Syrian-American tells UN of cultural reasons why rape in #Syria may be underreported

17/08/12

By Women Under Siege — July 30, 2012

Safa Sankari, a member of our Syria team, spoke at the UN on July 18 as part of a presentation of our first findings of a data analysis of our crowdmap of sexualized violence in Syria. Sankari, who is Syrian-American, is the co-founder and president of the Syrian American Medical Society’s Michigan Chapter Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps in the humanitarian and medical needs of Syrians. WMC’s Women Under Siege Director Lauren Wolfe also spoke. You can read her testimony here.

Good afternoon. I would like to thank you for this opportunity to humbly allow me to give the Syrian women a voice in the ongoing conflict. Since the uprising began in March 2011, the security situation in Syria has been rapidly deteriorating, and women, who are usually the most vulnerable in any conflict, no longer feel safe in their own homes. Sexualized violence is becoming more prevalent in Syria, and the women have nowhere to turn for help.

I would like to share with you a story of “Selma” from Karm al-Zaitoun, Homs. She was independently interviewed [by Human Rights Watch] about an attack that occurred at her neighbor’s home in March 2012. She states:

“I saw the security forces and the shabiha and I went into the house [and hid] … My neighbor has girls. I heard her say to them, ‘Don’t let out a noise.’ Our apartments are wall-to-wall … They [the shabiha] came to our building … The door to my house was open still [as I left it when I was packing]. From my hiding place I could hear that someone came in and said ‘This one is empty, there is no one here’… They knocked on my neighbor’s door … One of them said, ‘Open or we will shoot.’ She did not open the door and they shot at it … When they went in one said, ‘Why are you not opening the door?’ She was saying, ‘Oh God, God forbid, don’t come close to me.’ She said, ‘I will kiss your feet but don’t come near us’…

“The girls were protesting. I could hear them saying not to grab the mother and she was just saying, ‘Don’t touch my daughters.’ I could hear one girl fighting with one of them. He was saying, ‘Oh, you are going to scratch me too?’ She pushed him and he shot her in the head. She was the oldest. 20 years old … They grabbed the youngest. She was 12. You could hear her say, ‘Don’t take my clothes off.’ The mother said, ‘This girl is 12.’ The youngest, I saw her [later], her sweater was torn, all the way down the front. They raped her and they raped the two others … The other girls were 16 and 18 … I waited, hiding after they left. I didn’t move for one hour or so until the thuwar (revolutionaries) came …

“The girls had closed the door to their house and were crying … I knocked on their door and said, ‘I am your neighbor let me in.’ The scene on the inside was unreal. The 12 year old was lying on the ground, blood to her knees. I told them to get up, that this happened against their will. More than one person had raped the 12 year old. I heard them from my hiding place, saying, ‘Come on, enough, my turn.’ She was torn the length of a forefinger. I will never go back there. It comes to me. I see it in my dreams and I just cry.”

Selma’s story is not an isolated one. As Lauren [Wolfe] has shared with you, there are many other reported stories of rape and sexualized violence. However, I can assure you, the number of stories we are hearing about are grossly underreported. The reason for this is twofold.

First, the Syrian regime’s tactic has always been one of instilling fear into its people. When they rape a woman, they often threaten her that if she says anything to anyone, not only will she pay a price, but her family will as well. I know this firsthand from a young, distant female relative of mine in Syria. She was kidnapped from in front of her home in broad daylight. She was gone for 3-4 days and was returned to her family for a ransom of money. Her family refuses to tell us anything about the details of her ordeal, and not even who the perpetrators were. We can only imagine what may have happened to her, and what the perpetrators may have threatened her and her family with if they spoke to anyone of what happened.

The second reason why rape and sexualized violence is underreported is the culture of Syrian society. Women are not encouraged to speak up for fear of being shunned in their communities. It is a cultural aspect that is often mistakenly tied to religion—that a women’s virginity is tied to her family’s honor. For fear of bringing shame to her family or even being killed herself, women do not feel safe speaking about the issue. Also tied to this cultural issue is the fear of a rape victim to never be able to get married if she has lost her virginity in this manner. The rape victim, who already has gone through extreme mental and physical trauma, now faces being rejected by men and living as an outcast in society.

The other shocking aspect of the reports of rape the crowdmap website and media outlets are receiving is the fact that the rape is being coupled with other types of physical torture. As a Human Rights Watch report issued on June 15 about Nour, who was independently interviewed, she states she has suffered amnesia subsequent to being detained in Damascus. She cannot recall her name, age, or whether or not she had family. She is quoted as saying:

“The earliest thing I remember is being stopped at a checkpoint in Homs,” said Nour. “I thought I was going to be detained but the soldiers there took me to an apartment where there were other girls … I was there for two or three days and then they took me to Damascus to the Palestine Branch. They held me there for two-and-a-half to three months. There were three other women there … They had a schedule. They would take turns with us. More than one man would rape you. It wasn’t every day, but it was regular.”

Nour continues to say, “There were three other women in the cell when I arrived … Throughout our time in that cell, the four of us there were permanently in one of four positions: They tied our handcuffed hands above our heads onto a chain coming out of the ceiling and chained our feet together with our feet flat on the floor. They tied us face up to a metal bed which just had two planks of wood on it – we were in an X position so our wrists and ankles were attached to the four corners of the bed frame. They put our entire hunched body into the hole of a big tire with our back bent forward. They tied us to a metal chair with no bottom or back to which they sometimes attached electrodes to electrocute us.

“With every new shift of the guards, they would switch our positions. We slept in those positions. They electrocuted us quite often … Each time my body and particularly my jaw and teeth would clench up for a long time – it was extremely painful …

“They did other things to us too … [They] raped us while we were on the bed … [one of them] used to force the soldiers who were reluctant, saying things like “I have a sister,” to rape us. In my case they raped me about four or five times … Twice, more than one man raped me one after the other. I cannot remember how many it was each time.”

Stories like Nour’s and Selma’s are just the tip of the iceberg. In the aftermath of the conflict, we are sure to hear many more women like these. Rape is a vicious crime that does not just affect the woman, but affects an entire community. Women, who in most cases are the most vulnerable, yet at the same time, the backbones of societies are being humiliated and devalued. The longer the international community remains silent, the worse the aftermath will be.

We all remember the Bosnian conflict, and generations today look back and wonder, Why didn’t the international community intervene earlier to prevent the mass rapes and sexualized violence that took place there? Let us not allow another humanitarian disaster to happen on our clocks.

Thank you for listening.

Source: womenundersiegeproject.org

A STORY OF A SYRIAN YOUNG GIRL „, PLEASE READ AND SHARE, THIS IS WHAT OUR WOMEN ARE EXPERIENCING

17/08/12

A Syrian girl gives details of her rape by the Syrian Assad forces:
“We were all tied up in the square near our homes, as were the children who were crying and screaming with fear and panic. The men were moved to an unknown location.
We were all screaming with fear, begging for help, I was shaking from the terror in my heart, 30 men, NO, 30 monsters with massive bodies and scary faces, sparks of hatred flying out of their eyes, they were fully armed with guns and knives. They moved the women away with the children, as the women started pleading for mercy.
They kept us, the younger girls, in the square, and so the party began with me. A monster untied me, I started screaming and fighting so he pulled me from my hair and threw me on the ground where I hit my head and screamed from the pain, and that’s when I heard my mother screaming from afar “NO, NO, leave her, she is just a little girl, she has a future, take me, PLEASE”
My mother and the women screaming, their cries became louder, they started praying for help from God, but their terrified screaming and pleading only got these men “monsters” more excited, their laughs getting louder!
As I was on the ground I saw three faces come closer to me, smirking, their hands started touching me, and within seconds I found myself lying on the ground naked. I began fighting and resisting with all my strength, but their hands and arms came around and started squeezing the air out of me, I felt the barbaric attack on my body, my body that had quieted down, I was paralyzed.
I could smell something like mould coming off of their disgusting bodies, more like the staunch of death, they were screaming harshly at me, saying: “is this the freedom you want? FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM”
Another monster began hitting me on my face and body, punching me mercilessly, stomping on my chest with his enormous feet„ I could feel my rib cage cracking beneath the unbearable weight, a burning sensation all over my body from the pain.
I could still hear my mother screaming, until someone hit her and told her “shut up, mother of a …..”
10 human monsters took turns at having me, took turns in torturing me and humiliating me.
I could no longer hear my mother’s screams, as soon as I got the chance I turned my head to her direction, she was on the floor, covered in her own blood, her throat had been slit along with all the other women and children, they had killed them all.
I wasn’t the only girl at the party, there were others, tortured and killed.

