BEIRUT: After jihadis from ISIS swept into the central Syrian town of Palmyra this month, government officials, opposition supporters and international organizations quickly warned that the area’s world-famous Roman-era ruins were in danger of being demolished. ISIS did carry out a spectacular demolition Saturday – but of the political prison that for many Syrians is one of the most notorious landmarks of the Baath Party’s 50-plus-year grip on power.

The prison was reportedly shut down in 2001 but then reopened a decade later, after the popular uprising against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad erupted. 

According to Human Rights Watch, by the end of the year it held around 2,500 people, with detentions soaring in the wake of the government’s crackdown.

Shortly before ISIS militants seized the town in late May, the authorities emptied the prison once again and transferred its prisoners elsewhere, according to multiple sources.

The most notorious incident in the prison’s history came in 1980, one day following an assassination attempt against then-President Hafez Assad by members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Assad’s half-brother Rifaat and his elite troops entered the complex early in the morning of June 26 and went from cell to cell, summarily executing an estimated 1,000 prisoners to avenge the attempt on the president’s life.

ISIS members Saturday photographed themselves entering the prison complex and setting off a huge explosion that ended the saga of Tadmur prison, named for the modern town that lies next to the famous ruins.

Many supporters of the opposition objected to the action, calling it the destruction of a notorious “crime scene.”

The Syrian Revolution General Commission, a network of anti-regime activists, said that “many people defended the ISIS gang when it demolished the tombs [of religious figures] and antiquities in Syria and Iraq; they poured over all the books on religion to come up with the evidence” to justify the group’s actions.

“Today, the [ISIS] gang demolished Tadmur prison, which has witnessed the killing of thousands of Syrians for several decades ... in order to get rid of the evidence. [ISIS] used an amount of explosives that would be enough to destroy an airport,” the group continued in its statement on the incident.

“There is no religious or military justification for demolishing the prison,” the SRGC said, calling it a case of “burying the scene of the crime,” an action that it said the regime would be overjoyed to see take place.

Regime media outlets and pro-regime social media were silent about Saturday’s demolition while anti-regime Syrians were divided over how to react to the news, as many expressed the same type of dismay over the loss of “evidence.”

Some, however, expressed the view that the bodies of detainees would likely be discovered in the desert area surrounding the facility, and that the shabby structures had probably been emptied of any damning evidence before ISIS arrived.

Others were upset that the facility wasn’t put to a useful purpose, such as housing the displaced or being turned into a makeshift hospital.

And another group of people brushed off the commotion by saying that after four-plus years of war, the entire country was full of evidence for any party that was serious about documenting human rights violations.

Yassin Hajj Saleh, a veteran dissident who was imprisoned for 16 years – including one in Tadmur – wrote that he was “sad” to hear the news, as the facility held an especially important symbolic meaning for him and others.

“I’m sad about ISIS’ destruction of Tadmur prison; it’s as if they destroyed my home. I dreamt about visiting there one day, to see the cell, and the clinic ... and maybe walk on the roof of the cells,” Saleh wrote on Facebook. 

“The prisons should have remained, especially Tadmur prison, so that we could visit them voluntarily, and become liberated from them. The destruction of a prison that was the symbol of our slavery is the destruction of our freedom as well. Of course, it’s a huge service to the Assad regime of slavery,” he continued.

Saleh told The Daily Star that he was uncertain about whether truly damning evidence had been destroyed by ISIS, commenting that “all of us are evidence” of the prison.

“I have no idea about the existence of mass graves; I assume that they aren’t underneath the prison but might be in the desert, a certain distance away,” he added.