BEIRUT:-The prison north of Damascus was
known to detainees as "the slaughterhouse" and in it, as many of
13,000 people were hanged in only four years after a series of sham trials,
according to a new report issued by Amnesty International. The report, issued
on Tuesday, said that 20-50 people were hanged each week at the Saydnaya prison
in what the organization called a "calculated campaign of extrajudicial
execution."
The report covers the period from 2011 to
2015, but Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty's regional
office in Beirut, said there is no reason to believe the practice has stopped
since then, with thousands more probably killed. "These executions take
place after a sham trial that lasts over a minute or two minutes, but they are
authorized by the highest levels of authority," including the Grand Mufti,
a top religious authority in Syria, and the defense minister, she said.
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The killings were authorized by senior Syrian
officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad, and carried out by
military police. Amnesty has also recorded at least 35 different methods of
torture in Syria since the late 1980s, practices that only increased since
2011, Maalouf said.
Other rights groups have found evidence of
massive torture leading to death in Syrian detention facilities. In a report
last year, Amnesty found that more than 17,000 people have died of torture and
ill-treatment in custody across Syria since 2011, an average rate of more than
300 deaths a month. Those figures are comparable to battlefield deaths in
Aleppo, one of the fiercest war zones in Syria, where 21,000 were killed across
the province since 2011.
"The horrors depicted in this report
reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the
Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian
population," Maalouf said.
Syrian government officials rarely comment on
allegations of torture and mass killings. In the past, they have denied reports
of massacres documented by international human rights groups, describing them
as propaganda.
The chilling accounts in Tuesday's report
came from interviews with 31 former detainees and over 50 other officials and
experts, including former guards and judges. According to the findings,
detainees were told they would be transferred to civilian detention centers but
were taken instead to another building in the facility and hanged.
"They walked in the 'train,' so they had
their heads down and were trying to catch the shirt of the person in front of
them. The first time I saw them, I was horrified. They were being taken to the
slaughterhouse," Hamid, a former detainee, told Amnesty. Another former
detainee, Omar Alshogre, told The Associated Press the guards would come to his
cell, sometimes three times a week, and call out detainees by name.
Alshogre said a torture session would begin
before midnight in nearby chambers that he could hear."Then the sound
would stop, and we would hear a big vehicle come and take them away," said
Alshogre, who spent nine months in Saydnaya. Now 21, he lives in Sweden.
Speaking in an interview from Stockholm via
Skype, Alshogre described how he was forced to keep his eyes closed and his
back to the guards while they abused or suffocated a cellmate.The body often
would be left behind, or there would be a pool of blood in the cell for other
prisoners to clean up.
"We can tell from the sound of the
prisoner as he dies behind us. He dies a meter away. I don't see anything, but
I see with my ears," said Alshogre, who at age 17 moved among nearly 10
detention facilities in Syria for two years before he was taken to Saydnaya. Alshogre
survived nine months in the prison, paying his way out in 2015 a common
practice. He suffered from tuberculosis and his weight fell to 35 kilograms (77
pounds).
Two cousins detained with him in western
Syria didn't survive, dying a year apart in a military intelligence detention
facility. The younger one died in Alshogre's arms, deprived of food and so weak
he was unable to walk to the bathroom on his own. Still, Alshogre said nothing
could have prepared him for Saydnaya.
At one point, Alshogre was called out by his
guards "for execution," he said. He was brought before a military
trial and told not to raise his gaze at the judge, who asked him how many
soldiers he had killed. When he said none, the judge spared him. Death
in Saydnaya was always present, "like the air," Alshogre said. Once
when he was deprived of food for two days, a cellmate handed him his food
ration and died days later.
"This is someone who gave me his
life," he said. Another cellmate died of diarrhea, also common in the
prison."Death is the simplest thing. It was the most hoped for because it
would have spared us a lot: hunger, thirst, fear, pain, cold, thinking,"
he added. "Thinking was so hard. It could also
kill," said Alshogre, who keeps a photo of one of his tormentors on the
wall of his home.
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