Men ordered to rape each other to ‘amuse’ a sick guard. Women raped in front of family members to force confessions. And blood – rivers of blood from the sustained beatings and torture, reported Daily Mail.
This is from the testimony of 65 former prisoners in Assad’s jails across Syria who have spoken out about the horrendous conditions they endured in order to give a voice to those left behind.
Denied access to government prisons in Syria, Amnesty International has compiled an in depth investigation into human rights abuses inside military jails across the war torn country.
While the horrific abuse has been documented in ISIS and rebel detention centres, the sheer scale of systematic human rights violations are being carried out by the Syrian army, according to the watchdog.
The organisation estimates that more than 17,723 people have died in custody in Syria over the past five years – an average of more than 300 people each month, about 10 a day.
Amnesty’s 69-page report documents the testimony of men and women subjected to electrocutions, beatings, stress positions, rape, severe cold and the withholding of medical treatment, food, and water.
Researchers have also compiled a 3D impression of what the inside of the notorious Saydnaya Prison looks like through satellite imagery and memories of those who were detained there.
One survivor, named only as Omar S, recounts being made to watch a prisoner being forced to rape another.
‘Because of our situation – we look very bad, and we smell bad – so the guards wouldn’t usually make any sexual advances on us. But still, there was one time that the guard stripped all of us. And he chose two of us, one of us huge, and the other very small.
‘He told the two to come to him. He asked them to turn in a circle, to show him their bodies. Then he ordered the bigger one to rape the smaller one. Because of the torture, and the situation, he couldn’t, even if he had tried. The guard told him he had to do it or he would die.’
Former detainees from the intelligence branches have described being held in cells so overcrowded they had to take turns to sleep, or had to sleep while squatting saying ‘it was like being in a room of dead people’.
‘They were trying to finish us there,’ said Jalal, a former detainee. Another detainee, ‘Ziad’ (not his real name), said the ventilation in Military Intelligence Branch 235 in Damascus stopped working one day and seven people died of suffocation:
‘They began to kick us to see who was alive and who wasn’t. They told me and the other survivor to stand up … that is when I realised that … seven people had died, that I had slept next to seven bodies … [then] I saw the rest of the bodies in the corridor, around 25 other bodies.’
Watch the video of the prisoners’ confessions
Sourced from Daily Mail. Featured image courtesy: Amnesty
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