaydnāyā al-‘askarī) is one of the major military prisons of the Arab Union, located just north of Damascus in the Syrian Arab Republic, in the mostly rural municipality of El-Tell. It is part of the wider El-Tell Military Base, the largest Union Defence Forces base near Damascus and the federal capital of Nasser City. Sednaya Prison is the most high-profile prison operated by the Union Defence Forces and the Ministry of Defence, due to the large number of individuals sentenced to death and executed for treason and other political crimes in the prison during the Arab Revolution and Arab Revolutionary War, and in more recent times the Arab Civil War, as well as the multiple political criminals continually detained at or sentenced to the prison.

As of March 2021, a total of 2258 prisoners are kept at Sednaya Prison. As it is a military prison, the vast majority of inmates are former military personnel, either of the Union Defence Forces or of its enemies. The only civilians held at Sednaya Prison are those whose high-profile place in national politics and subsequent treasonous actions (including sabotage, espionage, poisoning of food and water supplies, and more) gave their sentencing Court the prerogative to deny them their civil rights, with all inmates having been tried under martial law. Martial law was in effect during the 2011–19 war, and thus several otherwise civilian criminals wound up being tried by military courts and sentenced to military prisons like Sednaya Prison. Since the end of the war, the great majority of civilians were either released at the mercy of the courts or retried for their crimes in civilian courts and if convicted, sentenced to civilian prisons.

The prison is named after Sednaya, a hamlet of El-Tell Municipality, which also includes the hamlets of El-Tell and Mneen. Sednaya Military Prison is administered by the Ministry of Defence's Military Police Directorate, which is staffed by Arab Army-attached military police personnel; those who work in Sednaya are all MPs with the specific role of military corrections. Sednaya Prison is the second-largest prison near near Damascus, after the civilian Mezzeh Prison.