A former female detainee recounted the horrors she experienced in the prisons of the Assad regime during an international conference discussing the situation of female detainees and children in the Assad regime’s prisons.
The former detainee was speaking on the sidelines of the International Conscience Movement campaign which was launched in Istanbul last month and is due to continue until the International Women’s Day on March 8.
In a video published by the Anadolu news agency on Friday, Samar al-Khaled said that the screams and cries of children being tortured at night prevented her from sleeping.
Samar, who used to run a Koran teaching institute, said that members of the Assad regime’s security agencies detained her while on her way home in Damascus in 2014.
“I saw women who were in a terrible condition. Worms began to eat their skin. The cell was very dark with a slight beam of light seeping from under the door. I was later taken to a cell too narrow that I could not sit down or lay. I had to stand on my feet all the time.”
Samar said that detainees were mere numbers as the jailers addressed them not by their names, but by using serial numbers.
Samar went on to say that she was savagely electrocuted and asked to make confessions. She added that among the detainees were doctors and scientists whose conditions were much worse than hers.
The conference, which was launched under the title ‘Until the Liberation of the Last Child and Last Woman Detained in Syria,’ aims to bring attention to the plight of detainees in the prisons of the Assad regime, especially women and children.
The Syrian Coalition earlier said these such stories are just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in the prisons of the Assad regime. It said that the Assad regime has already executed tens of thousands of detainees in order to conceal its crimes, citing international reports about the Assad regime’s disposal of bodies of detainees in crematoriums it built in its prisons.
According to human rights organizations, the Assad regime has detained at least 500,000 people since March 2011. The figure includes about 13,500 women who have been subjected to systematic rape and torture, while about 7,000 of those are still held by the regime. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