Someone wanted to slit my throat, like they had done to the others but a voice behind him said “no, leave her, she is already almost dead, barely breathing”
I was barely breathing, they had broken all my ribs under the weight of their bodies.
When they were done with the torture, murder and rape, they pulled my body to a dumpster so I could die there “this is your place you….” they said.
The time passed slowly after that, I was naked, wounded and having a lot of difficulty breathing, cold and alone.”

The boys of the city found the girl, their passionate screams of outrage “May God never forgive them she is alive” made her wish she was passed out, unconscious, the tenderness she heard in the young mens’ voices left her in a condition of inner insanity. She didn’t have the strength to look them in the eye after they had seen her like this.
The young girl is now outside Syria, somewhere safe, she gave her testimony of what had happened after days and days of continuous weeping over her soul, her dreams, and her country.

Source: facebook.com

The Ultimate Assault: Charting #Syria’s Use of Rape to Terrorize Its People

We’re tracking reports of sexualized violence in Syria, where the attacks appear to be potentially orchestrated by government security forces.

Syrian army soldiers kidnapped, raped, and killed some of 16-year-old Zaynab’s classmates. When they came looking for her father, her family fled their home in Homs for Lebanon, where they live as refugees. (Matilde Gattoni).


A woman swathed in black squares her shoulders and calmly looks into a camera. She holds a Quran. Only a sliver of her face — her eyeglasses — shows. “What happened to me hasn’t happened to anyone, or if it has affected anyone else I do not know,” she says. “But I will speak and let all the people know what [Syrian leader] Bashar al-Assad and his men are doing.” Over the next four minutes, her breathing grows labored and her voice breaks as she describes how, in May 2011, five men wearing black entered her home on the outskirts of Homs and raped her.

“This is my message to the world,” she says. “Let all the world hear what is happening to us. And I might not be the first one nor the last who was treated in this way.”

The still-unidentified woman posted the video to YouTube on February 11, 2012. It is one of the earliest reports on our live, crowd-sourced map of sexualized violence in Syria. The Women’s Media Center project Women Under Siege has been collecting reports out of Syria for three months, during which time we’ve seen many stories similar to this, in which multiple attackers, usually government forces, are said to gang rape a woman in her home. We have also mapped stories at the extreme edge of nightmares; of teenage girls given shots that immobilize them while their genitals were burned or filled with mice. Government forces and others appear to be carrying out appalling sexualized attacks against women, men, and children in Syria as the conflict there continues. Although we are unable to independently confirm these stories — Syria is simply too dangerous, and our research staff too small — they are consistent both internally and within the news and NGO reports telling similar stories from the Syrian conflict.

To step back from the red dots on our map and try to understand the sexualized violence of Syria’s war, our team of doctors, activists, and journalists has taken the 81 stories we’ve gathered so far, from the onset of the conflict in March 2011 through June 2012, and broken them down into 117 separate pieces of data on everything from rape to the consequences of sexualized violence, such as depression, HIV, and pregnancy. Many more victims are included in these reports, but the vagueness of much of the information does not allow us to give an estimate of the total number. For example, one report tells of an incident in which the Syrian army allegedly raped 36 women while another speaks of a doctor who is treating some of the “2,000 girls and women raped throughout Syria.” Our data, though largely anecdotal, gives us a sense of the scope and impact of sexualized violence in Syria. It appears to be widespread, not limited to any particular city, and often involves rape.

“The data we have so far suggest sexualized violence is being used as a tool of war, although possibly haphazardly and not necessarily as an organized strategy,” said Dr. Karestan Koenen, associate professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the lead epidemiologist on the mapping project. “These reports indicate that post-conflict intervention will need to address the consequences of sexualized violence for victims.”

Government perpetrators have committed the majority of the attacks we’ve been able to track: 61 percent, including attacks against men and women, with another 6 percent carried out by government and shabiha forces together. These soldiers or officers have allegedly carried out 58 percent of rapes against women; shabiha (plainclothes militia) attackers 14 percent; government and shabiha working together 5 percent; and another or unknown attacker 26 percent. In 42 percent of the incidents of sexualized violence against women that we found, the victims were allegedly attacked by multiple people at once, suggesting a disturbingly high rate of gang rape.

There are well-documented challenges and limitations when it comes to studying sexualized violence in conflict, and our data is not meant to represent the Syrian conflict in its entirety. All of our reports come second- or third-hand, and can’t be independently confirmed. Still, the data provides a small but criticalwindow into Syria’s ongoing violence. 

“These new data drawn from reports of sexualized violence crimes in the Syria conflict give us an important initial snapshot of the scale and scope of this horror,” said Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, which conducts research and advocacy related to rape in armed conflict. 

syria perp slide final (forweb).jpgWomen Under Siege

“The fact that a large portion of the alleged crimes involved multiple attackers indicates possible coordinated, orchestrated, or systematic violence without restraints on the behavior of government and other forces,” Sirkin said. In other words, either Syrian leaders appear to be instructing soldiers to violate women, or the Syrian armed forces have descended into such a Lord of the Flies-style chaos that rape is becoming more routine.

Of the 117 reports, 80 percent of them include female victims, with ages ranging from 7 to 46. Of those, 89 percent reported rape; 6 percent reported groping; 6 percent include sexual assault without penetration; and 11 percent of reports include detention that appears to have been for the purposes of sexualized violence or enslavement for a period of longer than 24 hours. It’s difficult to know intent, but some soldiers have described being ordered to detain women to rape them. We’re keeping an eye out for similarities to Bosnia’s infamous “rape houses,” such as this one in Foča.

Syrian women are suffering more than just sexualized violence itself, with 20 percent of reports leading to the victim’s death, 10 percent to anxiety and/or depression, and 5 percent to pregnancy. “Death” means that women were found dead with signs of sexual assault or they were raped and then killed in front of witnesses, as in this report in which a mother describes watching her three daughters stripped, raped, and murdered by knife-wielding security forces. “You could only hear the screams and the cries of the little ones asking for help, but this did not make them show any mercy,” she recalled.

So far, we’ve found 24 incidents involving men and boys between the ages of 11 and 56 who have also reported sexualized violence as a consequence of the Syrian conflict. Thirty-three percent of reports with male victims allege rape and 38 percent include sexual assault without penetration. Almost 17 percent include multiple attackers. In all but one case, the perpetrators of sexual violence against men were reportedly members of government forces. This is likely due to the fact that most — 75 percent — of the reported sexual torture has occurred in detention facilities, staffed and run by the government, where rape and sexual assault appear to be used as a tool of torture. The other 25 percent of reports do not specify the exact location, in many cases because the attack was in the victim’s home — in a number of these, the male victim is forced to watch as his wife or daughter is raped.

“The fact that about a fifth of the reports involve male victims also points to unbridled terror, given the enormous stigma and silence that typically surrounds mass rape of men,” said Sirkin.

The one city that has produced the most reports is Homs, the long-suffering center of protest, with 37 percent of incidents. Surprisingly, the second-most frequent source of the reports is Damascus, the supposedly quiet capital city, with 12 percent of reports.

Our numbers tell us that there is a potentially tremendous human rights crisis unfolding for women, men, and children in Syria. Behind each number though, is a life — a family, or even a whole community — now potentially destroyed by rape and sexualized torture.

Jackie Blachman-Forshay contributed research.

Source: The Atlantic

Defectors: Torture of children, rape by #Syrian army ‘routine’ !

Isa Hussein, 20, a Syrian army soldier of Kurdish ethnicity who was killed for refusing to shoot civilians during the Syrian uprising, according to Lawlan Ibrahim, a friend of Hussein’s family. Ibrahim carries Hussein’s photograph on his cell phone. (MCT)

DOMZIN, Iraq — In addition to shooting unarmed civilians, Syrian military personnel routinely have raped women and girls, tortured children and encouraged troops to loot the houses they storm, former foot soldiers say.

“What I have seen with my own eyes, it was indescribable,” said Rolat Azad, 21, who said he’d served as a master sergeant in Idlib province in the northeast of Syria. There, he commanded 10 men who’d break into houses seeking to arrest men whose names they’d been given by the country’s intelligence agencies. “They gave us orders: ‘You are free to do what you like,’ ” he recalled.

