Report details routine torture in Syrian prisons
One former prisoner described undergoing desperate jailhouse surgery performed with a scavenged razor blade. A woman told of her gang rape by a military commander and his troops, each awaiting his turn. Another man recounted thirstcrazed prisoners licking spilled water from the floor “like cats.”
Even before the outbreak of Syria’s civil war, the country’s detention facilities, particularly those run by the security forces, were notorious for abuse. But prison torture is occurring now on an industrial scale, with more than 17,000 people believed to have been killed in custody and tens of thousands of others enduring horrific treatment daily, Amnesty International said in a searing new report.
“Since the current crisis in Syria began in 2011, the situation has become catastrophic, with torture committed on a massive scale,” the report says, citing interviews carried out with 65 ex-detainees over a span of five months in 2015 and 2016.
The London-based rights group said its findings corroborated those of previous investigations, including one carried out by a U.N.mandated body, but the 64page document is notable for the degree of agonizing detail provided by interviewees, the majority of whom had found haven in southern Turkey. Like other international monitors, the group was barred from carrying out research in Syria.
“The first thing this torture does is take your dignity,” a man identified as Omar H. told researchers. “It breaks the human.”
Many of the former detainees bear the scars of their ordeal in captivity: badly healed bones, nerve damage, the puckered marks of cigarette burns. For some, the lingering psychological effects are even worse, leaving them unable to cope with work or family life, the report says.
Every former prisoner to whom the researchers spoke said they had been tortured — subjected to beatings, starvation, electric shocks. Sexual violence was commonplace.
The report focuses on conditions in what it describes as Syria’s most lethal detention facilities, including those operated by the country’s four intelligence services. The prisoners, the group said, came from all walks of life — doctors, teachers, cafe owners, housewives, lawyers and journalists.
Syria has consistently denied mistreatment of detainees, but Amnesty International charged that the government of President Bashar Assad had embarked on a systematic campaign to eliminate anyone who was seen as posing a threat to the state, using torture to terrorize prisoners as well as their families.
Researchers said they found the ex-prisoners’ accounts credible, in part because some details were repeated again and again by people who had never met — descriptions, for example, of the “welcome party,” a severe beating administered on arrival at a detention facility; or different methods of torture, including one known as shabeh, in which the victim was suspended by manacled wrists, often for hours, from a hook or a pipe.