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A10 News | | SUNDAY, MAY 12, 2019 2 R But Shurbaji was still inside. Two years later, a released detainee reported that Shur- baji had been beaten to death. “Don’t forget us” Syria’s war remains with- out a political solution. With peace talks stalled, Russia is urging theWest to normalize and finance reconstruction anyway, deferring reforms. The millions of relatives of missing detainees remain in a social and psychological limbo. Without death certifi- cates, presumed widows cannot remarry. Children cannot inherit. In Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Germany, France, Sweden and beyond, families and survivors push on. After he was freed in 2013, Ghab- bash landed in Gaziantep, Turkey, where he runs wom- en’s-rights and aid programs for refugees in the last patch of rebel-held Syria. geon, several detainees de- cided to smuggle out the names of every prisoner they could identify. “Even though we are three stories underground, still we can continue our work,” recalled one, Mansour Omari, who said he was imprisoned for human-rights work. Another detainee, Nabil Shurbaji — a journalist who, by coincidence, was the first to inspire Ghabbash to activ- ism in 2011 and later shared his cell inMezze — tried to write on cloth scraps with tomato paste. Too faint. Shurbaji finally used the detainees’ own blood, from their malnourished gums, mixed with rust. A detained tailor sewed the scraps into Omari’s shirt. He made it out. The message in blood reachedWestern capitals; the shirt scraps were dis- played at the Holocaust Museum inWashington, D.C. nel in photographs of a secu- rity officer’s funeral. Then she broke down. Khleif’s family rejected her over what it considered her loss of honor and her politics, she said. Her pro-govern- ment brother texted death threats; her husband di- vorced her. For some conservative men, the conflict changed attitudes. Several survivors andmale relatives say their families now honor sexual- assault survivors as war wounded. Khleif hid nothing fromher new husband, a former rebel. “You are a medal onmy chest, you are the crown on my head,” she recalled him telling her. Names written in blood Detainees and defectors have risked their lives to tell their families, and the world, of their plight. In the 4th Division dun- By then, he and numerous survivors said, there was an industrial-scale transporta- tion system among prisons. Detainees were tortured on each segment of their jour- neys. Some recalled riding for hours in trucks normally used for animal carcasses, chained tomeat hooks. Ghabbash’s new cell was typical: 12-feet long, 9-feet wide, usually packed so tightly that prisoners had to sleep in shifts. Outside the cell, a man was blindfolded and hand- cuffed in the corridor. It was Darwish, the human-rights lawyer. He had been singled out for lecturing a judge on Syrian laws guaranteeing fair trials. He later ticked off his punishment: “Naked, no water, no sleep, forced to drink my pee.” Prison torture grewmore brutal and baroque as rebels outside made advances and government warplanes bombed restive neighbor- hoods. Survivors describe sadistic treatment, rape, summary executions or detainees left to die of un- treated wounds and illness- es. After weeks or months, many prisoners got so-called trials lastingminutes with no defense lawyers. Ghab- bash’s was typical. At a mili- tary “field court” in 2012, he heard a judge rattle off his conviction, “terrorism that destroyed public property,” and his sentence: death. “The whole trial was 1½ minutes,” he said. He expected to go to Sayd- naya Prison, which by then was a mass execution center. Thousands have been hanged there after summary trials, according to an Am- nesty International report. “Good, it’s finished,” he recalled thinking. But it was not. He would endure an- other year of daily beatings. His last stint was in a makeshift prison deep un- derground near Damascus, a military bunker of the elite 4th Division, a fief of Assad’s brother Maher. There were nomore interrogations. “Torture just for torture,” said Darwish, who was also transferred there. “For re- venge, for killing, for break- ing the people.” Rape and assault Women and girls have been raped and sexually assaulted in at least 20 intel- ligence branches, andmen and boys in 15 of those, a U.N. human-rights commis- sion reported last year. Sexual assault is a double- barreled weapon in tradi- tional Muslim communities, where survivors are often stigmatized. Relatives have killed female ex-detainees in honor killings, sometimes merely on the assumption they have been raped, rights reports and survivors say. MariamKhleif, 32, a mother of five fromHama, was repeatedly raped during her detention. Khleif said she had aided injured pro- testers and deliveredmedi- cal supplies to rebels, acts the government labeled terrorism. In September 2012, she said, security officers dragged her fromher house. At state security’s Branch 320 in Hama, she said, the investigation chief intro- duced himself as Col. Sulei- man. CIJA’s archives show that Khleif was detained and that a Col. Suleiman Juma headed the Hama branch. “He was eating pista- chios,” she recalled later in her sparse apartment in Reyhanli, Turkey. “He spat the shells at us. He left no dirty word unused.” A 3-foot-square basement cell held her and six other women. Guards hung her fromwalls and beat her, knocking out teeth. She saw themdrag a prisoner com- plaining of hunger to a toilet and stuff his mouth with excrement, a method re- called by other survivors. “At midnight,” she said, “they would take the beauti- ful girls to Col. Suleiman to rape. I remember Col. Sulei- man and his green eyes.” Khleif identified the colo- detainees, reviewed govern- ment documents and exam- ined hundreds of pages of witness testimony. The survi- vors’ accounts alignwith accounts fromother prison- ers held in the same jails, and are supported by the govern- ment memos and by photos smuggled out of Syrian pris- ons. There is little hope for holding top officials ac- countable anytime soon. But there is a growingmove- ment to seek justice through European courts. French and German