Starting last July, he said, his unit arrested and tortured five to 10 people daily. “We had a torture room on our base,” he said. “There was physical torture — beatings — and psychological tortures,” said Azad, a Syrian Kurd who deserted and fled in March to the Kurdistan region of Iraq. “They also brought women and girls through. They put them in the closed room and called soldiers to rape them.”

The women often were killed, he said.

Azad — as with other former soldiers here, the name is a pseudonym assumed to protect his family, still in Syria — was interviewed at a camp that Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government set up for Syrian army deserters. He recalled the torture of two young teenage boys. He said they’d been arrested either for shooting videos of the military or showing disrespect for the military and the regime, something that wasn’t uncommon, even among children. “I once asked a small kid why he wasn’t going to school,” Azad said. “He said, ‘We won’t until this regime is gone.’ “

One boy, about 13, was brought into the torture room and given electrical shocks, Azad said. Another, 14, was brought into the room in late February. His screams could be heard in the camp outside the town of Jisr al Shughour. “It was painful for all the soldiers,” he said. Azad said he had no idea of the boy’s fate. “They held him one or two days. Either they killed him or sent him to military security,” he said.

Even worse, he said, was hearing the wailing and screaming of old men being tortured: “When they tortured old men, I couldn’t stand it. I went outside. Others closed their eyes. I could not stay.”

An independent U.N. commission of inquiry has described the Syrian government’s offensive against civilians as possible “crimes against humanity.” The commission, which reports to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, detailed arbitrary arrests, disappearances and torture, including the torture of children, in its latest report, issued in February, but it didn’t detail the practice of rape. Commission officials said they had yet to talk with a rape victim.

Former soldiers described the anguish in attacking civilians and their homes. “It was a horrible thing,” said Rodi, a former soldier who said he’d been based in Homs. “At the beginning, people in Homs were just going out and asking for their freedom and a change of government. The government started the shooting. After they killed a lot of people, people stood and continued protesting. We started shelling them.”

He was assigned to a military construction unit but was ordered to the scenes of demonstrations, where troops would shoot at civilians.

“It was an ugly scene. We were at the top of a building and would shoot at civilians: children, women, men, anyone against the regime.” He said the Syrian intelligence agencies stationed personnel to make sure they shot civilians. “They were watching anyone not shooting and taking down names,” he said.

Several soldiers said Kurdish and Sunni Muslim troops tried wherever possible to fire over people’s heads, but Alawites — members of the sect related to Shiite Islam that President Bashar Assad belongs to — boasted about how many demonstrators they’d killed.

“We had an order to shoot and kill,” said Khaled Derecki, 20. “But some of those demonstrating were my friends, and we fired over their heads. “But the Alawites in my unit were very proud. They’d say: ‘Today, we killed seven or eight.’ “

Another soldier, who used the name Gula Rozava, said his commander had ordered his unit to shoot anyone who was demonstrating against the regime. “Maybe half of them were scared, and that’s why they shot,” he said.

The former soldiers were among more than a dozen whom McClatchy interviewed March 22-26 in three locations around Iraqi Kurdistan. All said they hadn’t shot anyone directly.

— In addition to shooting unarmed civilians, Syrian military personnel routinely have raped women and girls, tortured children and encouraged troops to loot the houses they storm, former foot soldiers say.

“What I have seen with my own eyes, it was indescribable,” said Rolat Azad, 21, who said he’d served as a master sergeant in Idlib province in the northeast of Syria. There, he commanded 10 men who’d break into houses seeking to arrest men whose names they’d been given by the country’s intelligence agencies. “They gave us orders: ‘You are free to do what you like,’ ” he recalled.

Starting last July, he said, his unit arrested and tortured five to 10 people daily. “We had a torture room on our base,” he said. “There was physical torture — beatings — and psychological tortures,” said Azad, a Syrian Kurd who deserted and fled in March to the Kurdistan region of Iraq. “They also brought women and girls through. They put them in the closed room and called soldiers to rape them.”

The women often were killed, he said.

Azad — as with other former soldiers here, the name is a pseudonym assumed to protect his family, still in Syria — was interviewed at a camp that Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government set up for Syrian army deserters. He recalled the torture of two young teenage boys. He said they’d been arrested either for shooting videos of the military or showing disrespect for the military and the regime, something that wasn’t uncommon, even among children. “I once asked a small kid why he wasn’t going to school,” Azad said. “He said, ‘We won’t until this regime is gone.’ “

One boy, about 13, was brought into the torture room and given electrical shocks, Azad said. Another, 14, was brought into the room in late February. His screams could be heard in the camp outside the town of Jisr al Shughour. “It was painful for all the soldiers,” he said. Azad said he had no idea of the boy’s fate. “They held him one or two days. Either they killed him or sent him to military security,” he said.

Even worse, he said, was hearing the wailing and screaming of old men being tortured: “When they tortured old men, I couldn’t stand it. I went outside. Others closed their eyes. I could not stay.”

An independent U.N. commission of inquiry has described the Syrian government’s offensive against civilians as possible “crimes against humanity.” The commission, which reports to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, detailed arbitrary arrests, disappearances and torture, including the torture of children, in its latest report, issued in February, but it didn’t detail the practice of rape. Commission officials said they had yet to talk with a rape victim.

Former soldiers described the anguish in attacking civilians and their homes. “It was a horrible thing,” said Rodi, a former soldier who said he’d been based in Homs. “At the beginning, people in Homs were just going out and asking for their freedom and a change of government. The government started the shooting. After they killed a lot of people, people stood and continued protesting. We started shelling them.”

He was assigned to a military construction unit but was ordered to the scenes of demonstrations, where troops would shoot at civilians.

“It was an ugly scene. We were at the top of a building and would shoot at civilians: children, women, men, anyone against the regime.” He said the Syrian intelligence agencies stationed personnel to make sure they shot civilians. “They were watching anyone not shooting and taking down names,” he said.

Several soldiers said Kurdish and Sunni Muslim troops tried wherever possible to fire over people’s heads, but Alawites — members of the sect related to Shiite Islam that President Bashar Assad belongs to — boasted about how many demonstrators they’d killed.

“We had an order to shoot and kill,” said Khaled Derecki, 20. “But some of those demonstrating were my friends, and we fired over their heads. “But the Alawites in my unit were very proud. They’d say: ‘Today, we killed seven or eight.’ “

Another soldier, who used the name Gula Rozava, said his commander had ordered his unit to shoot anyone who was demonstrating against the regime. “Maybe half of them were scared, and that’s why they shot,” he said.

The former soldiers were among more than a dozen whom McClatchy interviewed March 22-26 in three locations around Iraqi Kurdistan. All said they hadn’t shot anyone directly.

ON THE WEB

Report of the fact-finding mission on Syria (September 2011)

First report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab republic (November 2011)

Second report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic (February)

MORE FROM MCCLATCHY

One face of the Syrian revolt: a jihadi comes home

A new generation of Syrians adapt to life in exile

Experts: Sanctions squeeze Syrians, but are unlikely to change Assad’s behavior


Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/04/02/3145876/defectors-torture-of-children.html#storylink=cpy

Source: charlotteobserver.com

Safe in Turkey, a family flees rape, torture in #Syria

By Jonathon Burch

BOYNUYOGUN, Turkey | Sat Mar 17, 2012 7:03am EDT

(Reuters) - It took three long days for 60-year-old Abdullah, his wife and son to hike across the hills to Turkey from their Syrian coastal city of Latakia, stopping only to hide from patrolling soldiers or to eat the sandwiches his wife had prepared for their escape.

When they finally reached their destination - a hole cut in the barbed wire fence that marks the Turkish-Syrian border - the grey-bearded father of eight was hungry, frightened and exhausted.

From his new home inside a Turkish refugee camp just across the border, Abdullah frantically recounts his harrowing journey to safety three days earlier and the horrors that drove his escape - now an all too common tale from the thousands of Syrians fleeing into Turkey.

“The secret police come in groups into our homes and take the women away to the police stations. They tear their clothes off and sexually assault them. Some of them, they rape,” said Abdullah, his voice quivering as he speaks.

“They take the women because they want to draw the men out of hiding. They take electric wires and electrocute their feet, ears and genitals. Both men and women,” he said.

“Is there another place in the world where the government does this to its people?”

