Lots and lots of Syrian women can be considered to be incarcerated into the Assad regime’s prisons. Minimal is famous about their fate, but people who find a way to escape inform stories of horror. DW’s Julia Hahn reports.

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Torture in Syrian prisons

Syrian refugee recounts ordeal of torture

Muna Muhammad remembers every tiny information. The stench when you look at the cells, the pain sensation, her torturers. “He pulled a plastic that is black over my mind after which he hung me personally through the roof, head down,” the 30-year-old states. The memory still haunts her. The guard said he was likely to leave her hanging through the ceiling until all her “evil ideas land in this case,” she recalls.

Muna had been a music instructor before she ended up being arrested in 2012 for participating in protests against President Bashar Assad in Deir ez-Zor. She premiered, then rearrested and taken up to the infamous Military Intelligence Branch 215 facility in Damascus — inmates call it “hell branch” because torture is a day-to-day incident.

1 day, her torturer turned up by having a stun gun. “He stated, ‘Muna, where can be your heart?'” she recalls. “I pointed within my heart, and that is where he zapped me personally.”

Locked away

For months, Muna ended up being locked up in solitary confinement or loaded as well as other inmates. “One they interrogated a 16-year-old,” she says day. “I heard her scream. It had been so noisy. I was thinking they have to be killing her.”

Lots of women had been sexually abused, Muna states, incorporating if she didn’t confess that she also faced the threat of rape.

Muna Muhammad fled to Turkey in 2016

Hygiene conditions during the prison had been an emergency, says Muna, describing that the inmates are not always permitted access to toilets or showers. There have been kids, too. “we keep in mind a lady and her child,” Muna claims. “Her mobile ended up being really small and dark, your ex cried on a regular basis, and over and over repeatedly, she attempted to peer under the home, dreaming about a little bit of daylight.”

Muna had been fundamentally awarded amnesty and released. In 2016, she was able to flee to Turkey, where she nevertheless lives today — in Gaziantep, a city that has been a haven for half of a million Syrians.

No body understands just how lots of women are imprisoned in Syria. “a lot more than 7,000,” estimates Fadel Abdul Ghani, mind associated with the Syrian system for Human Rights, a monitoring group that documents human rights violations within the war that is syrian.

Ghani’s statistics on armed teams reveal that many of those additionally involve situations of violence against females — as well as the Syrian government heads that list. Women are deliberately targeted, he says, simply because they constantly played a role that is important the opposition against Assad. The regime sees torture and intimate punishment of females as a war strategy, Ghani argues. “Break the ladies, and also you break the household — along with it opposition in society. That is the objective.”

Human rights activist Fadel Abdul Ghani claims the Assad regime utilizes the torture of females as war strategy

‘Systematic torture and abuse’

In 2017, Amnesty Overseas stated that a lot more than 17,000 folks have died since 2011 due to torture, punishment and disastrous conditions in prisons run by the Syrian cleverness solutions and also the Syrian federal government. As much as 13,000 individuals were executed during the infamous Saydnaya Military Prison north of Damascus, based on the individual liberties organization, which claims the “systematic, extensive assault because of the federal federal government on civilians” amounts to “crimes against mankind.”

The Syrian president rejected the report, that will be according to statements created by previous prisoners, as “fake news.”

The ‘cure task’

Muna wants the globe to understand exactly what is going on in Syrian prisons. Humiliation had been area of the torture, too, she claims, recalling an event the place where a man was asked by a guard about their occupation. The guy stated he was a physician, and the guard ordered him to hop on a single leg and say, “we have always been a bunny.” “At first the physician spoke extremely quietly, him, then most of us heard him yell: ‘we have always been a rabbit, i’m a bunny. so they beat'”

Electroshock torture is just a regular event in Syrian regime prisons

Muna has in writing her story, and she gathers other victims’ reports, too. She has begun a help team for Syrian females, she escort services in Hayward calls it “project recovery.”

“Some ladies will not mention just exactly what occurred for them in prison, as well as others break up and can not stop crying once they speak about it,” Muna states. “we attempt to demonstrate to them they have been strong, that the terrible items that occurred in their mind are not their fault.”

“I inform them, start a fresh life.”

Muna’s new way life is in Turkey. But she hopes that certain time, she can help bring her torturers in Syria to justice.

Who is fighting within the Syria conflict?

War without any end

Syria happens to be engulfed in a devastating war that is civil 2011 after Syrian President Bashar Assad destroyed control over big components of the united states to numerous revolutionary teams. The conflict has since used foreign capabilities and brought misery and death to Syrians.