More than 1,000 Syrians died, were executed, tortured or ill-treated in a detention center in a Damascus suburb in Damascus, a report published Thursday that included widespread concerns about its site.
In the report, shared only with Reuters, the Syrian Centre for Justice and Accountability said it determined the location of the grave by using witness testimony, satellite images and documents taken at a military airport in Mezzeh, a suburb of Damascus.
Some locations are on the ground of the airport. Others face Damascus.
Reuters did not check the documents and could not independently confirm the existence of the mass grave through its own comments on satellite images. However, Reuters reporters did see many signs of disturbing earth in images of places pointed out by SJAC. Two of the locations, one on the Mezzeh Airport property and the other on the cemetery in Najha, showed obvious signs consistent with the witness testimony of SJAC.
Shadi Haroun, one of the authors of the report, said he was one of the prisoners. He held months to organize protests between 2011 and 2012, describing the daily interrogation aimed at forcing him to fall into baseless confessions.
He told Reuters that deaths were in many forms.
Although detainees see nothing but their cell walls or the interrogation room, they can hear “an occasional shootings, every few days.”
Then there is the damage caused by the torture.
“A detainee, who was caused by the whipping he received during the torture, was whipped or not treated at the foot for several days and gradually turned into gangrene until the amputation point of the entire foot amputation became evil,” Harrown said.
In addition to obtaining documents, the SJAC and the association of detained and missing persons in Sednaya prison interviewed 156 survivors and eight former Air Force Intelligence Agency members, Syria’s Security Services Department is responsible for surveillance, imprisonment and killing regime critics.
The new government has issued a decree that prohibits former regime officials from speaking publicly, and no one can comment.
“Although some of the graves mentioned in the report have not been found before, the discovery itself does not surprise us, as we know that more than 100,000 missing persons in the Assad prison did not appear on the day of liberation in early December.” The colonel of the new government’s interior ministry was resided in his army by his army.
“Discovering the fate of those missing and searching for more graves is one of the biggest legacies left by the Assad regime,” he said.
It is estimated that thousands of Syrians have been killed since 2011, when Assad’s crackdown on protests tends to be a full-scale war. Assad and his father Hafez, who served as president and died in 2000, have long been charged by rights groups, foreign governments and prosecutors in war crimes with widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions within the country’s prison system and the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people.
SJAC said all survivors interviewed were tortured.
The report focuses on the first few years of the uprising, from 2011 to 2017. However, some testimony from former regime officials in the Mezzeh detailed incident before the regime fell.
The report said the Meze military airport is an integral part of the Assad government’s mandatory disappearance agency, and it accommodated at least 29,000 detainees between 2011 and 2017.
According to the report, by 2020, the Air Force Intelligence Agency has transformed more than a dozen hangars, dormitories and offices in Mezzeh into prisons.
The SJAC is a human rights group led by the European government-funded Syrian U.S. until the recent freeze of funds from the U.S. government, the U.S. government estimates came from two Air Force intelligence data sets, listing 1,154 detainees who died between 2011 and 2017 and between 2017. This dataset was leaked in the Facebook group. The estimate does not include those executed after the death sentence was imposed by the military field court established in the hangar.
According to testimony in the report, officials and soldiers were fired from the squad and civilians were hanged. Two witnesses said many of the executed people were buried near the hangar.
In December, the U.S. Department of Justice’s unsealed war crimes accused two ranked Syrian Air Force intelligence officials of “inflicting cruel and inhuman treatment of detainees at the Mezehill military airport, including U.S. citizens.”
(The story has not been edited by NDTV staff except the title and published from the joint feed.)
