Islamic State extremists use torture methods of Assad regime
GAZIANTEP, Turkey — In Syria, the torturers change but the tortures remain the same.
Prisons run by Islamic State jihadists are using the same punishments as those run by the Assad government, according to victims of both regimes.
The tortures are so well known to Syrians that they have names: the “German chair,” “the tire” and “the flying carpet.”
The favourite of both the regime and Islamic State (also known as ISIL or ISIS) is the “shabeh,” hanging people by the wrists for long periods.
The practice was described by liberal activists from the town of Raqqa who suffered it first at the hands of the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad and then of Islamic State.
“All you think about is pain,” said Hazm al-Hussein, adding that he was tortured by an ISIL leader previously jailed by the regime.
Raqqa is largely Sunni Muslim, with a Christian minority, and is historically less conservative than the surrounding countryside. Under the regime, protests were ruthlessly suppressed and many activists who provided video footage to the outside world were arrested and tortured.
One, Jimmy Shahinian, was given the shabeh every four days for four months until his arms came out of their sockets.
The practice, long outlined in Amnesty International reports, is when the arms are handcuffed behind the back and the cuffs used to hoist the body in the air, putting pressure on the shoulder sockets.
In Shahinian’s case, this was combined with the “German chair,” where the body is strapped into a chair with a back adjusted to inflict pain on the spine. “I was sure I was going to die,” the Armenian Christian said. “Mind you, when you were there, you wanted to die.”
For another activist, who asked to be known as Samir, ISIL’s torture was not his first experience. Two years previously, intelligence officers from the regime used “the tire,” in which the victim is forced inside the rim of a large tire that holds you immobile as you are beaten. Samir suffered broken arms and a leg. The shabeh imposed by ISIL, when it too caught him, has left him twitching uncontrollably, despite medical care.
The cruelty of Syrian prisons has long been recorded. “They have made an art form out of torture,” said Samir.
In the “flying carpet,” the victim is strapped to a hinged board, with the ends brought towards each other to bend the spine. Male rape, sometimes with kebab skewers, and starvation are also used.
The echoes of the torture, from the regime prisons to ISIL’s, are no mystery. Hussein said he recognized the voice of his chief jailer, Abu Luqman, a local ISIL “emir”, even though he wore a mask.
Abu Luqman’s real name is Ali al-Shawaq, an Islamist lawyer from Raqqa who served six years in the regime’s Sednaya prison and was almost certainly tortured himself. “The shabeh,” said Hussein, “is like a contagion.”