Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government has been running a network of secret torture facilities across Syria while the country's civil war unfolded, a new report has found.

In a lengthy report, the New York Times found that the rate at which people are being detained in the country is still increasing, despite Assad's military win in the bloody conflict - now in its ninth year.

In the report, several survivors shared gruesome testimonies of how they were arrested and tortured across a number of prison facilities run by the Syrian intelligence.

The survivors are just a handful of hundreds of thousands of people believed to have passed through the secret prison system since the Syrian uprising kicked off in 2011.

Memos sent to Syria's head of military intelligence, and obtained by the New York Times, are reporting the deaths of those imprisoned, while also apparently showing government officials ordering crackdowns and discussing deaths in detention, the Times reported.

"The memos were signed by top security officials, including members of the Central Crisis Management Committee, which reports directly to Mr. al-Assad," the Times reported.

The exact number of civilians detained in these prisons is unknown, but around 128,000 Syrians are either considered to be detained or dead, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

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Nearly 14,000 were killed as a result of torture. Testimonies by survivors of the prison system reveal torture methods including regular beatings, hanging by the wrists, being shocked with electricity, rape, and other forms of sexual assault.

Other methods have forced detainees to "act like animals" and "beat or kill one another".

Methods of routine torture have been utilised as a tool to crack down on opposition and dissent, and according to the Times, have been "critical" to Assad's military success in Syria.

Although the Syrian government has denied that it carries out systematic abuse, it has recently acknowledged the death of hundreds in detention by issuing death certificates, or "listing them as dead" in family registration files.

The Times said the millions of relatives of those missing detainees remain living in "social and psychological limbo".

"Without death certificates, presumed widows cannot remarry. Children cannot inherit," the report read.

A United Nations panel said last year that the conditions of the prisons – where detainees, crammed in tiny cells, are often denied water, clean food, blankets, and clothes – amounted to "extermination".

Medical neglect and poor hygiene conditions have claimed the lives of many in detention, the Times revealed. The Times said those transferred to a military hospital are also unsafe as many have been tortured and killed by the staff.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, government detention accounts for about 90 percent of all disappearance cases in Syria - a figure significantly higher than the number of people detained by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS), the Times said.

While Assad and his aides remain in power, a growing movement is seeking justice via European courts. French and German prosecutors have arrested three former security officials, the Times said, and have issued arrest warrants for individuals including Syria's national security head, Ali Mamlouk.

Today, there are nearly six million Syrian refugees who fled the war in Syria. Even as the war ends, many fear persecution upon returning and have voiced their need for a UN-sponsored safe return process. </s> Two suspected former secret service officers from the Syrian government have been arrested in Germany on allegations of carrying out or aiding torture and crimes against humanity.

The men, identified only as Anwar R, 56, and Eyad A, 42, were arrested in Berlin and in Zweibrücken, in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, on Tuesday. Both men are believed to have left Syria in 2012 and to have sought asylum in Germany.

The arrests follow years of investigation assisted by the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR).

As part of an operation coordinated with police in France, another Syrian alleged to have worked for the secret service was arrested by Parisian prosecutors on Tuesday. His name was not revealed.

It is the first time that western criminal prosecutors have arrested alleged torturers working for Bashar al-Assad.

The federal prosecution service in Karlsruhe said in a statement: “From April 2011 at the latest, the Syrian regime began to suppress all anti-government activities of the opposition nationwide with brutal force. The Syrian secret services played a vital role in this. The goal was to use the intelligence services to stop the protest movement as early as possible.”

Anwar R is suspected of heading a secret service department that operated a prison near Damascus. He is accused of participation in the torture and abuse of prisoners between April 2011 and September 2012.

The prosecutors said: “As head of the investigative division, Anwar R directed and commanded prison operations, including the use of systematic and brutal torture.”

Eyad A is thought to be a former officer who aided and abetted the murders and physical abuse of around 2,000 people between July 2011 and January 2012.

He is alleged to have been responsible for guarding a checkpoint close to Damascus in 2011, where typically around 100 people a day were arrested before being imprisoned and tortured in Anwar R’s jail.

The arrest warrants for the pair were issued several months ago. Warrants have also been issued against at least 24 other alleged members of Assad’s government, including Jamil Hassan, the head of Syria’s notorious Air Force Intelligence Directorate.

Hassan is wanted in Germany for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, and is believed to have tortured and murdered tens of thousands of civilians. The ECCHR is assisting torture survivors to file cases against their alleged torturers.

Evidence against Hassan was gathered in interviews with other Syrians, some of whom live in Germany.

Anwar R has apparently not made a secret of his role in torture, expressing the view that his flight from Syria and his application for asylum in Germany is evidence enough that he has distanced himself from his past.

