17/08/2012 Damascus, #Syria *GRAPHIC*: Important update by Coordination of Doctors in Homs

“Important !! Please share if you care ! 

NO FOR SLAUGHTERING US ! KILLS US BUT NEVER SLAUGHTER US BY KNIVES !!!!!!!!

 Just today four massacres occurred in different regions, mostly in the countryside of Damascus 

All occurred through the slaughter of the detainees by knives 

Today , More than 60 martyrs where found slaughtered by knives , a number not including the number of other martyrs killed in the shelling , snipers’ shots , torture in detentions !!!! 

Unfortunately, the media did not speak on the subject and a lot of pages did not mention about the growing cases of martyrs being found slaughtered by knives , with hands were tied up and bodies were found near garbage dump . Yesterday 60 martyrs were found like that in Qatana , Damascus Suburbs and another were found in Artooz, Damascus suburbs .

 what is happening nowadays in Syria has not happened before in history !! How long this world will keep silent about the ongoing massacres in Syria !!!!”

Mohamed, a Syrian refugee from the southern Syrian town of Daraa crossed illegally into Jordan in December 2011, after being detained by the government. His family has been trying to join him in Jordan through the legal border crossing ever since - unsuccessfully. Aid workers and refugees say the Syrian government has tightened restrictions at the border. Here, Mohamed stands a few hundred metres before the Jordanian border crossing, waiting for his family. PICTURE: Heba Aly/IRIN

A few hundred metres from the dusty, sleepy crossing that divides Jordan and Syria, Mohamed (name changed) waits on the roadside clutching a plastic bag and his blazer.
After 147 days in detention for participating in anti-government protests in his hometown of Daraa in southern Syria, he left his wife and seven children behind and crossed into Jordan illegally, through a gap in barbed wire fencing.
He had no choice, he says; those who are jailed have their names put on lists at the border barring them from leaving legally.
Syrians do not require a visa to enter Jordan, and before a popular uprising began in Syria last March, thousands of people crossed the border in both directions daily.
For a month now, Mohamed’s family has been trying to cross into Jordan legally to join him, but time after time, they have been turned back at the border.
Refugees and aid workers say the Syrian government has closed its official border crossing with Jordan to anyone with a new passport and to families, women and children. It allows only those who already have Jordanian stamps in their passports, or young men who come individually, to cross.
“The (government) doesn’t want people leaving Syria in droves and refugees bringing negative media attention,” Mohamed told the IRIN news agency.
The Syrian uprising began peacefully in March 2011 demanding democratic reforms, but the opposition has become increasingly armed in the face of a violent crackdown by the Syrian government. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says more than 7,500 people have been killed - mostly civilians in what has become a near civil-war. Up to 200,000 people are displaced within Syria, aid groups say, and tens of thousands of others have fled to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
Jordanian government spokesperson Rakan al-Majali told IRIN only 2,400 of the 80,000 Syrians who have crossed into Jordan in the last year have done so illegally.
But those numbers are rising because of increased border restrictions, according to the Islamic Charity Centre Society, a local group working along the border in the nearby town of Mafraq.
In the last two weeks alone, 500 families have crossed into Jordan through the barbed wire fencing, said Khaled Fayez Ghanem, co-ordinator of Syrian refugees’ relief at the centre’s Mafraq branch.
“They started refusing families to leave,” he told IRIN. “When families leave, it gives the impression of a crisis in Syria.”
Mohamed communicates with his family through a smuggled Jordanian SIM card. They are hosted in a village near the border called Naseeb - as “refugees within Syria” - to facilitate their daily travel to and from the border.
On this day, Mohamed is waiting for them once more.
“I was here yesterday. I am waiting for them again today. If they don’t come today, we’ll find a way of getting them out illegally.”
His children tried splitting up and crossing one by one, but because their passports are brand new, he said, they were turned back on the assumption that they would claim refugee status in Jordan.
“Even with a bribe, we can’t get them out.”
Ghanem says families have had to pay Syrian customs officials bribes of up to 50,000 Syrian pounds ($873) to cross the border. Others are afraid to even try.
Abu Suleiman, of the restive city of Homs’ Hay Ashira neighbourhood, said on  March 3 Syrian soldiers shot at the bus he was travelling in towards Jordan, 5km from the border.
“People are afraid to go legally because of attacks on buses crossing the border,” said another refugee who identified herself as Um Fawaz, from the Baba Amr neighbourhood of Homs.
Ahmed Sharaf, who owns a shop just outside the official border crossing, said traffic had been gradually decreasing. “There is a lot less movement from Syria now.”
Those who come illegally walk 1.5km to get from the Syrian border to the Jordanian border, sometimes carrying injured people. Once on Jordanian territory, the army picks them up and takes them to be registered. They require a Jordanian sponsor to sign for them, and then they are free to enter Jordan.
According to Ali Rashid Shdaifat, head of the Jordan Red Crescent branch in Mafraq, some passport offices in Syria have closed, making it more difficult for Syrians to get passports to travel.
Ahmed (name changed) decided to flee Homs after he was twice arrested, detained and, he says, tortured. He tried three times to cross the border into Jordan.
“The first time, they wouldn’t let us out. They said we would protest internationally and make Syria look bad. The last time, when we neared the border, we met people who said people who tried to leave were being targeted: women were being killed, and men electrocuted.”
He had to travel to the capital Damascus to get passports made for his wife and kids. The process took 5-6 days and cost a 25,000 pound ($436) bribe to get authorisation to travel, required for all young men in Syria. He asked them to put an old date on the permission letter so it would not be obvious that he was trying to flee recent violence.
He says he was accepted for travel only because his son was ill. He arrived in the Jordanian capital Amman on March 17; his wife was forced to travel the next day.

