Freedom to die: Inside the Syrian torture chamber

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 now some nine 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 5300 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 neighboring 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 exclusively to Bikyamasr, 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.

Hossam 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. Hossam 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. Hossam 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 Hossam 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.”