Substantial evidence against the men was gathered as a result of the exhibition of so-called Caesar photographs in the UN headquarters in New York in March 2015, which depicted the corpses of thousands of torture victims alongside personal testimonies. The photographs were taken by a former member of the Syrian military police calling himself Caesar, who fled Syria with the images in 2013.

German authorities have approached the cases under the legal principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows the prosecution of crimes in one country even if they happened elsewhere.

It was on the same basis that the US judiciary ruled last week that the Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin was deliberately targeted and murdered by Assad’s rgovernment. </s> Berlin — Germany has arrested two alleged former Syrian secret service officers accused of torture and crimes against humanity, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

The men, 56-year-old Anwar R and Eyad A, 42, were arrested on Tuesday in Berlin and Rhineland-Palatinate state. Both left Syria in 2012.

Also on Tuesday, another Syrian believed to have worked for the secret service was arrested in France in what was a “co-ordinated” operation, the federal prosecution in Karlsruhe said.

“From April 2011, the Syrian regime started to suppress with brutal force all anti-government activities of the opposition nationwide,” a prosecution statement said.

“The Syrian secret services played an essential role in this. The aim was to use the intelligence services to stop the protest movement as early as possible.”

Anwar R had allegedly led a secret service division that operated a prison in the Damascus area, and had participated in the torture and abuse of prisoners from April 2011 to September 2012.

“As head of the investigative department, Anwar R directed and commanded prison operations, including the use of systematic and brutal torture,” it said.

Eyad A, a former officer who had manned checkpoints and hunted protesters, had allegedly aided and abetted two killings and the physical abuse of some 2,000 people between July 2011 and January 2012.

In the summer of 2011, he manned a checkpoint near Damascus where around 100 people per day were arrested then jailed and tortured in the prison headed by Anwar R.

The conflict in Syria has killed more than 360,000 people and displaced millions since it began in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.

Several other legal cases are now pending in Germany against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

In 2018, German prosecutors issued an international arrest warrant for Jamil Hassan, a top Syrian official who headed the notorious airforce intelligence directorate and is accused of overseeing the torture and murder of hundreds of detainees.

Although the alleged abuses did not happen in Germany, the case has been filed under the legal principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows any country to pursue perpetrators regardless of where the crime was committed.

The Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights has also joined with torture survivors to file criminal complaints against 10 high-ranking Syrian officials, accusing them of crimes against humanity and war crimes. </s> Ghabbash, a law student from Aleppo, repeatedly confessed his actual offense: organizing peaceful anti-government protests. But the torture continued for 12 days, until he wrote a fictional confession to planning a bombing.

That, he said, was just the beginning.

He was flown to a crammed prison at Mezze air base in Damascus, the Syrian capital, where he said guards hung him and other detainees from a fence naked, spraying them with water on cold nights. To entertain colleagues over dinner, he and other survivors said, an officer calling himself Hitler forced prisoners to act like dogs, donkeys and cats, beating those who failed to bark or bray correctly.

In a military 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 from disease, torture and neglect in a single month.

“I was among the lucky,” said Ghabbash, 31, who survived 19 months in detention 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 system of arbitrary arrests and torture prisons has been pivotal to his success. While the Syrian military, 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 independent monitoring group that keeps the most rigorous tally. Nearly 14,000 were “killed under torture.” Many prisoners die from conditions so dire that a UN investigation labelled the process “extermination.”

Now, even as the war winds down, the world’s attention fades and countries start to normalise relations 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.

The Syrian government has denied the existence of systematic abuse. However, newly discovered government memos show that Syrian officials who report directly to Assad ordered mass detentions and knew of atrocities.

War crimes investigators with the non-profit Commission for International Justice and Accountability, or CIJA, have found government memos ordering crackdowns and discussing deaths in detention. The memos were signed by top security officials, including members of the Central Crisis Management Committee, which reports directly to Assad.

A military intelligence memo acknowledges deaths from torture and filthy conditions. Other memos report deaths of detainees, some later identified among photos of corpses smuggled out by a military police defector. Two memos authorise “harsh” treatment of specific detainees. A memo from the head of military intelligence, Rafiq Shehadeh, orders officers to take steps to ensure “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 isolated mistakes unavoidable in a war.

Over seven years, The New York Times has interviewed dozens of survivors and relatives of dead and missing detainees, reviewed government documents and examined hundreds of pages of witness testimony. The survivors’ accounts align with accounts from other prisoners held in the same jails, and are supported by the government memos and by photos smuggled out of Syrian prisons.

There is little hope for holding top officials accountable anytime soon. But there is a growing movement to seek justice through European courts. French and German prosecutors have arrested three former security officials and issued international 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 lieutenants remain in power, safe from arrest, protected by Russia with its military might and its veto in the UN 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 5 million Syrian refugees in the Middle East and Europe 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.”

