A French newspaper published drawings illustrating the horrors taking place inside the prisons of the Assad regime. The drawings were drawn by a Syrian artists who experienced these horrors during his detention in one of Assad’s prisons following the outbreak of the Syrian revolution.
In an article published by the French newspaper Liberation under the title “bureaucracy of death,” Syrian artist Najah Albukai recounts through his sketches the barbarism of the Assad regime against detainees. Tens of thousands of detainees died under torture in the prisons of the Assad regime. His drawings illustrated the reality inside Assad’s prisons as well as the systematic methods of torture carried out by Assad’s intelligence services against detainees.
Reports by human rights groups indicated that detainees inside Assad’s prisons “were subjected to brutal torture and inhumane treatment of a purely sectarian nature.” The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said that it had compiled a list of the names of 118,000 people who were detained in Syria, 88 percent of whom were held in the Assad regime’s detention facilities. Other human rights groups said that the figure could be much higher, especially as tens of thousands of people were forcibly disappeared.
Human Rights Watch on Monday questioned the Assad regime’s claim that detainees were dying of “heart attacks.” Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on the Assad regime to give answers for questions about the death of detainees in its prisons following the regime’s issuance of death notices for thousands of detainees who died in its prisons.
“A slip of paper with a date of death is no answer. The Syrian government, which is no doubt updating its civil registries to sweep the thousands of cases of disappearances under the rug, has much more to answer for,” said Lama Fakih, HRW’s deputy Middle East director.
The Syrian Coalition earlier called on the international community to launch a serious investigation into the war crimes taking place in the prisons of the Assad regime and refer those responsible for those crimes to the International Criminal Court. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)