Abdullah and his family are among a fast growing number of refugees pouring into Turkey day and night through unofficial crossing points, either scrambling through barbed wire or traversing the Orontes river that marks out part of the border.

Over the past few weeks, the number of Syrians crossing has increased dramatically with an average of 200 to 300 now coming into Turkey every day. This week 1,000 crossed in just 24 hours, the highest number since the first wave of refugees last summer.

Around 15,000 registered Syrian refugees now live in tented camps inside Turkey, making up almost half of the 34,000 people the United Nations estimates to have fled Syria since the start of the conflict a year ago. Hundreds of thousands more are thought to be displaced within the country.

Turkey fears a surge of refugees similar to the tens of thousands who crossed from Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War and on Friday it said creating a “buffer zone” inside Syria was one of the options it was considering to protect the fleeing civilians.

SUNNI MUSLIM

Abdullah and his family are Syrian Turkmen, Syrian citizens of Turkish descent whose forefathers settled in the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire centuries ago. He speaks a mixture of Arabic and broken Turkish.

Like the three-quarters of Syria’s 22 million people, Abdullah is also a Sunni Muslim. In contrast President Bashar al-Assad and his security apparatus, including the core of the feared Shabiha militia, are from the minority Alawite sect.

Abdullah says the security forces are singling out Sunni districts in Latakia in their crackdown on anti-Assad protests.

“They have blocked off all the roads. They have split the city into different sections to stop people from travelling from one area to another,” he said.

Reports from Syria cannot be independently verified as the authorities deny full access to rights groups and journalists.

Abdullah picks up an ashtray from the floor and draws a circle around it with his finger.

“Their tanks surround the Sunni villages and fire on them, then the soldiers come into the villages, harass the people and beat the men and sexually assault the women,” he said.

“They take any man over the age of 12 with them.”

As Abdullah tells his story, his voice grows louder until he is shouting. A friend tries to console him, offering him a cigarette. He takes several puffs, filling his tent with smoke.

His 46-year-old wife waits outside the tent holding the entrance shut. She does not want to be seen or interviewed. Abdullah gives only one name and probably a false one. He does not want to be photographed. Even in the safety of Turkey, like many of the refugees, they live in fear of government reprisals.

Abdullah and his wife have also left seven of their children back in Syria and he fears for their safety. They could not come with him, he said, because the group would be too big to evade the secret police.

One of his sons was already imprisoned for 90 days where he was beaten and tortured.

“They take a piece of wood with metal on the end, wire it up and plug it in. Then they stick it into the person’s mouth,” he says, grabbing the television remote control from the cushion next to him and thrusting it into his mouth.

ASSAD IS YOUR GOD

Abdullah paints a picture of repression even before the uprising against Assad began in March last year. He sticks out his tongue and pretends to cut it with two of his fingers.

“I cannot talk in Syria. I cannot say the things I want, or how I feel. We are always under pressure,” he said.

“I cannot even pray, I cannot be a Muslim. They take us to the police stations and say ‘who is your god?’ I say ‘god is my god’ and they put a picture of Assad on the floor and say ‘no, this is your god, pray to him’,” he said.

“Would they do this in your country? They are killing all of us. Why? Why?”

Abdullah said the things he had witnessed finally drove him to escape. He took his 22-year-old son and his wife and left during the night.

“There are taxi drivers that pick people up every night. If the road is clear, they will take two or three people and take them out of the city. The taxi took us from the centre of the city to the outlying villages,” he said.

“From there we walked all the way to the border, maybe 50 kilometers (30 miles).”

They walked for three days across the hills and through farms. Every time they saw government soldiers they would hide, sometimes for hours at a time. Once the soldiers opened fire in their direction, but they managed to escape.

Like most of those who have left, Abdullah wants only one thing - to one day return home.

“With God’s permission, like Libya, like Egypt, like Tunisia this government will fall. Hopefully then we can return to 0Syria. God willing tomorrow, tomorrow,” he said.

Source: reuters.com

How to advance #Syria’s transition

By Anne Applebaum, Published: March 1


“We are not pretending that the human rights situation in Syria is perfect. . . . We are aware that there is a regression in the quality of services usually provided by the government to the population by the regions facing violence.”

— Fayssal al-Hamwi, Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations,in Geneva on Feb. 28

On Sunday, Syrians “voted” in a constitutional referendum that reflected “ citizens’ keenness on moving forward with the reform process ,” in the words of the government’s news agency. On the same day, 17  people were killed in Homs by the government’s military forces, while the International Red Cross tried, and failed, to negotiate safe passage for the wounded out of the city. The Syrian regime now has two faces: the pseudo-democratic one it turns to the outside world, and the vicious one it turns on its own people.

Although that contrast is clear, a Western military coalition of the willing isn’t going to emerge quickly on behalf of Syria, as it did for Libya. Syria’s ethnic divisions resemble those in Iraq, its ruling clique is sustained by Iran, its opposition is chaotic and some of its population is so scared of what might come next that they may be inclined to support the regime. The Syrian army has better weapons than the Libyan army (which itself collapsed only in the nick of time, just before NATO’s ammunition ran out), and Western publics are war-weary. But before we throw up our hands and let the Saudis send jihadists to “help” the Syrian rebels (like they once “helped” the Afghan mujaheddin), we have several more cards to play.

One involves taking Syria’s human rights rhetoric seriously — and turning it against the regime. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and others have collected, compiled and published evidence of the regime’s abuses, including the names and positions of Syrian officers who ordered soldiers to fire on unarmed demonstrators; accounts of torture and arbitrary detention; descriptions of rape, abuse and murder of children; and evidence of the mass slaughter of regime opponents over many years.

It’s time to refer this material to the United Nations, the Arab League, the International Criminal Court (not a body I like, but since it exists we should use it); to hand it publicly to Syrian officials; to read it in Arabic on the radio; to use it in statements and at news conferences. A single speech by the American president or the British prime minister that named the criminal Syrian army officers could have an enormous impact, once it has been beamed back into Syria via radio, satellite TV, the Internet and word of mouth.

Western leaders have refrained from this kind of language because, as Hillary Clinton put it this week, using labels like “war criminal” to describe Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, can “limit options to persuade leaders to step down from power.” She is right — which is why rhetoric aimed at delegitimizing the regime should be accompanied by immediate and strenuous efforts to not only unify the opposition but also to get its disparate members talking about the post-Assad future. Syrian rebels need to start talking about transitional justice: how, exactly, former regime allies will be treated, how real criminals will be distinguished from mere collaborators, how victims will be compensated and how the minority rule of a dictatorial clan can be ended without bloodshed.

This isn’t an impossible dream: South Africa managed to avoid civil war, in an analogous (though hardly identical) situation. Violence there was avoided in part because the outgoing minority participated in the transition. If some of the Alawite elite can be persuaded to do the same, Syria stands a chance of avoiding civil war. There isn’t anybody to talk to in Assad’s immediate circle; all have blood on their hands. But if the Syrian rebels can reassure others in Damascus, Ala­wites as well as Christians, that they won’t become the targets of a campaign of revenge, then they stand a better chance of persuading more people to switch sides. The crucial moment of the revolution — when the regime’s supporters begin to sympathize with their opponents — may be fast approaching.

One way or another, this conflict will end. Assad will fall — or he will remain in power thanks to a bloodbath, followed by another era of sullen repression. Either way, one of the best things the West can do is help Syrian rebels and the Syrian diaspora think about what might come next. It seems ridiculous to focus on the future in the middle of a crisis. But in this case, that might be the only way the crisis can be resolved.

Anne Applebaum is director of political studies at the London-based Legatum Institute and writes a monthly column for The Post. Her e-mail is applebaumletters@washpost.com.

Source: Washington Post

Syria’s ancient desert city besieged: residents #Syria

The Syrian army has been laying siege to the ancient city of Palmyra, a world heritage site, since early February and shooting at anything that moves from a historic citadel, residents say.

“Palmyra is surrounded by the army from all fronts: the Arab citadel, the olive and palm tree groves, the desert, the city,” one resident told AFP by telephone, adding that the operation began on February 4.

Security forces have set up camp in the citadel which overlooks the Roman ruins and the city of some 60,000 people, said the resident who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals.

“Machinegun fire rains down from the citadel at anything that moves in the ruins because they think it is rebels,” he added.

Palmyra’s pristine Roman ruins set off by dramatic desert sunrises and sunsets have earned it the status of a UNESCO protected world heritage site.

