My News
Today, Monday, December 9, 2024, activists and media professionals circulated on social media sites pictures of a body that had been tortured in one of the Assad regime’s prisons. They said it belonged to the activist “Mazen Hamada,” which confirms his death in Assad’s prisons after years of absence of information about his fate, in addition to thousands of others. Syrian detainees whose fate has not been clarified despite the fall of the Assad regime and the opening of all prisons.
“Mazen Hamada” is from the city of Deir ez-Zor, a Syrian refugee in the Netherlands who lived there for years. He worked as an employee in the French oil exploration company “Chamberger” in Deir ez-Zor Governorate as a technician. He was a contributor to procedures to prosecute the Assad regime, and appeared in Syrian documentaries. He talked about torture in the regime’s detention centers.
“Mazen Hamadeh,” a former detainee in the regime’s prisons for three times, made a settlement with the regime’s embassy in Berlin and returned to Damascus in February 2020. According to sources close to “Mazen,” the intelligence arrested Hamadeh immediately after his arrival at Damascus airport and took him to an unknown location. The sources said at the time Hamada was suffering from a financial and psychological crisis at the time, and the regime arranged procedures for his return to Syria.
“Hamada” had previously been arrested three times since the beginning of the revolutionary movement. The first arrest lasted for a week on April 24, 2011, by the State Security Branch in Deir ez-Zor. The second arrest was on December 29, 2011, by the same branch, while… He returned from Damascus through one of the military checkpoints at the entrance to the city of Deir ez-Zor, and it lasted about two weeks. The third detention is considered the longest in duration and the most brutal in its dealings, as members of the Air Force Intelligence branch arrested him in central Damascus until 2014.
Hamada gave testimonies about torture against the regime in the Hague trial, and said about the conditions of his detention in the Air Force Intelligence branch: “As soon as we entered here, they started beating us with sticks, and they made us take off our clothes and stand naked, and of course they tied our hands, and then we were taken to the studies building, and then To what is called Aircraft Security, which is a dormitory 12 meters long and 7 meters wide. We, 170 detainees, were standing in that space. We remained there for three months, after which… We were transferred to the old investigation branch, and we found ourselves 12 people in a cell whose dimensions did not exceed about two meters in length and two meters in width.”
Hamada confirmed in his testimonies that he was subjected to various types of torture, including “ghosting, impalement, torture by targeting the genitals, using hot oil and boiling water, and extinguishing cigarettes on the bodies of detainees.” Hamada also emerged as a political activist, as he published video clips in which he said that he met with Western officials to study issues. related to the Syrian revolution, but he closed his accounts on social networking sites.
Fadl Abdul Ghani, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, revealed in a statement during a live interview on Syria TV that the majority of detainees forcibly disappeared in the prisons of the former Syrian regime are dead, or have been liquidated, according to data and documents obtained by the network. Through soul circles and documents proving this.
Abdul Ghani’s statements came amid conflicting information about the fate of hundreds of thousands of detainees in the regime’s prisons whose fate has not been revealed, at a time when millions of Syrians are anxiously awaiting to know the fate of their relatives who have no news about them, while arriving at the prison could reveal major crimes and atrocities that may be… It was committed against detainees through liquidations and field executions that were carried out over the past years, and it will take many months to uncover a long series of these crimes that were committed with all horror.
Today, Monday, December 9, 2024, activists broadcast newly filmed video clips on social media sites, showing dozens of bodies piled up in the mortuary in the “Harasta Military Hospital” in the Damascus countryside, belonging to detainees who were recently liquidated in the regime’s prisons and transported to the hospital in preparation for burial in Mass graves.
According to the videos received, the bodies belong to detainees in the prisons of the former Syrian regime, who were soon liquidated and transferred to the military hospital, but the rapid fall of the regime prevented them from being buried in the secret mass graves in which the Assad regime buried hundreds of thousands of Syrian detainees, whose fate is still unknown to their families.
According to human rights sources, the coming weeks and months will reveal thousands of crimes committed against detainees in the Assad regime’s prisons, as the releases that took place during the liberation of all prisons indicate that those released do not equal a small percentage of the size of the numbers incarcerated in the regime’s prisons, and their fate has not been revealed. What conclusively confirms that they were liquidated and buried in mass graves that will become clear in the coming period.
The “Military Operations Department” announced early in the morning on Sunday, December 8, 2024, the liberation of detainees in “Sednaya Central Prison, one of the most fortified Syrian military prisons, and the Syrians knew it throughout the early era of the Assad family’s rule as the “human slaughterhouse” because of the types of… The death, torture, and killing that were practiced on him during bitter years seem to have come to an end. The prison contains thousands of missing Syrian detainees, some of whom have been detained for more than 40 years. His fate is unknown to this day.
Dozens of video clips were spread showing operations to open the locked doors on the cells and remove hundreds of detainees, including women, children, and elderly men. This was done randomly. Large columns of civilians were also observed in the streets. The sources said that they were detainees who left Saydnaya prison after the doors were opened by civilians and members of the revolutionaries. .
Information is spreading about the existence of thousands of missing persons whose fate has not been clarified, amid conflicting information about the existence of basement floors in the Red Prison, as it is known, and that it has secret doors locked with passwords and it is not known how to enter them, as the members supervising the prison fled before the factions arrived at the place, and no one remained. Of them.
“Sednaya Prison” has a dark history in the lives of Syrians in general. Hardly a town, village, or neighborhood in a city is empty without its children having tasted the bitterness of death, torture, or being absent for long years in the darkness of prisons, and having tasted the woes at the hands of the regime’s gangs, but hope still exists for millions that They find their children among the living remaining in locked cells.
According to documentation by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, at least 113,218 people, including 3,129 children and 6,712 women, are still subject to enforced disappearance at the hands of the parties to the conflict in Syria since March 2011. It also indicated that there is no horizon for ending the crime of enforced disappearance in Syria. Of them, there are no less than 96,321, including 2,329 children and 5,742 women (adult female). Syrian regime forces.
