Torture victims have spoken out about the horror of Syrian torture chambers after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad.
Residents of Douma, in the eastern Ghouta region of Syria, were subjected to a horrific chemical warfare attack launched by Assad forces on April 7, 2018. An investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found that two yellow cylinders were dropped from a Syrian air force helicopter, crashing through the top floor of one apartment building and landing on the balcony of another.
The attack killed 43 people, who chocked to death because of the concentrated green-yellow chlorine gas that hissed out of canisters. And their bodies were blue and black when civil defence workers brought them out to the street.
For years, the victims of Assad’s regime couldn’t speak out as the last rebel group fighting in Douma surrendered the next day, and the town was forced to grieve in silence. But after rebels led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) toppled the president last week, victims are finally able to reveal the extent of the torture they faced over the years.
Abdulhadi Sariel lived on the opposite side of the street from where the chlorine cylinders landed – and said his family survived because they stayed on a higher floor. But despite this, one of his daughters still has respiratory problems as a result of the attack, he told the Observer.
The 64-year-old said: “No one in that basement came out alive. Their bodies turned to black, their clothes went green and were burnt, they crumbled and stuck to their bodies. The clothes looked like wood. We threw out all of our clothes but [you can still see the effect] on the curtains. We can escape the bullets and the tanks, but chemicals travel through the air. We were afraid, children were afraid.”
The newspaper also spoke to 16-year-old Hamad Shukri, who was just 10 when the attack happened one street from his home. He said he still remembers it “very well” because “there was no explosion, only gas.” He said: “The adults were throwing water on everyone to try and wash the chemical off. I didn’t understand what was happening. I just knew that people were dead.”
Tawfiq Diab, 79, lost his wife Hanan and his four children in the attack – and barely survived himself. He only found out that his family had been killed when he regained consciousness in hospital 10 days later. Even now, years later, he is still not sure where their bodies were taken by regime forces.
He said: “After I was awake I started asking questions but police came and told me ‘don’t ask about them’. I was arrested and spent a week at the police station. They told me ‘we will cut off your tongue’ if you speak. We were silenced against our will … Now we can talk.”
Now, desperate relatives are crowding Syrian hospitals seeking their loved ones – and some prisoners released from Assad’s notorious jails are so physically and psychologically traumatised that they forgot their own names and identities. During 53 years of rule by the Assad prison, people would disappear, be snatched from the street, and presumed detained in the vast network of prisons.
More than 150,000 people went missing but now the dynasty has fallen, prisons have been open, with surviving detainees brought into the light. At a Damascus hospital, Dr Muaz Ataya said that from a group of five or six men who had been brought there from the notorious Sednaya prison, all had serious physical and psychological trauma, and three didn’t know who they were, The Times reported. One of them only said his number, 27, as he didn’t remember his name. The doctor said: “They have no names in the prison. They have only numbers.”
Dr Neamt Alkahef said another patient from the prison couldn’t say anything at all – but after she told him he didn’t need to worry as Assad had fallen, he looked at her in horror and tried to shush her. Even though he didn’t remember his name, he knew nobody could say that. Sednaya prison, known for its horrors, was long known as “the slaughterhouse”.
Industrial-sized horror was acted out inside Sednaya, among Assad’s prisons and kill-sites from where 157,000 have disappeared, including 5,274 children and 10,221 women. It is feared as many as 15,000 have died under torture in the labyrinth of cells and chambers after Assad’s men used 72 different tortures, some even crushed to death.
Human rights campaigners say regime torture methods included electrocuting genitals, hanging weights from them; burning with oil, metal rods, gunpowder or flammable pesticides. Victims had their heads crushed between a wall and the prison cell’s door; needles or metal pins inserted into bodies; prisoners exposed to freezing cold water spraying.
One woman, Mariam Khleif, jailed for helping rebels, was repeatedly raped, she said, kept in a tiny with six other women and was hanged from the walls and beaten. She said a prisoner complained of hunger only for guards to stuff his face with excrement. And female inmates, she said, were taken to a Colonel Suleiman, a security boss, to be raped. Gut-wrenching sadism was revealed in video – nasty footage from inside one of the jails of a medieval body-press used to break bones and execute prisoners.
Bloodied ropes used for hangings were revealed. Outside Sednaya, a hauntingly high concrete complex of tiny windows outside Damascus, Ghada Assad broke down in tears as she cried: “Where is everyone? Where are everyone’s children? Where are they?” She had rushed from her Damascus home to the prison on the capital’s outskirts, hoping to find her brother, who was detained in 2011, the year Arab Spring protests first erupted.
She said: “My heart has been burned over my brother. For 13 years, I kept looking for him.” When insurgents last week seized Aleppo – her original hometown – at the start of their swiftly victorious offensive, she recalled: “I prayed that they would reach Damascus just so they can open up this prison.”