It was a key tourist attraction in Syria before unrest against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad erupted 11 months ago. Human rights groups say more than 6,000 people have been killed in the country since mid-March last year.

Other Palmyra residents told AFP said that hundreds of people have fled the city for safety after reports emerged that several local figures have been killed by regime forces.

Adnan al-Kabir, whose family owns the Al-Waha (Oasis) Hotel in the heart of the city, was among three civilians killed by the army, three different sources told AFP.

A YouTube video shows Kabir with a wound to the head apparently caused by gunfire. Friends who knew him identified Kabir in interviews with AFP.

“The majority of the young men have left or are trying to leave, fearing detention. Only elders and state employees stayed behind,” said another resident who managed to sneak out of Palmyra.

Women and girls have been spirited off to safer locations for fear they would be raped by “soldiers who hold nothing sacred,” he said, speaking from a neighbouring country.

Although communications with Palmyra were severed at the start of the campaign, those residents who have managed to get out spoke of daily machinegun and tank fire.

Hundreds of people have fled from the desert city that carved its place in the history books as a caravan stop on the ancient Silk Road and as the home of legendary Queen Zenobia who defied Rome in the third century AD.

“People related and unrelated to rebels are fleeing because security forces are detaining people at random,” said one resident who fled to neighbouring Jordan.

He said he saw tanks and checkpoints all around the city.

Security forces have also set up checkpoints within Palmyra itself, stopping traffic at gunpoint, checking cars and detaining men between the age of 20 and 40, said another resident who escaped from the city.

“Many people have disappeared, we don’t know if they are dead or detained,” said the 31-year-old who was able to get out after five days of siege.

Tanks were also deployed near the Roman ruins at the entrance to Palmyra — a desert city known as Tadmur in Arabic.

According to residents, regime forces have destroyed and set ablaze several olive, palm and date groves using tank and machinegun fire.

“All our resources are concentrated in the gardens: our olives, our dates,” said one resident who fled after security forces stormed and destroyed his garden.

“The gardens near the ruins were hit the hardest. People will have to plant again and wait for 10 years before they see a good season again,” another man said.

Anti-regime activists, mostly loosely organised local youths, had been using the gardens as a meeting point, residents said.

Until this month Palmyra had been spared the deadly violence in the Assad regime’s crackdown on dissent, according to activists.

“There was an unspoken understanding between authorities and residents that security forces would stay out of Palmyra if the city behaved,” one resident said.

Residents say Palmyra’s fate was decided after a Sunni general in charge of security in the region was replaced by an Alawite from Assad’s community.

Source: africasia.com

Syrian women, backbone of the revolution #Syria

By Electron Libre

The women of Deraa, where the Syrian uprising began back in March, took to the streets on Saturday, calling for the release of their husbands, brothers or sons currently detained by security forces. The rally illustrates how women are playing a crucial role in the uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Rime Allaf, a researcher at London based laboratory Chatham House has described them as the backbone of the revolution, placing particular emphasis on their involvement in organizing protests and rallies. She uses the actress Fadwa Suleiman as an example, who, as we can see in this amateur video footage, has led a number of demonstrations in Homs in recent weeks.

And when they are not on the streets, the women of Syria are working behind the scenes. Some tending to wounded protesters who cannot get to hospital, others in factories or workshops like this one, making banners and Syrian flags to be used in the anti-government rallies.

But women are not exempt from the brutal and bloody crackdown. And to avoid arrest, torture and rape, many prefer to protest from home, as we can see in these online videos. And although women are at the forefront of the uprising against the Damascus regime, it looks as if they plan on being equally involved in the Syria of tomorrow.

Source: france24.com

#Syria Could Plunge into Civil War as More Soldiers Defect

Saturday, 10 December 2011, 12:21 pm
Press Release: United Nations

UN Rights Chief Says Syria Could Plunge into Civil War as More Soldiers Defect

New York, Dec 9 2011 6:10PM

The United Nations human rights chief warned today that Syria could descend into civil war as more members of the armed forces defect, noting that nearly 1,000 of the estimated 4,000 people who have died in the bloody crackdown on protesters have been members of the security forces.

“This is why I am alerting the world that as you have more and more defectors from security forces this may well develop into a full-fledged civil war,” Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters at UN Headquarters.

“I would say that whatever it is, we would be better placed if we could gain access into the country to assess the situation ourselves. This is why I do believe that having many trained observers in the country will give us a proper understanding, even of his [President Bashar al-Assad] own assertions,” she said.

Mr. Assad claimed in a media interview earlier this week that his administration is fighting against armed gangs and is not targeting civilians.

The report of the independent international commission of inquiry into the nine-month crackdown in Syria released last week concluded that Syrian security and military forces have committed crimes against humanity against civilians, including acts of killings, torture, rape and imprisonment.

The report – based on interviews with more than 200 victims and witnesses of human rights violations – documents widespread, systematic and gross violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms. The Syria Government declined the commission’s request to visit the country.

“I point to what the commission of inquiry has factually established – that communities are under siege, people dare not step a foot outside their homes because they are being shot at, and so they pass food from home to home by ropes through windows,” said Ms. Pillay, who is scheduled to brief the Security Council in a closed-door meeting on Syria next Monday.

She said members of the commission of inquiry had learned of a group of villagers who were on their way to deliver food to residents of another village that was under siege when they were shot at and 40 of them killed. A father of a 14-year-old boy showed the commission the pictures of the body of his son who was tortured and killed, she said.

“If we have access, this is what we will present to President Assad because it does not fit the picture as he describes it,” said Ms. Pillay. “Somebody is killing innocent protesters there and we need to establish who,” she added.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who was on a visit to Kenya today, was asked about the situation in Syria and Mr. Assad’s recent denial of gross human rights violations. Mr. Ban said that the UN assessment of the situation in Syrian has been “very impartial, fair, objective and credible.”

Source: scoop.co.nz

**MUST READ** Freedom to die: Inside the #Syria’n torture chamber

Annasofie Flamand, Chris Kline and Hugh Macleod | 2 December 2011

Syrian protesters at a funeral.

At first glance Abu Ali doesn’t look like much of a villain. He is a Syrian man of average height and build, forty something in age, with nothing remarkable about his appearance; except his dark leather jacket that gives him away, it’s virtually a uniform, a trademark of his profession, as a Praetorian guard of the state. Abu Ali is not an ordinary man at all. He was until very recently one of President Bashar al-Assad’s secret policemen, an enforcer, a torturer, a man who spent most of his adult life compiling dossiers on his own people or extracting confessions from those considered undesirable or dangerous to the Assad dynasty’s ruthless regime that has held sway, passed down from father to son, almost unchallenged for nearly half a century, that is until now.

Syria’s uprising is some nearly eight months old and it has witnessed the most ferocious, blood soaked government crackdown in the whole of the Middle East’s so called Arab Spring; the awakening of revolution in progress first sparked in Tunisia’s and Algeria’s pro-democracy movements which soon swept the whole region toppling or threatening dictatorships from North Africa to the Persian Gulf.

Some western journalists privately poke fun at the Syrian strongman’s rather nebbish appearance as a “chinless wonder.” Assad does not strike the classic pose as a third world dictator in a bemedalled uniform. Outwardly, he is a mild mannered, fairly gawky figure in bespoke European suits, an effete tyrant with a pronounced lisp and bird like eyes rather too close together. But he is all powerful, referred to as the “upper god” by his Baath Party followers and there is nothing funny about a minimum estimated 5,300 people, mostly unarmed civilians, security forces have killed so far, according to Syrian and international human rights groups.

There have been at least a further 16,000 arrests. How many have been released is not known. The figures for both fatalities and those newly held captive or disappeared, dwarf conservative United Nations estimates. Persistent but unverified rumors of numerous mass graves, soldiers summarily executed for disobeying orders, government snipers issued with hollow point dum dum ammunition instructed to take head shots, growing fears of rape cases and medical staff being punished for treating wounded civilians have all also not been convincingly dispelled, nor silenced.

Insan and the Damascus Center for Human Rights, both leading Syrian watchdog organizations, are adamant that peaceful demonstrations by Syrian civilians are routinely subject to the indiscriminate use of lethal force and those arrested by military or security forces enter a prison system where Human Rights Watch says torture is systematic.

