Introduction to 3D tours

To date, the ISIS Prisons Museum team has documented over 100 prisons and dozens of other sites where ISIS committed violations, including mass graves. 

Here, the IPM presents virtual 3D tours of these prisons. The tours were filmed from 2017 onwards, after the sites were abandoned by ISIS, and were created to document the locations of ISIS crimes and to reconstruct the crime scenes. They also contribute to efforts to reveal the fate of people still missing from this period, and to identify the ISIS members who committed the crimes.

Methodology 

The 3D tours were filmed using 360-degree cameras, with drone and satellite footage used at a later stage. From this, 3D interactive reconstructions were created. These allow visitors to explore the prisons as they were under ISIS control – as well as at the time of filming.

Wherever possible, names written on the walls of the prisons by former detainees have been recorded and documented by the IPM, as have the documents left behind by ISIS in these sites. In a few cases, it was not possible to document prisons – either because they were destroyed by bombardment, or because they were quickly reclaimed and restored by their original owners.

The tours are also informed by interviews with former detainees. The IPM team interviewed hundreds of these witnesses, who provided detailed testimony of their experiences in detention and the uses of the different areas of the prisons. In some cases, former ISIS members, now either imprisoned or on trial, were also interviewed to fill gaps.

Documentary evidence and testimonies were cross-referenced, and all the information gathered was analyzed to achieve the most accurate understanding of the layout and uses of each part of the prisons.

Finally, designers and engineers used all of this material to create the virtual reconstructions of the prisons that you will visit today. As more prisons are documented and analyzed, they will be uploaded to the IPM website.