More than a thousand Syrians died in detention at a military airport on the outskirts of Damascus, the capital of Syria, killed by execution, torture or mistreatment in a place that was widely feared, according to a report to be published on Thursday (27) that he tracked the deaths in seven alleged places of grave.
In the document, shared exclusively with Reuters, Syria’s Center for Justice and Responsibility states that it identified the venues of the graves using a combination of witness testimonials, satellite images and photographed documents at the Military Airport in the suburb of Mezzeh in Damascus after.
Some places were on the airport ground. Others by the capital.
Shadi Haroun, one of the authors of the report, said he was among the prisoners.
Arrested for several months in 2011-2012 for organizing protests, he described daily interrogations with physical and psychological torture to force him to make unfounded confessions. Death came in many ways, he reported to Reuters.
Although the detainees saw nothing but the walls of their cells or the interrogation room, they could hear “occasional shots, shooting every two days.”
In addition, there were injuries inflicted by torturers.
“A small wound in the foot of one of the detainees, caused by a whip he received during the torture, was not sterilized or treated for days, which gradually became Gangrene and his condition worsened until he reached the point of amputation of the whole foot,” Harroun recalled, describing the situation of a cellmate.
In addition to obtaining the documents, the Justice Center and the Association for the Detained and Missing Persons in interviewed 156 survivors and eight former Air Force intelligence member, Syrian security service in charge of watching, arresting and killing regime critics.
The new government issued a decree prohibiting former authorities of the regime of speaking publicly and none of them were available to comment.
“Although some of the graves mentioned in the report have not been found before, the discovery itself is not surprising, as we know that there are over 100,000 missing people in Assad’s arrests that did not leave during the days of liberation in early December,” an interior ministry colonel who identified with his military pseudonym, Abu Baker, explained.
According to Baker, “discovering the fate of these missing people and looking for is one of the greatest legacies left by the Assad regime.”
It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed since 2011, when Assad’s repression to protests became a large-scale war.
Both Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, have long been accused by human rights groups, foreign governments and promoters of widespread extrajudicial murder crimes, including mass executions within the country’s prison system and.
The Justice Center said all the survivors interviewed were tortured.