The files of rights groups are groaning with extensive, documented evidence of the Syrian state having institutionalized torture. Fresh incidents are reported every day. Yet despite the weight of substantive proof, the International Criminal Court at The Hague has yet to ratify the allegations into official charges, though it has acknowledged the Syrian findings “as being consistent with Crimes Against Humanity.” However, so long as Russia and China continue to block a resolution condemning Syria in the UN Security Council, no action, legal or otherwise can be expected or is even possible under the organization’s charter.

Syria’s suspension by the Arab League and a non-binding resolution recently issued by the UN has not yet brought forth a No Fly Zone over Syrian airspace. The potential aerial blockade is meant to be led by Turkey with US logistical support and may also include aircraft from Arab states. Ankara has strongly denied the Turkish Army was planning a limited ground invasion of Syrian border regions to secure a buffer zone for refugees. Thus far tangible international action remains largely symbolic.

For decades during the Cold War Damascus was Russia’s leading regional ally, a reliable client for billions of dollars worth of Soviet weapons.

More recently, Russian engineers have been in Syria supervising the dredging and expansion of Tartous port which is set to become a permanent base for the Russian navy in the Mediterranean, a critical strategic expansion of Moscow’s power.

Along with China, which pursues a policy of non interference in other countries’ domestic affairs (politically at least), and with Iran and Hezbollah, Tehran’s proxy army which has risen to become the predominant political and military force in nieghboring Lebanon, Syria’s Assad is not entirely alone.

“Iranian support for the regime has increased throughout the crisis,” said a senior Western diplomat in Damascus. “This includes support to the security services with advice, equipment and training, but not boots on the ground. There are no credible indications of Hezbollah or Iranian forces used on the ground. It would be counterproductive and the regime is not short of thugs.”

Speaking of thugs, Abu Ali is quietly nervous. Abu Ali is not his real name, he is one of the very first of his kind to step out of the shadows and break silence. Used to power and privilege, he is now an uncomfortable refugee unsure of how long his safe house on the Syrian Lebanese border will stay safe. His conservative Muslim beliefs means he does not shake hands with a woman when he meets us. Officially Abu Ali was an army intelligence officer, but his knowledge seems more about prisons, interrogation rooms and inflicting pain, than it does battlefields. Abu Ali spent most of his tenure in the army under Assef Shawkat, the much feared former military intelligence chief and Bashar al Assad’s brother in law. He says he mostly wrote reports and his hands are as plain as the rest of him, a bureaucrat’s hands, not a butcher’s. Initially deployed to Daraa, the cradle of the uprising, Abu Ali said he defected after being sent to kill protestors in Homs, his home city and one of the focal points of the uprising.

Syria has no less than 16 different internal security and spy agencies, known collectively as the mukhabarat spread out amongst the armed forces, constabulary and paramilitary branches of the police state. The watchers watch the watchers, lest the potential threat to Assad emanate from within the power structure, though today it is ordinary people who ultimately pose the greatest challenge to Assad.

And though the outcry of the Syrian people remains mostly a non-violent movement, the sheer brutality of the regime’s response has prompted pockets of armed rebellion. There is now a weak, poorly equipped and organized, self-styled Free Syrian Army, composed of some 6,000 to 15,000 disaffected soldiers waging a guerrilla campaign, though Syria has yet to reach a full blown civil war. A senior Western Diplomat in Damascus, speaking to Bikyamasr.com on Sunday, argues the escalation of violence and counter violence plays into the dictatorship’s hands.

“The regime is feeling quite confident and remains determined to maintain its security first policy. The security policy is not just a response to protests as they happen but the systematic targeting of activists who are arrested and detained in their homes. The security machine is doing what it knows how to do: Controlling, repressing and putting the fear back into society.

This is not a regime that is restoring order but is the main factor for violence and disorder in the country. The more the opposition becomes violent the more it fits the regime’s narrative, and they have the big guns.”

Abu Ali is a cog from the inner core of the apparatus of repression and he has reason to be uneasy, fearing retribution from those he once served and those he victimized. Still, he speaks very matter of factly about his former work, plainly, without artifice, virtually without emotion. There is a palpable coldness in his eyes and the tone of his voice. He is thin lipped and there is nothing warm about this man. It seems very easy to understand him as someone who practiced cruelty professionally, clinically, as a job.

He says state sanctioned torture is nothing new.

“The methodology for the security services to torture people in Syrian prisons is well established and goes back to the 1970’s and 1980’s. Just one specific example is called the flying carpet. It is a prisoner’s introduction to jail. It’s a suspended tire one is put through, the legs raised off the ground, then you are beaten with cables. That happens as soon as you enter a Syrian prison, you sit on the flying carpet. We called it part of our hospitality.”

The menu of horrors available is extensive.

“Other methods include: electrocution, repeated blows to the face, pulling nails out, pulling out facial hair from eyebrows or the head or eye lashes, we have many methods. I can tell even more about some other methods: we deliberately deprive prisoners of water, then we give the thirsty prisoners salty water once, twice, three times, then we’d give them pure water so when they want to urinate we put a rubber band around the penis to constrict it. We don’t allow them to pee so whatever you want they’re ready to give confessions soon enough and are ready to say whatever you ask them. They can tell you anything on TV as long as they can be allowed to piss. This is an old and ongoing method being followed by the regime.”

Some of the victims muster greater resistance to abuse and they require even more barbarous treatment to deliver the showcase confessions, which are then televised on state broadcasters as public proof of the enemy within.

“There are some prisoners who have strong bodies, who can tolerate these tortures. In such cases the wife is then brought in, or the daughter, the mother, anyone of his relatives and then they too are tortured in front of the main suspect. Sometimes we’re ready to rape the women regardless of whether she is a wife, a mother, or daughter – and we rape her in front of the man to get the confession. Sometimes he’s innocent of any accusations, and he will reveal directly whatever you want. I can say safely that the ones on television, those invented terrorists used by the regime to justify their actions on state TV, have suffered physical torture themselves, their relatives have been tortured or their women raped. After they have been on TV all of them will be killed and if they aren’t killed, those that survive will be tortured to the point they become insane. Others have their tongues cut out so they can’t talk ever again.”

Thus witness the recent verified case file of Zeinab al-Hosni, an eighteen-year-old woman who was kidnapped by security forces in reprisal for her brother being named on a wanted list for organising protests. When the brother was arrested a month later and then reappeared as a gruesomely murdered corpse, his body had been pierced by seven gunshot wounds, his back and jaw were broken, major muscles had been torn from the bone and cigarette burns were marked all over his cadaver – the family was then informed that the military hospital storing the remains in its morgue also had the body of 18 year old Zeinab in the same freezer. Her decapitated and dismembered corpse had multiple chemical burns on her arms and face. Then in a macabre epilogue she miraculously turned up alive on a taped segment of Syrian state TV explaining she had not been murdered after all. The “Upper god,” it seems, can even reanimate the dead when it suits him. Her family believes that she was forced to make the TV appearance before she was hacked to pieces.

Abu Ali, if he feels any remorse does not show it, nor does he express anything untoward about innocent people being tortured or killed. But what of them? What is the price they pay and how will they live with the physical and psychological scars the hell men like Abu Ali have wrought on them?

Mohammed (an assumed name) is one of the lucky ones, he has emerged alive from Assad’s dungeons but he is far from intact, he is a man forever changed. A peaceful, illiterate, subsistence farmer of thirty with no political convictions whatsoever when the uprising began, he is now after his ordeal an enemy of the Syrian regime and an exile, pledged to remain one until Assad is toppled. He is married with two young children, a slender, soft spoken, neatly groomed, tall and thin man, thinner still for the thirteen kilos in bodyweight he lost during his imprisonment. He comes from a small, rural village south of the central city of Homs. He was held incommunicado and tortured severely for thirty-three consecutive days in the Homs prison. He shows discomfort sitting, a sign of the permanent damage caused to his genitals during torture. He is hesitant to speak at first and chain-smokes throughout his interview in a Lebanese safe house. For a man with no formal education he is surprisingly articulate.

Mohammed cannot grasp the logic and injustice of why he was ever targeted by the security services, except that he was singled out as an example to intimidate others not to join the uprising.

“In the countryside we have no work or anything else we’re only living by the grace of God. We are farmers, we don’t have jobs – we are living off what we can raise for ourselves, the wheat we harvest, the livestock we tend to. The demonstrations started in Syria in the city of Homs 30km away – so intelligence agents started to carry out operations in our village to see who was involved or not involved. They took us and asked how many demonstrations you participated in or where you got weapons.

