DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Handcuffed and squatting on the ground, Abdullah Zahra noticed smoke rising from his cellmate’s flesh as his torturers gave him electrical shocks.
Then it was Zahra’s flip. They hanged the 20-year-old college scholar from his wrists till his toes barely touched the ground and electrocuted and beat him for 2 hours. They made his father watch and taunted him about his son’s torment.
That was 2012, and your entire safety equipment of Syria’s then-President Bashar Assad was deployed to crush the protests that had arisen towards his rule.
With Assad’s fall a month in the past, the equipment of demise that he ran is beginning to come out into the open.
It was systematic and well-organized, rising to greater than 100 detention amenities the place torture, brutality, sexual violence and mass executions had been rampant, in line with activists, rights group and former prisoners. Safety brokers spared nobody, not even Assad’s personal troopers. Younger women and men had been detained for merely residing in districts the place protests had been held.
As tens of 1000’s disappeared over greater than a decade, a blanket of worry stored the Syrian inhabitants silent. Individuals hardly ever instructed anybody {that a} liked one had vanished for worry they too could possibly be reported to safety businesses.
Now, everyone seems to be speaking. The insurgents who swept Assad out of energy opened detention amenities, releasing prisoners and permitting the general public to bear witness. Crowds swarmed, trying to find solutions, our bodies of their family members, and methods to heal.
The Related Press visited seven of those amenities in Damascus and spoke to 9 former detainees, some launched on Dec. 8, the day Assad was ousted. Some particulars of the accounts by those that spoke to the AP couldn’t be independently confirmed, however they matched previous stories by former detainees to human rights teams.
Days after Assad’s fall, Zahra – now 33 — came over Department 215, a detention facility run by army intelligence in Damascus the place he was held for 2 months. In an underground dungeon, he stepped into the windowless, 4-by-4-meter (yard) cell the place he says he was held with 100 different inmates.
Every man was allowed a ground tile to squat on, Zahra mentioned. When ventilators weren’t working — both deliberately or due to an influence failure — some suffocated. Males went mad; torture wounds festered. When a cellmate died, they stowed his physique subsequent to the cell’s bathroom till jailers got here to gather corpses, Zahra mentioned.
“Death was the least bad thing,” he mentioned. “We reached a place where death was easier than staying here for one minute.”
Assad’s system of repression grew as civil battle raged
Zahra was arrested alongside together with his father after safety brokers killed considered one of his brothers, a well known anti-Assad graffiti artist. After they had been launched, Zahra fled to opposition-held areas. Inside just a few months, safety brokers returned and dragged off 13 of his male family members, together with a youthful brother and, once more, his father.
They had been dropped at Department 215. All had been tortured and killed. Zahra later acknowledged their our bodies amongst pictures leaked by a defector that confirmed the corpses of 1000’s killed whereas in detention. Their our bodies had been by no means recovered, and the way and once they died is unknown.
Rights teams estimate at the least 150,000 individuals went lacking after anti-government protests started in 2011, most vanishing into Assad’s jail community. Lots of them had been killed, both in mass executions or from torture and jail circumstances. The precise quantity stays unknown.
Even earlier than the rebellion, Assad had dominated with an iron fist. However as peaceable protests changed into a full-fledged civil battle that might final 14 years, Assad quickly expanded his system of repression.
New detention amenities sprung up in safety compounds, army airports and below buildings — all run by army, safety and intelligence businesses.
Touring the location of his torture and detention, Zahra hoped to seek out some signal of his misplaced family members. However there was nothing. At dwelling, his aunt, Rajaa Zahra, noticed the photographs of her killed kids for the primary time. She had refused to have a look at the leaked pictures earlier than. She misplaced three of her six sons in Department 215 and a fourth was killed at a protest. Her brother, she mentioned, had three sons, now he has just one.
“They were hoping to finish off all the young men of the country.”
Syrians had been tortured with ‘the tire’ and ‘magic carpet’
The tortures had names.
One was known as the “magic carpet,” the place a detainee was strapped to a hinged picket plank that bends in half, folding his head to his ft, that are then crushed.
Abdul-Karim Hajeko mentioned he endured this 5 instances. His torturers stomped on his again throughout interrogations on the Prison Safety department, and his vertebrae are nonetheless damaged.
“My screams would go to heaven. Once a doctor came down from the fourth floor (to the ground floor) because of my screams,” he mentioned.
He was additionally put in “the tire.” His legs had been bent inside a automotive tire as interrogators beat his again and ft with a plastic baton. Once they had been carried out, he mentioned, a guard ordered him to kiss the tire and thank it for educating him “how to behave.” Hajeko was later taken to the infamous Saydnaya Jail, the place he was held for six years.