prosecutors have arrested three former securi- ty officials and issued inter- national arrest warrants for Syria’s national-security chief, Ali Mamlouk; its air- force intelligence director, Jamil Hassan; and others for torture and deaths in prison of citizens or residents of those countries. Yet Assad and his lieuten- ants remain in power, safe from arrest, protected by Russia with its military might and its veto in the U.N. Security Council. At the same time, Arab states are restoring relations with Damascus, and European countries are considering following suit. That impunity is not just a domestic Syrian problem. Without security reforms, the 5million Syrian refugees in the Middle East and Eu- rope are unlikely to return home to risk arbitrary arrest. “Justice is not a Syrian luxury,” Mazen Darwish, a Syrian human-rights lawyer, said in Berlin, where he has assisted prosecutors. “It’s the world’s problem.” An expanding gulag It was the detention and torture of several teenagers inMarch 2011, for scrawling graffiti critical of Assad, that pushed Syrians to join the uprisings then sweeping Arab countries. Demonstra- tions protesting their treat- ment spread from their hometown, Daraa, leading tomore arrests, which galva- nizedmore protests. A flood of detainees from all over Syria joined the dissidents at Saydnaya Pris- on. The new detainees ranged “from the garbage- man to the peasant to the engineer to the doctor, all classes of Syrians,” said Riyad Avlar, a Turkish citi- zen who was held for 20 years after being arrested in 1996, as a 19-year-old stu- dent, for interviewing Syri- ans about a prisonmassacre. Torture increased, he said; the newcomers were sexual- ly assaulted, beaten on the genitals and forced to beat or even kill one another. No one knows exactly how many Syrians have passed through the system since; rights groups estimate hun- dreds of thousands to a million. The Syrian Net- work’s tally of 127,916 peo- ple currently caught in the system is probably an under- count. The number, a count of arrests reported by detain- ees’ families and other wit- nesses, does not include people later released or confirmed dead. Because of government secrecy, no one knows how many have died in custody, but thousands of deaths were recorded inmemos and photographs. A former military-police officer, known only as Caesar to protect his safety, fled Syria with pictures of at least 6,700 corpses, bone-thin and battered, which shocked the world when they emerged in 2014. A tour of torture Ghabbash, the protest organizer fromAleppo, survived torture through at least 12 facilities, making him, he said, “a tour guide” to the system. His odyssey began in 2011, when he was 22. Ghabbash was hung up, beaten and whipped in a string of military and gener- al intelligence facilities, he said. InMarch 2012, Ghabbash was flown toMezze military air base, named for a well- off Damascus neighborhood nearby. fence naked, spraying them withwater on cold nights. To entertain colleagues over dinner, he and other survi- vors said, an officer calling himself Hitler forced prison- ers to act like dogs, donkeys and cats, beating thosewho failed to bark or bray correct- ly. In amilitary hospital, he said, he watched a nurse bash the face of an amputee who begged for painkillers. In yet another prison, he counted 19 cellmates who died fromdisease, torture and neglect in a single month. “I was among the lucky,” said Ghabbash, 31, who survived 19months in de- tention until a judge was bribed to free him. As Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, closes in on victory over an eight-year revolt, a secret, industrial- scale systemof arbitrary arrests and torture prisons has been pivotal to his suc- cess. While the Syrianmili- tary, backed by Russia and Iran, fought armed rebels for territory, the government waged a ruthless war on civilians, throwing hundreds of thousands into filthy dungeons where thousands were tortured and killed. Nearly 128,000 have never emerged and are presumed to be either dead or still in custody, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an indepen- dent monitoring group that keeps the most rigorous tally. Nearly 14,000 were “killed under torture.” Many prisoners die from condi- tions so dire that a U.N. investigation labeled the process “extermination.” Now, even as the war winds down, the world’s attention fades and coun- tries start to normalize rela- tions with Syria, the pace of new arrests, torture and execution is increasing. Detainees have recently smuggled out warnings that hundreds are being sent to an execution site, Saydnaya Prison, and newly released prisoners report that killings there are accelerating. Kidnappings and killings by the Islamic State group capturedmore attention in theWest, but the Syrian prison systemhas vacuumed upmany more times the number of people detained by the extremist group in Syria. Government deten- tion accounts for about 90% of the disappearances tallied by the Syrian Network. The Syrian government has denied the existence of systematic abuse. However, newly discovered govern- ment memos show that Syrian officials who report directly to Assad ordered mass detentions and knew of atrocities. War-crimes investigators with the nonprofit Commis- sion for International Justice and Accountability, or CIJA, have found government memos ordering crack- downs and discussing deaths in detention. The memos were signed by top security officials, including members of the Central Crisis Management Commit- tee, which reports directly to Assad. Amilitary-intelligence memo acknowledges deaths from torture and filthy con- ditions. Other memos report deaths of detainees, some later identified among pho- tos of corpses smuggled out by a military-police defector. Twomemos authorize “harsh” treatment of specific detainees. Amemo from the head of military intelligence, Rafiq Shehadeh, orders officers to take steps to en- sure “judicial immunity” for security officials. In an interview in 2016, Assad cast doubt on the truthfulness of survivors and the families of the missing. Any abuses, he said, were isolatedmistakes unavoid- able in a war. 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