We tell them we are simple, poor farmers, without weapons or politics. I’m a shepherd. Many people don’t even have a TV dish. But they kept saying you have to know who bought weapons, who’s smuggling, who let rebels enter the country, all the time while beating you. You have to answer them though they ask about things you’ve never heard of in your life. You have to confess whether you like it or not, you have to confess. What else to do? It’s impossible.

No one had joined the protests. Mine is a village of 500 people, what could they do? But I am one of the people that when I was released, the village could see what happened to me and nobody would ever talk again. Clearly they thought, when we release this guy he will tell everyone how we tortured him and no one will dare to demonstrate.”

Mohammed’s descent into terror began in early August as he had been fasting for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, when a large convoy of security forces vehicles swooped down on his village early one morning. Among the uniforms there were also many armed men in civilian clothes, known in Syria as shabiha, paramilitary thugs, a loyalist militia primarily drawn from Assad’s Allawite minority, an offshoot of Shia Islam, in what is predominantly a Sunni population. The shabiha play a prominent role in government sponsored violence and torture and augment their salaries by being given a free hand in robbing or extorting money from those they persecute.

The intruders in the village soon opened fire indiscriminately with automatic weapons. Mohammed saw some of his neighbors shot down and killed and together with a friend escaped on a scooter. But reasoning that they would be found and killed for certain and caught sooner or later, both decided to return and present themselves as innocent men, since they had done nothing except be frightened.

After surrendering before long Mohammed was handcuffed, fingerprinted, separated from his friend and placed in a tiny, filthy cell in the Homs prison, accused of being a weapons smuggler for Osama Rifai, an ally of Saad Hariri, former Lebanese prime minister whose father, Rafik, was assassinated in 2005 in an attack initially widely blamed on Syria but for which an international investigation has now indicted members of Syria’s ally, Hezbollah.

But how would a humble shepherd like Mohammed have any linkages to a kingpin of Lebanese power broking? How could such an accusation even be credible for a man who can neither read nor write?

The torture began with regular beatings and the more Mohammed protested his innocence the worse they became. Mohammed tried to reason with an officer who persisted with accusations that he had ties to armed resistance groups and the Lebanese black market weapons dealers. He had noticed before he was separated that there were many other detainees, among them adolescents, as bewildered as he was about their fate and being labeled “terrorists.”

“Just let me understand what you are talking about. Take anyone of us who was holding a weapon or someone who told you that I gave him a weapon, then you can kill me and I will put my fingerprint on the paper that gives you to the right to hang me.” But there was no respite for Mohammed and for the next month when he wasn’t being interrogated or tortured, his existence was that of a caged beast in a medieval dungeon.

“I was in a cell for one or two people but they packed people on top of each other, like pickles in a jar, six or seven of us. They feed you just enough to keep you alive, as if you were a dog that you throw a scrap or a piece of bread to. They treat you like an animal. As for the cell it’s where you eat, sleep, try to wash yourself and go to the toilet in the same place. It’s almost impossible to sleep and the jailers want that and throw water on the blankets. The room is 2.25m by 1.5m at most. The cell is underground. The smell of garbage is nicer than the prison. The moment you smell it you vomit. I cannot describe it to you. Rats go in and out of the room through the hole in the door. You cannot breathe. The water, I don’t know what they put in it but your kidneys start hurting – everyone’s kidneys hurt. It’s like a grave. Both the cell and a grave are underground – there’s no difference; one is made of cement the other is made of soil.”

As Mohammed describes his torment a pattern of mind numbing repetition becomes clear, the same questions are posed again and again in an endless harangue: “Who was in the demonstration with you…where did you get the weapons…to whom did you distribute the guns…where are the rebels hiding…who are your contacts with the Hariri family?” Unable to answer, Mohammed was powerless except to suffer and witness the suffering of others. Mohammed’s testimony reads like something from a Kafkaesque nightmare, an ever-recurring dystopian reality from which there is no escape.

“I said I swear to God I don’t know. They said: here there’s no god you can swear to. Here there’s only Bashar. He’s more important than God and everyone else in the world.” And then they start beating you in the tire. (The magic carpet ride) Sometimes they electrocute you. Ninety percent of us, they regularly electrocuted. They put water under you and they apply the electricity with a cattle prod and you have to confess. I tell them confess what? They strip you to your underwear. They make you bend over and ask questions you don’t know the answer to and you say I don’t know anything, you get an electric shock and you fall down. The torturer goes away for 3 minutes and returns to ask same question – after that you don’t know what to answer.

No matter how you answer them you have to answer what they want to hear, they say: do you know the Hariri family, you have to say I know the Hariri family. You are blindfolded and handcuffed during the interrogation and then you fingerprint a paper not knowing what you have admitted to. After you sign you are transferred to another department. That second department tells you: we have nothing to do with first department we will start a new interrogation and you go through the same routine: Where did you demonstrate? Who do you know? Who participated in protests? Who supports the rebels? Who transports weapons?

The same routine and then they beat you again. All that time you ask for death because death is easier, you appeal to God to let you die. There is no other way except to pray to merciful God to be released. There was someone in my cell who was beaten on back of his head with a rifle butt. Sometimes they beat prisoners just to kill them, not to get a confession. They beat this one to death, his brain seeped out on the floor, he was sixteen, what did he do? What was his mistake? Many people were killed in prison. In their hands either they kill you or leave you crippled, but you will never say the word demonstration ever again in your life. They use you to make the others behave, if you survive.

The calculated sadism Mohammed endured went beyond countless beatings or even the routine application of electric shocks, if electrocuting or repeatedly beating a man senseless can ever be considered ordinary conduct. Mohammed was singled out for even more savage torture, torture not only meant to inflict maximum pain but to deliberately degrade him yet further and to instill the deepest horror any man or woman would dread the most, repeated torture of his sexual organs.

“I still remember when he took the cattle prod and he put it on my testicles saying: it’s to finish your race. I was electrocuted this way four or five times but I can’t remember exactly, but more than three because sometimes I passed out. You black out when they do that to you.”

Mohammed’s penis and testicles were literally burned. He remembers the voltage being so high, his hair stood on end and he smelt cooked flesh. The result is that he has now been rendered impotent, likely permanently and the path to recovery is nearly as excruciating as the torture he suffered. The lasting psychological damage of having been effectively castrated, one can hardly fathom.

“I piss blood every two to three days. I’m seeing a doctor. I’m taking medicine. Thank God I have improved somewhat but as for my sexual condition it is zero. I am like my wife now. My ability to pass urine is blocked. The electricity damaged the nerves, things are closed off and since I didn’t fully recover from taking medicine, I am meant to have surgery to clean the pipes. I hope everything will go well.”

Mohammed was ultimately freed because, he said, friends and family raised 22,000 dollars needed to bribe the prison officials. He returned home only to see it had been so thoroughly looted by the Shabiha; there was nothing left but an empty shell. “I swear to God, they even took the baby clothes, the baby clothes!” His wife had shouted to the militiamen not to ransack their home when they came and she was lucky only to have been beaten. Apart from the clothes on his back his only worldly possessions now are two cheap mattresses and some blankets on a bare floor.

Mohammed is grateful to be alive but he is a haunted man, haunted by his own crucible of pain and all that he saw, all that he learned of the cruel realities beyond the bubble of the simple life he will never know again. He cannot forget the half deranged university student, traumatized by his own agonies, he shared a cell with for a time, who told him of seeing wounded hospital patients being executed with empty syringes, by masked soldiers disguised in hospital whites injecting air into the bloodstream. It sometimes took the victims two to three hours of excruciating convulsions to die. He cannot forget the shrieks of a female prisoner, whose only crime was being the wife of a cigarette smuggler, begging to be released with her two infant babies sharing her cell, one of them a newborn. He cannot forget the severely disabled man imprisoned solely because his brother had been identified as a demonstrator, a mute, paralyzed man who wore adult diapers he helped change. He cannot forget the six children in the cells, arrested on their own, street vendors all, the youngest six, the eldest eight years old, crying in their underwear in a place of murder.

