United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began analyzing a shirt of a former detainee in the prisons of the Assad regime on which the names of other colleagues were scribbled using blood and d flakes of rust.
Syrian human-rights activist and former detainee Mansour Omari managed to smuggle the scraps of cloth out of the prison in the folds and collar of his shirt.
Omari told Inab Baladi newspaper that experts at the Museum and the Lazarus Project are assisting to obtain the faded names of the detainees using multi spectral light to create high quality images in order to read the names.
Omri said that the project is especially important to draw the attention of the world public opinion to the forgotten plight of detainees and ensure that those responsible for torture in the Assad regime’s detention centers are held accountable. He noted
that the move is also aimed at helping expose the thousands of violations documented by local and international human rights organizations against detainees in the prisons of the Assad regime.
The project aims to extract the names of detainees that were written on the scraps of cloth and inform their families who have not known anything about their loved ones or their thereabouts for years.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in August put the shirt on display to raise awareness among visitors to the Washington museum about the suffering of detainees in the prisons of the Assad regime.
Omari was the first among the group to be released from a brutal facility in Damascus under the supervision of the 4th Division, one of the Assad regime’s elite army unites. Omari spent nearly a year in captivity before he was released in February 2013.
Detainees in Assad’s prisons and detention centers are subjected to brutal, systematic torture which causes death and chronic diseases as well as deprivation of food, medicine, and treatment.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights in early 2017 said it had documented the full names of at least 117,000 detainees in the prisons of the Assad regime since the outbreak of the revolution in March 2011. The Network pointed out that the number exceeded 215,000. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department + Inab Baladi Newspaper)