It was the detention and torture of several teenagers in March 2011, for scrawling graffiti critical of Assad, that pushed Syrians to join the uprisings then sweeping Arab countries. Demonstrations protesting their treatment spread from their hometown, Daraa, leading to more arrests, which galvanised more protests.

A flood of detainees from all over Syria joined the dissidents at Saydnaya Prison. The new detainees ranged “from the garbageman to the peasant to the engineer to the doctor, all classes of Syrians,” said Riyad Avlar, a Turkish citizen who was held for 20 years after being arrested in 1996, as a 19-year-old student, for interviewing Syrians about a prison massacre.

Torture increased, he said; the newcomers were sexually 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 hundreds of thousands to a million. The Syrian Network’s tally of 127,916 people currently caught in the system is probably an undercount. The number, a count of arrests reported by detainees’ families and other witnesses, 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 in memos 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.

Ghabbash, the protest organiser from Aleppo, survived torture at at least 12 facilities, making him, he says, “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 general intelligence facilities, he said.

In March 2012, Ghabbash was flown to Mezze military air base, named for a well-off Damascus neighborhood nearby.

By then, he and numerous survivors said, there was an industrial-scale transportation system among prisons. Detainees were tortured on each leg of their journeys. Some recalled riding for hours in trucks normally used for animal carcasses, chained to meat 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 handcuffed 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 grew more brutal and baroque as rebels outside made advances and government warplanes bombed restive neighborhoods. Survivors describe sadistic treatment, rape, summary executions or detainees left to die of untreated wounds and illnesses.

After weeks or months, many prisoners got so-called trials lasting minutes with no defense lawyers. Ghabbash’s was typical. At a military “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 1 1/2 minutes,” he said.

He expected to go to Saydnaya Prison, which by then was a mass execution center. Thousands have been hanged there after summary trials, according to an Amnesty International report.

“Good, it’s finished,” he recalled thinking. But it was not. He would endure another year of daily beatings.

His last stint was in a makeshift prison deep underground near Damascus, a military bunker of the elite 4th Division, a fief of Assad’s brother Maher. There were no more interrogations.

“Torture just for torture,” said Darwish, who was also transferred there. “For revenge, for killing, for breaking the people.”

Women and girls have been raped and sexually assaulted in at least 20 intelligence branches, and men and boys in 15 of those, a UN human rights commission reported last year.

Sexual assault is a double-barrelled weapon in traditional Muslim communities, where survivors are often stigmatised. Relatives have killed female ex-detainees in honour killings, sometimes merely on the assumption they have been raped, rights reports and survivors say.

Mariam Khleif, a 32-year-old mother of five from Hama, was repeatedly raped during her detention. Khleif said she had aided injured protesters and delivered medical supplies to rebels, acts that the government labelled terrorism.

Khleif’s family rejected her over what they considered her loss of honor and her politics, she said. Her pro-government brother texted death threats; her husband divorced her.

For some conservative men, the conflict changed attitudes. Several survivors and male relatives say their families now honour sexual assault survivors as war wounded. Khleif hid nothing from her new husband, a former rebel.

“You are a medal on my chest, you are the crown on my head,” she recalled him telling her.

Detainees and defectors have risked their lives to tell their families, and the world, of their plight.

In the 4th Division dungeon, several detainees decided 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 activism in 2011 and later shared his cell in Mezze — 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 reached Western capitals; the shirt scraps were displayed at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Two years later, a released detainee reported that Shurbaji had been beaten to death.

Syria’s war remains without a political solution. With peace talks stalled, Russia is urging the West to normalise and finance reconstruction anyway, deferring reforms. The millions of relatives of missing detainees float in a social and psychological limbo. Without death certificates, 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, Ghabbash landed in Gaziantep, Turkey, where he runs women’s rights and aid programs for refugees in the last patch of rebel-held Syria.

Darwish struggles with insomnia and claustrophobia, but continues his work for accountability. He recently testified about Mezze prison in a French court hearing in the case of a Syrian-French father and son who died there. That helped French prosecutors secure arrest warrants for Mamlouk, the top security official, Hassan, the air force intelligence chief, and the head of Mezze prison. Now, Mamlouk could be arrested if he travels to Europe.

The threat of prosecution, Darwish said, is the only tool left to save detainees.

