Mahmoud, a 21-year-old Palestinian resident of Syria, rests in a field hospital after he was found, Aug. 6, 2012, having been blindfolded, beaten and sprayed with bullets. (AP)

07/08/2012

(AP) ANADAN, Syria — The guards pulled him from his cell before dawn on Monday, bound his hands, blindfolded him and drove him to an empty lot in the Syrian city of Aleppo. They sat him in a row with 10 other captives, he said, then cocked their guns and opened fire.

“They sprayed us,” recalled 21-year-old Mahmoud, the lone survivor of the latest mass killing of Syria’s civil war. “The first bullet hit my chest, then one hit my foot, then my head. As soon as my head got hit, I thought, `I’m dead.”’

Reports of such killings have surfaced frequently during the 17 months of deadly violence that activists seeking to topple President Bashar Assad say has killed more than 19,000 people. But details are usually scarce — no more than activist reports or amateur videos of bloodied bodies or mass graves posted on YouTube.

Mahmoud related his grisly ordeal to The Associated Press hours after it happened. Struggling to speak, he lay in a bed in a makeshift rebel-run field hospital set up in a wedding hall in this town 13 miles north of Aleppo. Bandages covered his foot, head and chest. Plastic vines and colored lights adorned the walls of the darkened building, and two red velvet chairs once used by brides and grooms sat on a small stage.

Mahmoud gave only his first name to protect his family who still live in the area.

While his story could not be independently confirmed, Mahmoud’s wounds matched his story and residents who found him and his dead colleagues corroborated certain details.

Together, they painted a picture of the summary slaying of 10 men, at least some of whom had only loose links to the armed rebels seeking to topple the regime. That story jibes with activist claims of the increasingly brutal tactics regime forces are using to try to crush the rebellion that has spread to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.

Syria’s uprising started in March 2011 with peaceful protests calling for political reforms that were met with a fierce regime crackdown. Government brutality grew as dissent spread, and many in the opposition took up arms as the conflict morphed into a civil war.

Aleppo has been a stronghold of government support throughout the uprising, with a wealthy business class and many minority communities who fear they’ll suffer if Assad falls. Until recently, the city of some 4 million people had been spared the violence that has ravaged other Syrian cities.

But during the last two weeks, rebels have been pushing into Aleppo’s neighborhoods, clashing with security forces and torching police stations in a push to “liberate” the city. Syrian media has vowed the army is gearing up for a “decisive battle,” while anti-regime activists have reported swelling numbers of troops and tanks on the city’s edges.

The Syrian government blames the uprising on armed gangs and terrorists backed by foreign powers that seek to weaken Syria.

Mahmoud receives treatment in a field hospital after he was found Aug. 6, 2012, with three gunshot wounds in the town of Anadan

 (Credit: AP)

It was amid these tensions that Mahmoud, a Palestinian resident of Aleppo, had his fateful brush with Syrian security. On Thursday, Mahmoud said, he and a friend went to collect their paychecks from the thread factory where they work and heard clashes nearby. Soon eight men in civilian clothes stopped them and asked for their IDs and cell phones.

On Mahmoud’s phone they found videos of anti-government demonstrations and messages he sent to rebels from the Free Syrian Army, asking God to protect them and make them victorious. The men threw Mahmoud and his friend in the trunk of a car and drove them to a trash dump, where they were blindfolded, bound and beaten with sticks and large rocks before being taken to a security office.

Mahmoud was locked in a crowded cell with about a dozen other men, he said. Each day, some were taken out and new ones brought in.

“We were there for four days and they only gave us water to drink once. They never fed us,” he said. “They never asked us anything. Every day it was beating, beating, beating.”

Before dawn on Monday, guards pulled Mahmoud and 10 others from their cells and told they were going to see a judge. They were bound at the wrists, blindfolded and driven to Aleppo’s Khaldiyeh neighborhood, where they were lined up on a patch of rocky soil.

“They sat us all down next to each other, `You here, you here, you here,”’ Mahmoud said. “Then each one cocked his weapon and the shooting started.”

Mahmoud was shot three times. Bullets pierced his chest and foot and one grazed his skull. Minutes later, silence returned, and he realized he was still alive.

“I breathed, I said the shehada,” he said, referring to the Muslim declaration of faith meant to put him right with God. “I tried to get up then started screaming because blood was coming out of me.”

He scraped his face on a rock to remove the blindfold and crawled to where some nearby residents found him.

