Doctor jailed for criticism of Assad in trouble with Turkey’s Idlib proxies

A Syrian doctor who was imprisoned for criticising President Bashar Al Assad again faces prison, this time for his opinions of Turkey’s president.

Nine years ago, Mahmoud Al Sayeh, 48, from Al Bab in northern Syria, was jailed for criticising Mr Al Assad.

He was released and has since been struggling to survive in a civil war that has claimed the lives of his entire family.

Last month, a judge installed by the Turkish-backed Syrian opposition in Idlib sentenced him to five months in prison for online posts he made denouncing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s involvement in Syria.

Dr Al Sayeh, who has been in hiding since he was bailed in June, is unrepentant.

“I’m not going to bow to dictatorship ever again,” he said. “Not after all this bloodshed in my country and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.”

As Dr Al Sayeh keeps campaigning for free speech, what may be the bloodiest phase of the war is approaching, as Syrian government forces prepare a final assault on Idlib.

He was imprisoned for five months in 2007 in the notorious Seydnaya prison near Damascus for criticising Mr Al Assad online.

As protesters reclaimed the streets of Syria in 2011, the orthopaedic doctor began helping injured protesters who were shot by security forces.

But his work with rebels drew the attention of the security forces and he went into hiding, moving between the Aleppo countryside and his hometown. When ISIS took over Al Bab in 2014, Dr Al Sayeh fled with his family to Idlib.

The province has sheltered hundreds of thousands of fleeing Syrians over the past seven years, with half the province’s two million civilians displaced from other parts of the country.

Turkey entered the war in August 2016 with troops building observation points and installing proxies across Idlib.

In March last year, a Russian air strike hit the Qusour neighbourhood of Idlib city, killing seven of Dr Al Sayeh’s children, his wife, mother and brother.

“I was the only survivor among all residents of the building but I was injured badly,” he said. The air strike killed 22 people.

In January, Dr Al Sayeh posted online criticism of the Turkish president.

“Erdogan is all lightning and thunder but no rain,” he said in one, referring to what he saw as empty promises from Ankara.

In April, he was arrested by Al Hamzat brigade Euphrates Shield security forces.

“They took me to their base where the investigation started, combined with beating and insults,” Dr Al Sayeh said.

The interrogation was by a Turkish officer from Ankara’s intelligence agency, Dr Al Sayeh says, who accused him of belonging to a terrorist organisation before raising the tweets.

Dr Al Sayeh was eventually released on bail, but in August, Syrian judges installed under Euphrates Shield convicted him in his absence for “insulting a foreign president”. They sentenced him to five months imprisonment and fined him 5,000 Turkish lira (Dh2,775).

The fine was for “the psychological and social damages I caused him”, Dr Al Sayeh said.

“My fight is not personal. I’m more interested in removing laws that restrict public freedom and turn officials into supreme beings.”

I’m not going to bow to dictatorship ever again. Not after the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives DR MAHMOUD AL SAYEH Blogger