We are a group of Syrian bloggers, writers, activists, and independent citizens. We would like to commend your efforts to bring to light violations of human rights whatever their nature or source may be. We have read your letter to the leaders of the Syrian opposition highlighting “increasing evidence…of kidnappings, the use of torture, and executions by armed Syrian opposition members”, and we would like to respond with the following:

All efforts to expose criminal actions and violations of human rights are commendable. The Syrian uprising began with human rights at the forefront of its values. “Freedom” was one of the first words uttered in the chants of this uprising. It was also accompanied, at least in the beginning, with the chants of “Selmiya, Selmiya” (peaceful, peaceful). In one of the most memorable scenes of this revolution captured on video, Mohamed Abd Al Wahab from the town of Baidah (near to Banias) exclaims: “I’m a human being, not an animal!”, referring to the dehumanizing treatment of citizens by the security forces. The essence of the Syrian uprising is the people’s struggle for their human rights: the right of every Syrian citizen to freedom and dignity. The Assad regime has denied and suppressed these basic human rights for decades, employing every fear tactic imaginable: systematic murder (including but not limited to the massacre of Hama, 1982); mass imprisonment; and torture. These tactics of brutality have paralyzed the Syrian people in silence and fear, until March 2011.

Hence, we believe that the violations outlined by this report do not, and cannot, represent the entire opposition movement. We reject any implication that taints the entire opposition with these actions. This report has already been put to political use by mouthpieces and propagandists of the Syrian regime in order to bolster the notion that there are two equal sides to this crisis and that violence is more or less equal. This proposition is a gross exaggeration and utterly untrue. Criminal actions by armed opposition members, while appalling, are minuscule compared to the systematic criminal repression of the regime.

Many Syrians, understandably, have reacted to your report with anger and frustration. There is simply no mechanism in place to investigate these allegations or bring the perpetrators to justice and put them through fair trials. We can only realistically expect human rights to be ingrained and firmly upheld by state laws when Syria is free and democratic. Our struggle is not only with the Assad regime, but with a legacy of thuggery and Mukhabarat torture that infiltrated every aspect of life in Syria.

Finally, we must stress a very significant point in the HRW letter: it’s not always easy to identify armed opposition. As mentioned in the letter:

“Some reports received by Human Rights Watch indicate that in addition to armed groups with political motivations, criminal gangs, sometimes operating in the name of the opposition, may be carrying out some of these crimes.”

Indeed. This has exactly been the case of many kidnappings according to frequent reports from inside Syria, especially the city of Aleppo. When calling family members to demand ransom, the kidnappers identify themselves as members of the Free Syrian Army. While the reality suggests that there are far more likely suspects of these kidnappings: the criminals released from jail at the beginning of the uprising with a presidential pardon. These individuals have often been involved in the thuggish repression of peaceful protesters, and they would not miss the opportunity to smear the Free Syrian Army as well.