Many prisoners mentioned the tire was inflicted for rule violations — like making noise, elevating one’s head in entrance of guards, or praying – or for no motive in any respect.
Mahmoud Abdulbaki, a non-commissioned air power officer who defected from service, was put within the tire throughout detention at a army police facility. They compelled him to depend the lashes — as much as 200 — and if he made a mistake, the torturer would begin over.
“People’s hearts stopped following a beating,” the 37-year-old mentioned.
He was later held at Saydnaya, the place he mentioned guards would terrorize inmates by rolling a tire down the hall lined with cells and beat on the bars with their batons. Wherever it stopped, your entire cell could be subjected to the tire.
Altogether, Abdulbaki spent almost six years in jail over totally different intervals. He was amongst these freed on the day Assad fled Syria.
Saleh Turki Yahia mentioned a cellmate died almost on daily basis in the course of the seven months in 2012 he was held on the Palestine Department, a detention facility run by the Basic Intelligence Company.
He recounted how one man bled within the cell for days after getting back from a torture session the place interrogators rammed a pipe into him. When the inmates tried to maneuver him, “all his fluids poured out from his backside. The wound opened from the back, and he died,” he mentioned.
Yahya mentioned he was given electrical shocks, hanged from his wrists, crushed on his ft. He misplaced half his physique weight and almost tore his personal pores and skin scratching from scabies.
“They broke us,” he mentioned, breaking into tears. “Look at Syria, it is all old men … A whole generation is destroyed.”
However with Assad gone, he was again visiting the Palestine Department.
“I came to express myself. I want to tell.”
The mounting proof can be utilized in trials
Torture continued as much as the top of Assad’s rule.
Rasha Barakat, 34, mentioned she and her sister had been detained in March from their houses in Saqba, a city exterior Damascus.
Inside a safety department, she was led previous her husband, who had been arrested hours earlier and was being interrogated. He was kneeling on the ground, his face inexperienced, she mentioned. It was her final transient glimpse of him: He died in custody.
Throughout her personal hours-long interrogation, she mentioned, safety brokers threatened to usher in her sons, 5- and 7-years-old, if she didn’t confess. She was crushed. Feminine safety brokers stripped her and poured chilly water on her, leaving her shivering bare for 2 hours. She spent eight days in isolation, listening to beatings close by.
Finally she was taken to Adra, Damascus’ central jail, tried and sentenced to 5 years for supporting insurgent teams, costs she mentioned had been made up.
There she stayed till insurgents broke into Adra in December and instructed her she was free. An estimated 30,000 prisoners had been launched as fighters opened up prisons throughout their march to Damascus.
Barakat mentioned she is completely happy to see her youngsters once more. However “I am destroyed psychologically … Something is missing. It is hard to keep going.”
Now comes the monumental process of accounting for the lacking and compiling proof that might in the future be used to prosecute Assad’s officers, whether or not by Syrian or worldwide courts.
Lots of of 1000’s of paperwork stay scattered via the previous detention amenities, many labeled labeled, in storage rooms generally underground. Some seen by the AP included transcripts of telephone conversations, even between army officers; intelligence recordsdata on activists; and an inventory of tons of of prisoners killed in detention.
Shadi Haroun, who spent 10 years imprisoned, has been charting Assad’s jail construction and documenting former detainees’ experiences from exile in Turkey. After Assad’s fall, he rushed again to Syria and toured detention websites.
The paperwork, he mentioned, present the paperwork behind the killings. “They know what they are doing, it is organized.”
Civil protection employees are monitoring down mass graves the place tens of 1000’s are believed to be buried. Not less than 10 have been recognized round Damascus, largely from residents’ stories, and 5 others elsewhere across the nation. Authorities say they aren’t able to open them.
A U.N. physique often called the Worldwide Neutral and Unbiased Mechanism has provided to assist Syria’s new interim administration in accumulating, organizing and analyzing all the fabric. Since 2011, it has been compiling proof and supporting investigations in over 200 felony circumstances towards figures in Assad’s authorities.
Robert Petit, director of the U.N. physique, mentioned the duty is so monumental, nobody entity can do it alone. The precedence could be to establish the architects of the brutality.
Many need solutions now.
Officers can not simply declare that the lacking are presumed lifeless, mentioned Wafaa Mustafa, a Syrian journalist, whose father was detained and killed 12 years in the past.
“No one gets to tell the families what happened without evidence, without search, without work.”