This is one more testimony that documents the horror experienced by tens of thousands of people imprisoned by the Syrian regime, some of whom were lucky enough to escape. AFP met Mehmet Etürk, a 53-year-old man with hollow cheeks who has just been released from a Syrian jail and half of his teeth are missing, while the others are in danger of falling out.
“It was torture upon torture,” he says, miming the blows to the mouth with a baton that he says he received from the guards of the Palestine Branch, a prison in Damascus where he spent part of his almost twenty years. -and-one years of detention in Syria. Arrested in 2004 for smuggling, Mehmet Ertürk found his village, Magaracik, on Monday evening, perched at the top of a winding road in the middle of ocher land dotted with olive trees, 10 minutes from the Syrian border across fields.
The dead thrown into dumpsters
“My family thought I was dead,” says the 53-year-old man, whose face and gait make him look twenty years older.
The night he was released, he heard gunshots and began to pray: “We didn’t know what was happening outside. I thought I was finished.” Then loud hammer blows begin to resonate. A few minutes later, the rebels who entered Damascus to bring down Bashar al-Assad opened the prison doors wide.
“We hadn’t seen him for eleven years, we thought he was dead, we had no more hope,” confesses his wife, sitting in the courtyard of the family home with their youngest daughter, barely aged six months when his father was arrested.
Sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment, the Syrian prison administration will leave the father of four children to languish in an underground dungeon, at the mercy of zealous guards, without worrying about his end date of sentence, scheduled for 2019.
“Our bones came out of the flesh when they hit our wrists with hammers,” he said. “They also poured boiling water down the neck of a fellow detainee. The flesh on her neck has gone all the way down,” he said, pointing to his hips.
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“During the day, it was strictly forbidden to speak […] There were cockroaches in the food. It was damp, it smelled like toilets,” he continues, recounting the days “without clothes, without water, without food: it was like being in a coffin.”
“They put 115, 120 people in a cell of 20 people. “A lot of people died of starvation,” he said, adding that the guards “threw the dead into dumpsters.”
The salvation of a rope on the ceiling
To escape the horror, he will come to hope of being hanged. “One day they took us to a new prison area and I saw a rope hanging from the ceiling. I said, “Thank God we’re saved.”
He interrupts his story for the umpteenth time to thank heaven and “our dear President Erdogan” for being back, alive, with his family, and for not being among the countless victims in Syrian prisons, possibly more than 105,000 since 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH).
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