“It gives you energy, but it’s a heavy responsibility,” he said. “This could save a soul. Some are my friends. When I was released they said, ‘Please don’t forget us.’” </s> Lynn Maalouf, deputy director of research at Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, Feb. 6, 2017. Amnesty International says Syrian authorities killed at least 13,000 people in mass hangings at a prison north of Damascus known to detainees as the “slaughterhouse.” The group released a report covering the period from the start of the 2011 uprising until 2015, during which Amnesty says groups of 20 to 50 people were hanged at Saydnaya Prison, once or twice a week, in killings authorized by senior officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

COMBO - In this combination of two photos of Omar Alshogre, a 21-year Syrian former detainee, now living in Stockholm, Sweden. The left picture is of Alshogre taken on January 2017 in Stockholm, Sweden. The right picture is of Alshogre in July 2015 in Antakya, Turkey, a month after he got out of Syria's Saydnaya prison, near Damascus. While in detention, Alshogre said he heard men escorted to be hanged and had himself been called for "execution" but was spared after a brief trial. Amnesty published a new report on Tuesday revealing that as many as 13,000 men were hanged in secret in a Syrian prison between 2011 and 2015, as part of a government campaign of extrajudicial executions. The group says for five years, once or twice weekly, groups of up to 50 people were taken out of their prison cells and hanged to death. (Handout by Omar Alshogre via AP)

BEIRUT — The prison north of Damascus was known to detainees as “the slaughterhouse” and in it, as many of 13,000 people were hanged in only four years after a series of sham trials, according to a new report issued by Amnesty International.

The report, issued on Tuesday, said that 20-50 people were hanged each week at the Saydnaya prison in what the organization called a “calculated campaign of extrajudicial execution.”

The report covers the period from 2011 to 2015, but Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty’s regional office in Beirut, said there is no reason to believe the practice has stopped since then, with thousands more probably killed.

“These executions take place after a sham trial that lasts over a minute or two minutes, but they are authorized by the highest levels of authority,” including the Grand Mufti, a top religious authority in Syria, and the defence minister, she said.

The killings were authorized by senior Syrian officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad, and carried out by military police. Amnesty has also recorded at least 35 different methods of torture in Syria since the late 1980s, practices that only increased since 2011, Maalouf said.

Other rights groups have found evidence of massive torture leading to death in Syrian detention facilities. In a report last year, Amnesty found that more than 17,000 people have died of torture and ill-treatment in custody across Syria since 2011, an average rate of more than 300 deaths a month.

Those figures are comparable to battlefield deaths in Aleppo, one of the fiercest war zones in Syria, where 21,000 were killed across the province since 2011.

“The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population,” Maalouf said.

Syrian government officials rarely comment on allegations of torture and mass killings. In the past, they have denied reports of massacres documented by international human rights groups, describing them as propaganda.

The chilling accounts in Tuesday’s report came from interviews with 31 former detainees and over 50 other officials and experts, including former guards and judges.

According to the findings, detainees were told they would be transferred to civilian detention centres but were taken instead to another building in the facility and hanged.

“They walked in the ’train,’ so they had their heads down and were trying to catch the shirt of the person in front of them. The first time I saw them, I was horrified. They were being taken to the slaughterhouse,” Hamid, a former detainee, told Amnesty.

Another former detainee, Omar Alshogre, told The Associated Press the guards would come to his cell, sometimes three times a week, and call out detainees by name.

Alshogre said a torture session would begin before midnight in nearby chambers that he could hear.

“Then the sound would stop, and we would hear a big vehicle come and take them away,” said Alshogre, who spent nine months in Saydnaya. Now 21, he lives in Sweden.

Speaking in an interview from Stockholm via Skype, Alshogre described how he was forced to keep his eyes closed and his back to the guards while they abused or suffocated a cellmate.

The body often would be left behind, or there would be a pool of blood in the cell for other prisoners to clean up.

“We can tell from the sound of the prisoner as he dies behind us. He dies a meter away. I don’t see anything, but I see with my ears,” said Alshogre, who at age 17 moved among nearly 10 detention facilities in Syria for two years before he was taken to Saydnaya.

Alshogre survived nine months in the prison, paying his way out in 2015 — a common practice. He suffered from tuberculosis and his weight fell to 35 kilograms (77 pounds).

Two cousins detained with him in western Syria didn’t survive, dying a year apart in a military intelligence detention facility. The younger one died in Alshogre’s arms, deprived of food and so weak he was unable to walk to the bathroom on his own.

Still, Alshogre said nothing could have prepared him for Saydnaya.

At one point, Alshogre was called out by his guards “for execution,” he said. He was brought before a military trial and told not to raise his gaze at the judge, who asked him how many soldiers he had killed.

When he said none, the judge spared him.

Death in Saydnaya was always present, “like the air,” Alshogre said.

Once when he was deprived of food for two days, a cellmate handed him his food ration — and died days later.

“This is someone who gave me his life,” he said. Another cellmate died of diarrhea, also common in the prison.

“Death is the simplest thing. It was the most hoped for because it would have spared us a lot: hunger, thirst, fear, pain, cold, thinking,” he added.

“Thinking was so hard. It could also kill,” said Alshogre, who keeps a photo of one of his tormentors on the wall of his home.
Memos sent to Syria's head of military intelligence, and obtained by the New York Times, report that President Bashar al-Assad's government has been running a network of secret torture facilities across Syria, crushing opposition via routine torture in secret prisons.