In conclusion, while we appreciate Human Rights Watch’s efforts to shed light on the current Syrian crisis and we join HRW in condemning all violations of human rights in Syria, we strongly oppose tainting the Syrian opposition as a whole with these isolated cases. We strongly oppose an attempt to equalize the country-wide spread of atrocities by the Assad regime and the isolated cases by a few anti-regime operatives. As HRW knows from its own previous reports on Syria, there no comparison between the two in the number of dead and imprisoned, and the sheer, indiscriminate brutality directed towards innocent civilians.

12/03/12

Lately, there has been a debate among Syrians about when the revolution began. Did it start with the “Days of Rage” Facebook page? Or the February 17 protest in Al Hariqa neighbourhood of Damascus? The March 15 protest in the capital for the release of political prisoners? The imprisonment and torture of teenagers in Deraa? All of these events were factors that sparked an uprising that is now one year old. But some seeds of dissent were sown years before.

In 2003, in the Damascus suburb of Daraya, Yehya Shurbaji and a group of university friends who called themselves “The Youth of Daraya” initiated a campaign to fight corruption. They walked into shops and gave out posters illustrating three cases of everyday corrupt acts: paying bribes, running red lights and not waiting in line. They spoke gently to people, explaining how each of us - as Syrian citizens - was responsible for seemingly innocent or even culturally tolerated actions that corrupt society.

The Youth of Daraya believed in social activism, and were inspired by historic examples of non-violent movements. They started a mobile library and distributed books to the community. They cleaned the streets. They screened films about Gandhi in the mosque. People in Daraya at first resisted the young men, but slowly began to embrace their optimistic message. And Daraya began to change.

In 2003, the activists were arrested for organising a protest after the fall of Baghdad. “They were accused of forming a non-registered political group and spreading sectarianism, the usual list of accusations which the regime uses against activists,” Yehya’s cousin Eiad Shurbaji recalls. “They were sentenced from two to five years in prison. Yehya spent a long time in solitary confinement. After three years, they demanded he ask for a pardon and mercy for a reduced sentence in front of a judge. He told them: ‘I didn’t do anything wrong and I don’t want to ask for a pardon or mercy.’ So he was imprisoned for an additional two years.”

In 2011, Yehya and his friends joined the revolution following their non-violent principles. He spoke at the Daraya Cultural Centre, asking the community to understand that those we call “shabbiha” - the regime’s “thugs” - are our sons and brothers. He and his best friend, Ghiyath Matar, became known for their uncommon practice of handing out flowers and bottles of water to armed security forces. People asked Yehya: “How is it possible that you would give a rose to these monsters?” He replied, “I’m giving it to myself.”

Yehya and Ghiyath were arrested on September 9. Ghiyath suffered extreme torture and died four days later. He was 24 years old. He died for believing in his message of peace - for giving flowers to the enemy and offering water to the thirsty.

Yehya and his friends’ peaceful war on corruption in 2003 was as brave as the battle of Baba Amr. They were fighting the entrenched regime at its roots, pulling out the weeds of corruption that had become embedded within us.

The Syrian poet and former political prisoner Faraj Bayraqdar explains how the political vacuum and culture of fear that the regime had perfected set the stage for a weak opposition that reflects the regime’s image, complete with strains of egotism, corruption, sectarianism and divisiveness. According to Bayraqdar, an opposition is no more than a microcosm of society and the very government it opposes. His analysis may be hard to accept, but signs of its truth have tainted the revolution.

Today, after months of clashes between shabbiha and mundaseen (“infiltrators”), one word has emerged to unite us: takhween, the act of marking someone who opposes you as a traitor.

It’s not him, it’s not them, it’s us. One year into the revolution, and there is more than enough blame to go around: the exiled opposition’s embarrassingly public bickering and endless internal conflicts; the disorganised Free Syrian Army; fights for and against intervention; splits between communities inside and outside Syria; fractures within society, and not just along sectarian lines. Instead of engaging in difficult, nuanced discussions and embracing differing opinions, we reach for the easiest reactionary responses: name-calling and questioning loyalties. We play our treacherous games, while the Assad regime kills.

