This file includes two investigations. The first is titled The History of Raqqa’s Stadium: From Sports Facility to Security Prison. It examines the building of the Municipal Stadium in Raqqa and its role as the most prominent sports facility in the city. It moves on to explain how the stadium was used after the expulsion of Assad regime forces from Raqqa in 2013. It was briefly used as a media center, then as a court and prison belonging to a sharia committee set up by jihadi militias. A number of local activists were detained there at that time. After that, the investigation covers the years in which the stadium was controlled by ISIS. This period is the main focus of the report. As an ISIS ‘security prison’ housing two separate security branches, the prison was a notorious site of suffering. The investigation explores the relations between the two security branches as well as the hierarchy of the prison management. It also studies the conditions of detention and looks into the role of the stadium as an ISIS command center. The investigation gathers and analyzes information from dozens of video and audio interviews conducted by the IPM as well as from open source content that helps to place events within a historical timeline, and which corroborates the witness statements.

The second investigation is titled Raqqa Under ISIS: A Changing Conflict and Civil Resistance. It looks beyond the stadium and focuses on the general atmosphere in Raqqa at the time. It sheds light on the types of civil resistance in the city. Specifically, it studies the role of the Raqqa Local Council in terms of parallel civil activity. The report is based on the collection, study and analysis of various sources. These include a large number of scanned documents, now saved at the IPM archive; testimonies from ten activists, former workers at the Raqqa Local Council, and military personnel knowledgeable of the military matters in the city; and open source content and social media footage.

The IPM team entered the Stadium Prison (otherwise known as Point 11) for the first time in 2017. There it found hundreds of documents that had been left behind by ISIS.

The documents were saved in the IPM archive. They include arrest warrants, prison transfer documents, statements about cases related to both civilians and ISIS members, and security ID cards.

In this section, some of these documents are displayed in Arabic alongside their English translation. Each document is accompanied by an explanation detailing its content and specifying the issuing entity.

In keeping with the IPM’s professional and ethical standards for protecting the privacy of civilians and victims, the civilian names mentioned in the documents have been anonymized, and any information that could reveal civilian identities, such as addresses and fingerprints, have been removed. The noms de guerre and roles of ISIS members are kept as they are, because they do not reveal their true identities.

Study of the documents found in the Stadium Prison provides a better understanding of the structure of the ISIS security apparatus in Raqqa, the relations between the various security branches, the sentencing of those charged by ISIS, and how the sentences were implemented.

In this section, the IPM presents 11 video interviews with former prisoners in the Stadium Prison (otherwise known as Point 11) who were detained between 2014 and 2016. The interviews were recorded in Raqqa between 2021 and 2024 in the context of studying and documenting the prison.

As the Stadium Prison was a ‘security prison’, the detainees were usually political activists. Some were detained for collaborating with ISIS enemies or fighting against the group, while others were detained merely for having an internet connection.

The interviews cover various points, including the reason for the witness’s arrest, the details of interrogation and torture, daily life in prison, and the conditions of detention in terms of hygiene, health care, and food. The Stadium Prison was bombed by the Global Coalition, and there were repeated escape attempts. The interviews cover these events and show the changes in the building through different periods from its establishment as a prison until the detainees were transferred to other locations.

The majority of the interviews were conducted in person in the basement of the Stadium Prison. The camera toured the site with the witnesses in order to understand the uses of its many rooms. Due to difficulties in obtaining permission to continue filming inside the building, however, the rest of the interviews were filmed in a studio. In those cases, the witnesses talked about the prison while a virtual reconstruction of the site was displayed on a screen next to them. The testimonies show that some of the detainees were children or teenagers at the time of their arrest. The interviews cover painful aspects of their prison experiences and the torture that they were subjected to. The IPM team obtained informed consent from all the witnesses to use and show their filmed testimonies. Great care was taken to minimize editing and to offer the witnesses ample time to give their testimonies without interruption or leading questions.