Al-Araby al-Jadeed, London, November 15
Human rights organizations have been closely monitoring the humanitarian condition of Syrian refugees, but nobody has been looking at what is happening inside the prisons of the Assad regime. In the Hama prison, one of the notorious sites of torture in Syria today, political dissidents have been interrogated and executed without a remote chance for a fair trial. Some of them have tried to smuggle audio recordings out of the prison, in an attempt to gain the world’s attention to the terrible abuses that they endure each and every day. Without any international body to protect them or a legal system to defend their rights, these men and women, whose sole “crime” was to protest the Assad regime, have no choice but to continue suffering with the hope of evading death. Many of these individuals are deprived of food and water. Most of them suffer prolonged physical and psychological torture. The Hama prison, just like many other prisons in Syria, was used prior to the civil war as a detainment facility for convicted felons. Following the uprising, it was converted into an interrogation center for anti-Assad activists. With time, it grew into a full-fledged concentration camp in which inmates are systematically abused, tortured, and killed – much in line with the Nazi concentration camps we remember from the Second World War. The testimonies laid out in the 2014 Syrian detainee report, which provided photographic evidence of the systematic killing of more than 11,000 detainees by the Syrian regime, is just the tip of the iceberg. Much more is happening today behind closed doors. The actual number of individuals killed at these detention centers has long surpassed the hundreds of thousands, and the killing continues. It is unbelievable that world leaders who claim to be acting in the best interest of the Syrian people have completely overlooked this major crime. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been slaughtered by Assad in these camps to date, and not a single finger has been lifted to end this abhorrent crime. –Amer Kush