Some people say we can’t expect the revolution to adhere to its original principles after the indiscriminate violence and the spilt blood. Not only should we expect it, we should demand it - not in spite of the regime’s violence, but because of it.

People of Daraya - influenced by the youths’ message of peace - began to buy flowers for soldiers. They feared for Daraya’s son, Yehya. On the day he was arrested, security forces paraded him around the streets in an open Jeep, like hunters showing off a fresh kill. Even captured in the car, Yehya was smiling.

“His adherence to non-violence was not a tactical way in order to win the revolution,” his cousin Eiad said. “It’s a principle he’s worked on for over 10 years … and paid the price for it.”

As you read these words, Yehya Shurbaji may be enduring torture or may be in solitary confinement, which in a Syrian prison is akin to being buried alive. He may be dead. Would he think we were worthy of his sacrifice? Is the Syrian opposition in its current form of mass betrayal worthy of one drop of innocent blood, one refugee family or one orphaned child?

The targeted murder and detention of people such as Yehya and Ghiyath, and many others, prove the regime’s calculated strategy to exterminate those who don’t mirror its image, those who are above takhween and those who refuse to let go of the core principles of the revolution: non-violence, non-sectarianism and, above all, self-examination.

Our culture of takhween is killing the revolution. If we have learnt anything from the regime over the last 40 years, we should know what is wrong will never be right; a lie cannot be fabricated into fact; an unjust crime cannot be repackaged as a just act. No number of martyrs, not 10,000, not even a million, changes those principles. To betray them is to betray the ones who sacrificed their lives for Syria. To betray them is to admit we are nothing but traitors to ourselves.

Amal Hanano is the pseudonym of a Syrian-American writer who has published a series of articles on the Syrian revolution in Jadaliyya

BOYNUYOGUN, Turkey — An anti-Syrian government activist described weeks he spent in the regime’s torture chambers, saying he sometimes wished death would come and relieve him of the overwhelming pain.

“You hear the voices,” Yousef Dandash, a 25-year-old merchant from Jisr al-Shughour in Syria’s northern Idlib, told NBC News’ Richard Engel on Saturday. “You hear the sounds of men crying, real men shouting from the depth of their hearts.  You … pray that God takes you before you go back to the torture.”

Speaking at a refugee camp on the Turkish border with Syria, Dandash said he was detained for six weeks in March after tearing up a picture of President Bashar Assad in public.

“They took me to solitary confinement … with no access to a toilet,” he said.  “Every day there was beating and torture (and) electricity.”

He showed NBC News scars that he said were caused by prolonged bouts of torture.

His captors then took him to the capital Damascus, where he was put in a virtual underground city, Dandash said.

“There the torture and the beating started. I was blindfolded all the time and my hands tied behind my back,” he said.

Dandash managed to flee to Turkey after security forces took him back to a detention center in his town, where a judge decided to release him until his trial. His brother Ammar, who was a soldier, deserted and came with him across the border.

The growing numbers of Syrians fleeing to the country’s neighbors attest to the growing violence in Syria where Assad is trying to suppress a months-long rebellion. Some 10,000 refugees are now registered in tented refugee camps and the number is rising steadily.

On Sunday, voting was under way in the referendum on a new constitution in some parts of the country. Assad has said the poll will lead to a multi-party parliamentary election in three months, but his opponents see the vote as a joke given Syria’s turmoil.

The Syrian government, backed by Russia, China and Iran, and undeterred by Western and Arab pressure to halt the carnage, maintains it is fighting foreign-backed “armed terrorist groups.”

Unwilling to intervene militarily and unable to get the U.N. Security Council to act amid Russian and Chinese opposition, Western powers have imposed their own sanctions on Syria and backed an Arab League call for Assad to step down.

Dandash called the international stance on his country “weak” and “impotent” and called for the world to arm anti-Assad forces, not send humanitarian aid.

“We do not want food and water,” he said.  “We need rifles and ammunition.”

Activists detained in Syria have spoken about their experiences and said they were either tortured by security forces or made to confess to crimes they did not commit. (Al Arabiya)

By Mohamed Zeid Mestou
Al Arabiya Beirut

The testimonies of Syrian activists detained by security forces for taking part in anti-regime protests serve to expose another face of the horror that has been unraveling in the country since last March.