Among them was a 22-year-old electrician who said he heard the gunfire early Monday and worried that people were being killed because he had discovered six bodies in the same spot a day earlier. He showed videos of the victims on his cell phone, their bodies piled atop each other covered in blood, some bearing large bruises that appeared to be from beatings. He said all had been shot dead.

He and others asked not to have their names published because they have to pass through government checkpoints to get home.

The killings shocked residents of Khaldiyeh, a working-class neighborhood on Aleppo’s northwest side that has seen little violence until now. While many residents support the rebels, they have not established a foothold in the area, and the relative quiet has drawn thousands of people fleeing violence in other Aleppo neighborhoods or nearby villages.

As Mahmoud spoke, a white pickup pulled up outside the field hospital with the bodies of nine of the men killed Monday. The body of the tenth victim had been taken away by his family. All still had their hands bound and two still wore blindfolds. Two had bullet wounds to their heads, and others had blood on their faces and chests or coming out of their ears. None wore shoes.

Those killings convinced one Khaldiyeh resident who helped collect the bodies that the neighborhood needs arms.

“We want the Free Army to come to our neighborhood to protect us,” he said. “If they can’t come, then they need to give us weapons so we can defend ourselves.”

The field hospital’s doctor, Mohammed Ajaj, said he is no longer shocked when the dead and wounded pass through town on their way to burial in nearby villages or for treatment across the northern border in Turkey.

“We’ve gotten used to it,” he said.

An 18-year-old activist who helped collect the bodies said none of them had IDs.

“We really know nothing about them,” he said, adding that he would stop in neighboring villages to see if anyone recognized them before delivering them to a morgue further north.

“If nobody claims them, we’ll take their photos and put them on our Facebook page so their families can find out that they’re dead,” he said. 

“Widespread and systematic” torture in #Syria

(CBS/AP) BEIRUT - Syrian security forces routinely torture people detained during the country’s year-old uprising against authoritarian President Bashar Assad, Amnesty International said in a report released Wednesday.

The London-based group said detainees are beaten with sticks, cords and rifle butts and sometimes suspended inside tires for further beatings. Others are sexually assaulted or killed.

These detainees’ accounts back claims of brutal beatings, electrocutions and sexual assault.

Earlier this month, video obtained by CBS News showed detainees who had allegedly been tortured by doctors and soldiers at a military hospital in Homs, the central Syrian city which was pounded for weeks by government forces before they captured rebel-held areas by force.

In the video, shot secretly inside the military hospital, men are seen blindfolded and shackled to their beds with rusty chains. (Click on the video player at top to see CBS News correspondent Clarissa Ward’s full report)

Since protesters first took to the streets in Syria one year ago to call for political reform, security forces have cracked down hard, deploying snipers, troops and pro-government thugs to quash all signs of dissent.

As the protest have spread and some in the opposition have taken up arms to protect themselves and attack government troops, Syria’s uprising has evolved into one of the bloodiest of the Arab Spring. The U.N. says more than 7,500 have been killed, most of them peaceful demonstrators.

Amnesty based its report on interviews in mid-February with dozens of Syrians who had fled to neighboring Jordan. Twenty-five said they had been tortured or ill-treated, the group said.

Torture appears to be part of a strategy to punish and intimidate dissidents, the group said. It calls on the International Criminal Court in the Hague to investigate charges of crimes against humanity against Syrian officials.

“Torture and other ill-treatment in Syria form part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population, carried out in an organized manner and as part of state policy and therefore amount to crimes against humanity,” it said.

The group said it has documented 276 cases of death in detention since the uprising’s start. But given the large number of people who have been detained, it says the number of those killed is likely much higher.

The report also accuses armed opposition groups of kidnapping and killing people believed to be associated with the regime — actions it condemns.

Syrian officials were not immediately available for comment. The Syrian government blames the uprising on armed extremists acting out a foreign conspiracy.

