A former detainee who have been recently released from the notorious Sednaya Prison near Damascus gave a harrowing account of the systematic torture being endured by detainees in the prisons of the Assad regime and which led to the deaths of tens of thousands. He also gave the names of dozens of detainees who he said were are still alive at the time of his release.
Muawiya al-Hajji, who was released three months ago following five years imprisonment, spoke about the atrocities taking place against the detainees. In a post he published on Facebook on Monday, al-Hajji gave the names of 65 detainees who are still held in the Sednaya Prison near Damascus. He apologized for the delay in publishing the list of names.
Al-Hajji said that he knew many detainees who died under torture in the facility. On late January, activists said that two young men from the same family, Kassem and Zakaria Tlass, were killed under torture in the prisons of the Assad regime.
The Department of Civil Registry in the city of Homs gave the father of the two young men death certificates for his sons when he visited the Department to obtain identification papers.
Rights group describe the Assad regime-run prisons as human slaughterhouses in which detainees are usually subjected to systematic, brutal tortured and inhumane treatment. Thousands of Syrians have died under torture in Sednaya Prison and other detention facilities run by the Assad regime.
The scale of torture was revealed when former military photographer codenamed Caesar smuggled about 50,000 photos of 11,000 detainees who were killed under torture in the prisons of the Assad regime after he defected from the regime.
In a report issued on June 26, 2018, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said that more than 13,000 people were killed under torture in Syria, the overwhelming majority of whom were killed by the Assad regime.
The Network said that at least 81,652 Syrian citizens were forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime alone in the period between March 2011 and June 2018.
Rights activists repeatedly called on the international community to exert pressure on the Assad regime to force it to disclose the fate of hundreds of thousands of detainees and those who have been forcibly disappeared in its prisons. They said that the international community bears responsibility for the rampant torture in Syria as it has so far failed to hold the Assad regime accountable for the death of tens of thousands of detainees in its prisons. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