“Sometimes when I sit alone I cry. Your soul dies when you are tortured, because you aren’t the only one, because you can hear others screaming for God’s sake! Who is the person who can calm down after having heard this? I am ready to sleep in the wild like an animal. I am ready to die, to dig my own grave and be buried alive but I will never return to Syria, for what I have seen in Syria. I will never return as long as Bashar lives in Syria. He has planted terror in people’s hearts. When I sleep I swear I see him in my dreams and I see how they were beating me. He is the president beyond even the whole universe. He is right and everyone is wrong. Our honor is violated. Syria is impossible.”

Unlike Mohammed, thirteen year old Hossam was from the start a willing participant in the uprising. Like young teenagers all over the world he loves football, but there is a distant gaze in his eyes, the eyes of a much older man. Hossam is also a torture survivor in exile and Hossam is a pseudonym. Unlike many western children his age he is politically aware and readily took part in the demonstrations.

“We were demanding freedom because in our country there is none. There are no human rights. Everything is silenced. All the people are oppressed. The prison cells are full. We have nothing that expresses freedom.”

Hossam is hungry for knowledge of the outside world and even the true history of his nation, instead of having to read the laudatory accounts of Assad’s family history that clog his textbooks. When he reaches adulthood he dreams of becoming a human rights lawyer.

He is a confident, self-possessed young man. He looks you straight in the eye. He leans forward in his chair when he speaks to us and he does not cry when he tells of how he was tortured, though he freely admits he cried plenty when he was being brutalized.

He comes from a town near the Lebanese border some forty kilometers from Homs, one which has felt the full brunt of the Syrian Army’s war machine in a concerted assault, one of many such sieges across the country where unarmed civilians faced tanks, artillery and air power.

He was arrested with his uncle, also a thirteen-year-old boy on the last day of school, after his final exams, randomly at a checkpoint. Hossam and his uncle like boys throughout Syria fear the example of another thirteen year old, Hamza al-Khateeb, a boy murdered by the security services early on in the uprising who gained national martyr status and provoked widespread outrage helping to mobilize greater resistance. It wasn’t merely that he been tortured to death, he had been so savagely disfigured it was as if he had been set upon by wild dogs and his cadaver was found with his penis amputated.

Hossam shared his time in prison alongside his uncle in the company of adults of all ages. At times they were beaten together, in other moments he faced torture alone. Unlike Mohammed, Hossan was often not blindfolded, he could see his torturer and he remembers “a terrifying huge fat man, dressed completely in black with a big beard.” He says he was often jumped and stepped on by the guards and that this too is common treatment.

Hossan was not in prison long and as soon as he was released he fled together with his immediate family across the border, but he was inside long enough to think he would never emerge again.

His corpulent tormentor showed him mobile phone images of young demonstrators and kept asking him whether he could identify himself. He could not, but the beatings only worsened with his denials. When he conceded he had been positively identified, though he still isn’t sure he was, he was not shown mercy, instead the punishment intensified.

“I thought I would die like Hamza al-Khateeb…the fat one kept shouting you want freedom? You want to overthrow the government? I told him I was a child why are you beating me? He answered…if you are so young why do you participate in the demonstrations? We arrest the elderly with the young. If you participate in demonstrations in the future we will cut off your arms and legs.”

Worse was to follow. Hossan waited crammed into a foul smelling cell with some fifty other male prisoners of all ages, jammed so tightly with humanity he could barely move, and he could not stop crying. An elderly prisoner befriended him and offered a warning.

“The old man was around seventy or eighty; he spoke to me gently and said, why are you crying so much? You will soon see something you could never imagine before, you didn’t see anything yet, they will do even more to you, this is just the beginning.”

And so it was. Hossan was soon taken away to face the electric cattle prod.

“When I heard the sounds of the others being tortured I thought I would never survive. They electrocuted me in the legs and chest. I felt my soul leaving me. I passed out for ten or fifteen minutes, then my soul came back to me and I thank God I didn’t die.”

But it would not end there and Hossan is still recovering from his injuries.

“I was terrified, I was crying but they brought pliers and a screw driver and pulled out my big toe nail. But they couldn’t remove it at first, so they started hammering it with the screw driver until it started pulling loose and then they ripped it out, it was the ultimate pain,” says the boy.

Hossam has bad dreams too and he wakes up crying from his nightmares but he is certain about one thing. “We will not retreat, until the regime is toppled.”

Abu Ali, the supposedly reformed torturer on the run concludes Assad’s henchmen relish their work too much to stop, whoever the victims might be and no outrage is excessive in their eyes, no atrocity too unthinkable.

“They do not differentiate between adults and children or anyone. Despite that they torture a victim to death, they always consider they could have done more to them, but they have a problem: the person being slaughtered by them or tortured unto death has only one soul, when that soul is gone they want another soul to return to body so they can torture more and more.”

** The authors of this exclusive investigation are independent, international, front line & investigative multimedia journalists and documentary makers. Collective professional credits include CNN International, ABC News Nightline, Al Jazeera English, Deutsche Welle, Journeyman Pictures, The (UK) Sunday Times, Times, Independent on Sunday and Independent, Global Post and Global Television (Canada) among many others.

Source: bikyamasr.com

#Syria army defectors target Assad’s military

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis

AMMAN | Fri Dec 2, 2011 1:10pm EST

(Reuters) - Syrian army defectors are targeting military convoys sent to reinforce President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on popular unrest, a senior rebel said, increasingly taking the fight to Assad’s forces in response to what he called state brutality.

Colonel Riad al-Asaad told Reuters that fighters from the Syrian Free Army, a loose collection of military units formed from thousands of military deserters, had improved their reconnaissance ability to enable them to disrupt army movements.

In the last month, army rebels have attacked and destroyed parts of an armored convoy in the southern province of Deraa, opened fire on an intelligence centre on the outskirts of Damascus, and killed six pilots at an air force base.

On Thursday, they killed eight people in a three-hour battle with security forces at an intelligence centre in the northern province of Idlib, an activist group said.

It was the latest clash in a spreading cycle of violence which has prompted the U.N. human rights chief to say Syria appears to be on the cusp of civil war.

Colonel Asaad said the increased attacks were in response to Assad’s military crackdown on eight months of protests which the United Nations says has killed more than 4,000 people.

“For months now regime forces have not entered a city, town or village without using heavy guns, armour and tanks against their inhabitants. We have a right to stop the troops going to violate the people,” Asaad said in an interview by telephone from Turkey where he has taken refuge.

A United Nations commission said this week Syrian security forces had committed crimes against humanity including murder, torture and rape. “Defending against such brutality, which now knows no limits, is a natural right,” Asaad said.

Syrian authorities say they are fighting “terrorist organizations” that, according to Damascus, are trying to incite civil war and have killed 1,100 soldiers and police since the uprising broke out in March.

MORE ATTACKS

Opposition sources cite increased operations in the last 10 days by defectors and insurgents in the central regions of Hama and Homs, where supply lines are being set up to Lebanon and to the rugged Idlib province on Turkey’s border.

Opposition to Assad has been fiercest in those provinces, as well as the eastern region of Deir al-Zor near the Iraq border. Assad has poured troops and tanks into the areas.

Defectors have also taken losses, especially in the central town of Rastan near Homs, where opposition sources said 22 deserters including two officers were killed in a tank-led assault two weeks ago.

Asaad declined to be drawn into operational details, but he said the defectors have changed tactics since they started coordinating three months ago, when he said attacks were targeting security police checkpoints.

He said defectors were not attacking troops in their barracks and ambushes on military convoys were justified.

“Tanks are usually assigned to their bases. The only reason they are leaving them is to kill and destroy people,” he said.

“Those soldiers who have taken an oath to serve and protect and are now harming the people have to quit and join the ranks of the people.”

He said defectors, who number over 10,000, were also trying to target security police complexes where he said thousands of anti-Assad Syrians were being held, as well as command centers directing the crackdown.

“They are legitimate targets across the country,” he said. “We have to attack them because it’s from there that orders are given to put down the Syrian people.”

Last month, the Syrian Free army formed a military council of nine defecting officers headed by Asaad. They issued a declaration pledging to protect peaceful protests, “bring down the regime and protect citizens from repression … and prevent chaos as soon as the regime falls.”

Burhan Ghalioun, leader of the main opposition group the Syrian National Council, met Asaad in Istanbul this week.

Ghalioun told reporters on a visit to Bulgaria on Friday he delivered a message that “we are against civil war.”

“We want the army defectors … to limit their actions to protecting their own lives and to the defense of peaceful demonstrators,” he said, adding all armed groups in Syria should work on “one unified strategy.”

Source: reuters.com