Author Jonathan Littell tells of Assad’s security forces targeting medical personnel and how he was smuggled to the heart of the Syrian conflict

guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 February 2012 23.50 GMT

A member of the Free Syrian Army wounded in clashes with government forces. Photograph: Tomas Munita/New York Times/Redux/eyevine

In Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, it is not just forbidden to speak, demonstrate and protest: it is also forbidden both to give medical treatment, and to receive treatment yourself. Since the beginning of the uprising, the regime has been waging a merciless war against any individual or institution capable of bringing medical aid to the victims of repression. “It’s very dangerous to be a doctor or a pharmacist,” a pharmacist from the Baba Amro neighbourhood of Homs tells me. Medical personnel are imprisoned – like the nurse in the nearby district of al-Qusayr, arrested the day after he showed me around his hidden emergency-care centre, its carpets covered with plastic tarpaulins to protect them from blood – or killed, like Abdur Rahim Amir, the only doctor in that centre, murdered in cold blood in November by military security, while he sought to treat civilians wounded during the army’s assault on Rastan to the north. Or tortured.

In Baba Amro, a nurse from the Homs National Hospital, imprisoned in September, describes the tortures he was subjected to by miming them: he was beaten with a club, blindfolded, whipped, suffered electric shocks, and hanged from the wall by a single wrist, on tiptoe, for four or five hours – a common practice that has its own name, ash-shabah. “I was lucky, they didn’t treat me so badly,” he insists. “They didn’t break my bones.” Sometimes, the regime’s forces just insult them. A Red Crescent nurse, in her ambulance, was stopped at a checkpoint: “We shoot them, and you save them!” the soldiers berated them.

The two city hospitals, the civilian (called the “National”) and the military one, are under the thumb of the security forces, and their rooms and basements have been turned into torture chambers. The private clinics, last resort for the wounded of the insurrection, are subjected to permanent assault. In one, in the heart of the old city, two nurses show me the impact of bullets in the windows, walls and beds, fired by the army from the nearby citadel. Aside from these two nurses, the clinic is empty. “We can only accept emergency cases and we don’t keep anyone for more than a few hours. The security forces come here regularly and arrest everyone they find. The doctors have had to sign a pledge not to take care of demonstrators.”

As they speak, a bullet slaps into the room next to ours. Everyone laughs. “Ever since the Free Syrian Army (FSA) established itself in the neighbourhood,” continues one of the nurses, “the wounded can be brought here.” The rebel army also transports doctors for operations, when it’s possible. Five days earlier, the clinic received a man with his belly torn open: a first surgeon was able to operate, but needed a specialist to complete the procedure. The neighbourhood, however, was sealed off, making it impossible to bring the specialist in and impossible to transfer the patient to another hospital. “In the end he died,” concludes the nurse.

Abu Hamzeh, a highly trained surgeon, tries to care for the wounded who arrive daily at an emergency first aid point in the city. He is so desperate about the lack of resources – his centre has no anaesthetics, no medical imaging equipment, he can’t operate on anyone, just bandage them and give them saline drips – that he wants to give up medicine and take up arms. “I’m useless here,” he mutters bitterly in front of a man with his abdomen perforated by a sniper bullet, “completely useless.” When the uprising first began, Abu Hamzeh was working at the Homs military hospital, and he witnessed the tortures inflicted on wounded demonstrators, sometimes even by nurses or doctors, whose names he carefully recorded. When the head doctor of the hospital tried to forbid such practices, they simply became more discreet. “One day, I treated a patient in the emergency room. The next day he was sent to the CT room for a brain trauma he didn’t have the previous day. That’s how I discovered that they did things to him at night. After two days the patient died from his brain trauma. He would not have died from the injuries I treated the first day.”

Horrified, Abu Hamzeh managed to procure a camera-pen in Beirut, and secretly recorded, with the help of a nurse, four short videos in a post-operative care room. In the clips you can see five patients, completely or nearly naked beneath the sheets, blindfolded, one ankle chained to the bed. The doctor’s hand uncovers their bodies: two of them bear large fresh red marks on the torso, the result of flogging. Lying on a table are the torture instruments: two supple whips, rubber straps cut out from tyres and reinforced with duct tape, and an electric cable with a plug on one end and a clamp on the other, to be attached to the fingers, feet or penis. One of the injured men groans incessantly. “They had blocked their catheters,” Abu Hamzeh exclaims. “When I came in they begged for something to drink. I opened the catheters and changed the urine bags, which were full, but two of the patients went into a coma because of kidney failure. When I changed their bandages, I noticed gangrene on one of the patients; I told this to the orthopaedic section but wasn’t able to follow up. Three days later I heard they had cut his leg off above the knee.”