In addition to seeing their comrades killed under their very eyes, detainees are either brutally tortured or forced to make fabricated confessions or both. In any case, the result of what they all refer to as “the black times” is irreversible physical and psychological damages.

A university student from the northeastern city of Deir ez-Zor who was arrested for organizing protests in Damascus suffered severed injuries in his vertebral column and subsequent walking difficulties after he was tortured in the Air Fore Intelligence base in the capital. The student, who has been receiving physiotherapy since his release, said that he saw five of the detainees in his cell die.

“They were unable to breathe. Security forces placed 32 people in a cell designed for solitary confinement,” he told Al Arabiya.

Another young man from the governorate of Rif Dimashq in the southwest told a similar story when he said that more than 35 detainees were placed in a small cell.

“We had to take turns to sleep and it was impossible for any of the injured in those cells to get medical treatment.”

A third protestor who is originally from the Golan Heights but moved to Rif Dimashq said he sustained a serious injury in his shoulder.

“My left arm stopped moving and I am currently receiving physiotherapy.”

According to former detainees interviewed by Al Arabiya, the degree of torture differs from one detainee to the other, but many survivors might end up totally paralyzed.

What is striking, they added, is that most of the times security forces are aware that the detainees have no information to give out, but they keep torturing them as if it gives them pleasure to do so.

Marwa al-Ghimian, the first female detainee since the start of the Syrian revolution and who was arrested on March 15 and detained in the Political Security headquarters, was brutally beaten by security forces.

“They hit me on the head with a table and dragged me by the hair. They kicked me and banged my head against the wall. All that while cussing and calling me names.”

After being released, Ghimian was arrested for a second time and placed in solitary confinement in a small cell that she described as a “box” in the Military Security headquarters.

“It was a very cold place and I spent a whole week alone there totally isolated from the outside world.”

Another detainee from the city of Darayya in Rif Dimashq said he suffers from convulsions in the middle of his sleep as a result of the torture to which he was subjected in the Air Force Intelligence base in Damascus.

“The sounds of other people screaming around while being tortured have also been haunting me in my dreams,” said the activist, who was accused of transferring money from officials in Arab countries to protestors in Syria.

An army officer, who was arrested after refusing to shoot at protestors, said he was placed in a small cell with 30 other detainees and all of them listened to the screams of torture all the time.

“They put their shoes in our food and sometimes they spat in it,” he said in earlier statements to Al Arabiya.

He added that security officers would keep knocking on the doors of their cells all the time to make sure they did not get any rest or sleep.

“I was also placed in a suspended iron cage for days and was always given the impression that I was going to be killed any minute.”

Not all those tortured managed to survive, though, for hundreds were tortured to death throughout the past few months based reports issued by the Syrian Revolution General Commission.

According to the commission, 204 people, including one woman and eight children died in Syrian detention centers since the start of the revolution.

The commission’s report stated that security forces use a variety of torture methods, the most common of which is electrocution, breaking bones and teeth, and gouging eyes—the last was specifically done with an activist who used to take pictures of the regime’s brutal practices against civilians. This, the report added, is besides stealing the organs of dead activists.

According to the report, out of the killed activists, 112 come from the city of Homs, 22 from Damascus and Rif Dimashq, 19 from Idlib, 12 from Hama, five from Deir ez-Zor, three from Aleppo, three from Latakia, and one from Jebleh.

The report stated that some of the activists who are still detained are tortured on daily basis and that sometimes the torture would last for 24 hours.

According to activists, most of the charges leveled against detainees are fabricated and have nothing to do with what they really do.

An activist from Rif Dimashq said he was accused of belonging to al-Qaeda and planning a series of bombings in his hometown. Meanwhile, a dissenting officer was charged with infiltrating the Syrian army for the purpose of carrying out terrorist operations.

In the same vein, a telecommunication engineer in Damascus was accused by the Political Security bureau of receiving money from foreign countries to organize a coup in Syria.

“They forced me to make televised statements about receiving money from abroad and coordinating with several media outlets to circulate false news about Syria,” he said.

Several former detainees were similarly forced to do confess to planning terrorist operations and spreading rumors about the Syrian regime.