An aerial view of Saydnaya prison. (photo: Amnesty)
Up to
13,000 Secretly Hanged in Syrian Jail, Says Amnesty
By Martin Chulov, Guardian
UK
07 February 17
Thousands of other opponents of Assad died from torture and
starvation at Saydnaya prison, witness reports suggest
As
many as 13,000 opponents of Bashar al-Assad were secretly hanged in one of Syria's
most infamous prisons in the first five years of the country's civil war as
part of an extermination policy ordered by the highest levels of the Syrian
government, according to Amnesty International.
Many
thousands more people held in Saydnaya prison died
through torture and starvation, Amnesty said, and the bodies were dumped in two
mass graves on the outskirts of Damascus between midnight and dawn most Tuesday
mornings for at least five years.
The
report, Human Slaughterhouse, details allegations of state-sanctioned abuse
that are unprecedented in Syria's civil war, a conflict that has consistently
broken new ground in depravity, leaving at least 400,000 people dead and nearly half the country's population
displaced.
It
suggests thousands more people could have been hanged in Saydnaya since the end
of 2015, after which former guards and detainees who spoke to Amnesty no longer
had access to verifiable information from inside the prison.
Among
the 84 people interviewed were four former guards at two key buildings, a
"red building" in which civilian detainees were held and a
"white building" that held former military members and where hangings
were carried out in the basement. More than 12 months of research focused on 31
men who were held in both buildings. A military judge was also interviewed.
The
witnesses claimed that once or twice a week 20 to 50 people at a time were
hanged after sham trials before a military court. Their bodies were taken to
the nearby Tishreen military hospital where a cause of death was typically
registered as a respiratory disorder or heart failure. They were buried on
military land in Nahja, south of Damascus, and Qatana, a small town to the
west.
The
report's author, Nicolette Waldman, said the estimate of the number of people
hanged ranged from a minimum of 5,000 to a maximum of 13,000.
"There
is no reason at all to expect that the hangings have stopped. We believe it is
very likely that the executions are going on to this day and that many
thousands more people have been killed," she said.
"They
came for them on a Monday. Before they were hanged, victims were condemned to
death in a two- to three-minute hearing. The death sentence was signed by the
minister of defence, who was deputised to sign by President Assad. It is
inconceivable that all of the top officials did not know about it. This was a
policy of extermination."
Amnesty
International estimates 13,000 people were killed in mass hangings in Saydnaya
prison between 2011 and 2015
Waldman
said the hanging victims were separate to claims of the systematic killing of more than 11,000
detainees in Syria from March 2011 until August 2013, which
were documented by a photographer codenamed Caesar who worked for the Syrian
military police.
The
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed last May that at least 60,000
people had died as a result of torture or dire conditions in Syrian prisons
from the earliest months of the anti-Assad insurrection.
Since
then, Syria has been gradually torn apart. The
initial uprising was met with a brutal crackdown and mass detentions, and by
late 2011 it had started to transform into an armed insurgency that aimed to
topple the four-decade Assad dynasty and its supporting state structure.
By
mid-2012 the uprising had been joined by jihadists from outside Syria, who
blended with hundreds of hardcore Islamists freed from Syrian prisons who had
begun to splinter the opposition. All the while, mass arrests and detentions
accelerated, as did an exodus of civilians from most parts of the country.
The
war soon sparked the biggest refugee crisis anywhere since the end of the
second world war. Mass immigration has since been a focal point of political
discourse in Europe and the US, feeding the rise of populism and nationalistic
leaders such as Donald Trump, whose travel ban prevented Syrians, among others,
from entering the US, until the order was overturned by a federal judge on
Friday.
Amnesty
said non-state armed groups had also carried out serious human rights abuses
against detainees. It singled out the al-Qaida-inspired Jabhat al-Nusra and
Islamic State as perpetrators of war crimes. But it said the "vast
majority of detention-related violations since 2011 have been carried out by
Syrian authorities".
Witnesses
to the killings in Saydnaya described a methodical routine in which those about
to be hung were collected from their cell block in the red building in the
afternoon and told they were to be transferred to another prison. They were
instead taken to the basement of the white building, several hundred metres
away, and repeatedly beaten. They were taken before a military judge and
condemned, before being hanged between midnight and 3am.
"Some
of them initially did not know what the sounds were," said Waldman.
"It is such a dehumanising and horrible experience in prison
already."
Amnesty
said its witnesses had detailed each step of the process, with some giving
graphic accounts of having heard the hangings being carried out in the room
beneath them. The organisation said it had sought a response to its allegations
from Syrian officials in mid-January but received no reply. Amnesty researchers
are barred from entering Syria.
"What
we have uncovered is beyond anything else we have seen," said Waldman.
"This demands a new kind of response. These practices have to stop. It is
one more step of diabolical intent by the Syrian authorities."
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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Eugene Victor Debs
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