Abu Hamzeh, who recently resigned his position in order to join the opposition, was quickly sidelined. But the practices he describes have only intensified over the past months. In Baba Amro, we are taken to meet R, a wounded man whose leg has been amputated, and who was just released from the military hospital. In late December a shell fell in his street, killing five of his neighbours and relatives. In the little video they show me, you can see R bundled into a vehicle, his leg half-torn off, just held in place by a hastily tied scarf. The first private clinic where he was brought was overwhelmed with wounded, and they tried to transfer him to another one, along with his 28-year-old nephew, whose left arm was attached by nothing more than a few scraps of flesh. But the ambulance transporting them was intercepted at a security forces checkpoint, where the two wounded men were arrested, placed in an armoured vehicle, and taken to the military hospital. There, without receiving any medical attention, handcuffed to their beds and blindfolded, they were tortured for eight hours. “They hit me with food trays, on my head and body. They tied ropes to my wounded leg and pulled in all directions. They did many other things to me, but I don’t remember them.”

The men torturing him weren’t even trying to get information, they just insulted their victims: “Ah, you want freedom, well here’s your freedom!” His nephew died from the torture; finally, R was transferred to the operating room for surgery. Afterwards, he was imprisoned, without any post-operative follow-up: his leg got infected, and six days later it was summarily amputated by a military doctor. I am shown a picture of him upon his release: his skin sallow, his cheeks sunk, skeletal, but softly glad to be alive. “They killed me, back there,” he concludes, his eyes shining. “I should never have come out alive.”

Such practices are in no way isolated cases, individual initiatives fuelled by sadism or overzealousness, outside of any control. On the contrary, they are codified and regulated by a set of procedures far older than the current uprising, as Abu Salim, a military doctor who served for two years in the mukhabarat, the Department of Military Intelligence, before defecting to the opposition to run a makeshift clinic in Homs, testifies: “What is the mission of a mukhabarat medical doctor?” he calmly asks as my tape recorder runs. “I will explain it to you. Firstly: to keep alive the people subjected to torture so that they can be interrogated for as long as possible. Secondly: in case the person being interrogated loses consciousness, to attend to him so that the interrogation can continue. Thirdly: to supervise the use of psychotropic drugs during the interrogation. We used chlorpromazine [an anti-psychotic drug prescribed, usually, for schizophrenia], valium, and rubbing alcohol – for instance, by pouring a litre into the nose, or else by subcutaneous injection. Fourthly: if the person being tortured has reached his threshold of resistance and is in danger of death, the doctor can request his hospitalisation. However, the doctor cannot make the decision: he must write a report and the officer in charge of the interrogation then decides whether or not to grant the transfer. Before the revolution, almost everyone was transferred; now, it’s only the important prisoners. The others are left to die.”

How I made it into Syria undercover

Morning. Rain is falling hard. One of the two Lebanese smugglers, at the wheel of a mini-van, is driving us down the small streets of Mount Lebanon, avoiding the Lebanese Army posts, out on to a large rocky plain. Syria is right in front of us. At a bend in the road, three boys are waiting for us on motorbikes. They aren’t professionals either, just local farmers, their hands red and calloused. They take us through muddy paths between houses and fields; we pass dirty, ragged children, a few beehives, some horses, until we reach a house where smiling farmers serve us coffee.

A radio call: the road is free, so we leave for another house, further on in the village. At that instant, a text message from the Ministry of Tourism, in English, appears on the cellphone: “Welcome to Syria.” We have passed through to the other side of the mirror.

The trip from Qusayr on the border to Homs, about 30 kilometres, will be made in the same way: by going from one house to another, from one vehicle to another, from one hand to another. A wide network of civilians helps the Free Syrian Army and the revolution. At every stage, a vehicle or motorbike goes in front to check if the road is free. And when we move, there are always people in front, around, behind us; cellphones are continually ringing to transmit the latest news.

Everything happens as if, faced with the police and security grid of the Ba’ath party and the mukhabarats – a grid that has dominated the life of the country for decades – society had in these past few months put in place a counter-grid, almost as effective, made of civilian activists, notables, religious figures, and, more and more, armed forces – the deserters who form the FSA. This counter-grid resists the other one, circumvents it, and is even starting to absorb it in part. When you travel between the Lebanese border and Homs, it becomes visible. There has, of course, always been a passive resistance to the regime’s grid, but now this second grid has completely broken away from its ties to the former. As if Syrian society, since the spring, had split in two, and as if both parallel societies were coexisting in the country, in mortal conflict.

• First published in Le Monde. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. (c) Jonathan Littell.