Syrians say jails were an extortion machine funding ousted rulers

Outside Syria's notorious Saydnaya prison, relatives leaf desperately through abandoned ledgers looking for news of the missing, clinging to the dream of seeing missing sons, husbands and sisters again.

Desperate Syrians say they were systematically shaken down for bribes to receive news of detainees that together amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's vast network of prisons was not simply a tool of his brutal crackdown on opposition to his rule, it was a money-making machine for his supporters.