An all-woman international convoy started its three-day journey in Istanbul on Tuesday to raise awareness of the suffering of women and young girls imprisoned by the Assad regime.
With the participation of activists and NGO members from 55 countries, the International Conscience Convoy, calling itself the “voice of oppressed women in Syria,” started its journey with 55 buses after holding a press conference at Istanbul.
Participants in the convoy included 200 women from Bosnia’s Srebrenica as well as dozens of women who lost loved ones at the hands of the Assad regime.
During the journey, the convoy will make stops in a number of Turkish cities and will reach the southern province of Hatay at the Turkish-Syrian border on March 8, International Women’s Day.
Members of the Syrian Coalition participated in the launch of the campaign. Vice-President of the Coalition, Salwa Aksoi, called on international organizations to support the campaign to achieve its goals of ensuring the release of detainees in the prisons of the Assad regime and exposing the barbaric, inhuman and brutal torture they are subjected to.
Aksoi stressed that women from all over the world are participating in the campaign to support thousands of detainees in the prisons of the Assad regime.
Lawyer Gülden Sönmez, deputy chairman of the Human Rights and Justice Movement (İHAK), said at a press conference in Istanbul about the event that 13,581 women have been subjected to torture and maltreatment in the “dungeons of the Assad regime” and some were raped since an uprising against the regime started in 2011. “Currently there are 6,736 adult and 417 underage prisoners.”
Sönmez stressed that such acts constituted “war crimes and crimes against humanity under international law, calling on the entire world to take measures to ensure the release of Syrian female in the prisons of the Assad regime. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
