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> 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> 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> Two suspected former Syrian intelligence agents have been detained in Germany at the request of the German prosecutor’s office. According to the prosecutor, the men, aged 42 and 56 years and arrested in Berlin and Rhineland-Palatinate, are suspected of “orchestrating tortures” and crimes against humanity in Syria. Another reported member of the alleged Syrian secret service was arrested in France, according to the Paris public prosecutor's office. All three arrests were made in a joint coordinated operation.

The German authorities claim that the two men who were arrested in Germany belonged to the regional investigative department of the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate in the capital area of Damascus; however, no evidence of this has been revealed to the public.

The 56-year-old suspect, known by the name of Anwar R., was allegedly “involved in tortures and physical abuse” as a senior Syrian intelligence agent between April 2011 and September 2012. He allegedly oversaw a so-called investigation department that also had its own prison. During the interrogations there, prisoners were reportedly “tortured brutally", while Anwar R., who was allegedly in charge of the facility, is suspected of ordering the systematic “torture” its inmates.

The 42-year-old, called Eyad A., is suspected of working for a unit in the department run by Anwar R. The list of charges against him includes being an accomplice in the killing of two people, as well as torturing at least 2,000 others between July 2011 and January 2012, as he worked for the country’s intelligence service.

READ MORE: German Court Sentences Syrian to Life in Jail for War Crimes

Both suspects reportedly fled Syria and claimed asylum in Germany, but German media suggest that Anwar R. was not trying hard to conceal his past. Damascus has yet to comment on the charges brought against its nationals. Syria also denies the existence of the so-called "secret police prisons”, claims about which have been made by activists and mainstream media outlets since 2011.

Syria has been in a state of civil war since 2011, with government forces fighting against numerous opposition groups and terrorist organizations, such as Daesh*. Russia, along with Turkey and Iran, is one of the guarantor states of the Syrian ceasefire. Moscow has also been assisting Damascus by providing humanitarian aid to residents of the war-torn country.

Daesh* previously seized large swaths of land in the Middle East, primarily from Iraq and Syria, and declared a caliphate. The terror group’s activities have also been registered in other countries, such as Afghanistan and Libya. However, Daesh terrorists have been driven from the vast majority of the settlements and territories that they once occupied, including from Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

*Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS) is a terrorist group banned in Russia and many other countries. </s> Three alleged former Syrian secret service officers have been arrested in Germany and France on suspicion of participating in torture and crimes against humanity, prosecutors in both countries said Wednesday.

All three were arrested on Tuesday in a "coordinated" operation by German and French police, the federal prosecution in the German city of Karlsruhe said.

Anwar R., 56, and 42-year-old Eyad A. were detained in Berlin and Rhineland-Palatinate state, prosecutors said. Both left Syria in 2012.

The same day, another Syrian was detained in the Paris region for "acts of torture, crimes against humanity and complicity in these crimes", the Paris prosecutor's office said.

The suspect, who is in his 30s, is accused of participating in acts of violence against civilians from March 2011 until 2013 when he worked for Syria's mukhabarat, or secret service, a source familiar with the case said.

The Syria conflict began in March 2011 with a series of mass protests demanding civil liberties, prompting a harsh crackdown by the regime which quickly began using "brutal force" against anti-government protesters, German prosecutors said in a statement.

"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. 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.

More than 360,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict with millions more displaced.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 60,000 people have died from torture or harsh conditions in regime custody since the conflict began.

Several other legal cases are now pending in Germany against the Assad regime.

Last year, 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 Center 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> On Sunday, the Times published an exhaustively reported and harrowing story about Bashar al-Assad’s secret network of prisons, which also serve as torture sites and execution centers. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group, nearly a hundred and twenty-eight thousand people are presumed to have been killed in the prisons or are being held there in custody—and nearly fourteen thousand have been killed by torture. Many prisoners die from conditions so dire that a United Nations investigation labelled the process “extermination.”

Eight years into the Syrian civil war, with Assad’s regime quickly gaining ground, Anne Barnard, of the Times, tells the stories of numerous survivors of the prison system, including details of the torture, sexual violence, and dehumanization that they faced there. Former prisoners recalled a guard who went by the name Hitler, who forced them “to act the roles of dogs, donkeys and cats, beating those who failed to bark or bray correctly.” Mariam Khlief and six other women were held in a basement cell, where they were beaten, tortured, and repeatedly raped. Survivors recalled blood from violent rapes staining the floor, guards stuffing excrement in the mouths of prisoners, and “a man who doubled as a nurse and a guard and called himself Azrael,” the angel of death, who murdered prisoners at night. It is almost impossible to do justice to the depth of Barnard’s reporting and the evil it describes.

Barnard, who has been working on the story for seven years, holds the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations. She previously spent six years as the Times’ Beirut bureau chief. After the story was posted online, I spoke with her by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Syria’s prisons have changed in the past several decades, whether the Western focus on ISIS warped our understanding of the Syrian civil war, and the long-term consequences of systemized torture.

How did you decide to turn all this reporting from over seven years, as the piece says, into one giant story?

Over the years, the pivotal importance of the detention system and rampant torture and even the fear of the detention—the pivotal role that that whole complex played in the trajectory and outcome of the war—became more and more clear. We had spent years covering the things that were happening more out in the open—I’m talking about the barrel bombs, the artillery attacks on neighborhoods, the war planes bombing neighborhoods, the attacks on medical facilities. All those things were, when they started to happen, in a way more newsy than the prisons, because the prisons had existed for decades before the civil war even began, before the political protests even began. These prisons are a reason why there was an uprising, and they were also the pivotal tool for suppressing that uprising.

I just continued to believe, the more it took shape in my mind, that this had actually been a pivotal factor in the outcome of the conflict, and the more we talked to hundreds of Syrians in the course of our work, we understood that almost every Syrian seemed to have somebody who was lost inside this system. So the scale, as well as the integrity of it.

Assad’s regime has always been a dictatorship, as was the regime of his father. How rampant was torture before the civil war began, in 2011? You write that Assad kept his father’s system of detention in place. But did it grow just in that there were more and more people thrown into prisons, or did the way the prisons operate change as well over these years?

It’s more the former than the latter. We have the account of a guy who had been in prison for almost twenty years when the uprising started, so he commented on how it changed. There was a much bigger flood of people coming to the prisons, and they were no longer just the long-term, hardcore dissidents that he described as almost élite political prisoners, like a club. All of a sudden, the prisons started getting completely packed with every kind of Syrian, he said, from the professor to the doctor to the garbage man. Because there was this much bigger scale of roundups going on.

And he said, at the same time, the torture became worse. Torture became more intense and chaotic and sadistic. And that account is echoed by others who were in the prisons at that period.

One thing that I thought was interesting about the piece is the way that the behavior of the guards and the people running the prison system seems at times calculated but at other times simply sadistic. You’re describing how this system became more sadistic. Is that mostly the regime’s plan to instill fear and win the civil war, or is it also that, because it’s wartime, there are more prisons, the prisons are being run by people who don’t have training, and things get out of hand, even beyond the disturbing plans of the regime?

There are elements of both. I think that a lot of the sadism you’re describing is not new; it is not rogue. It is similar to what happened in the Tadmor prison after the Hama uprising, in 1982, even down to forcing prisoners to pretend to be animals. Even that has been described by prisoners from the eighties, and all the specific torture methods have been used all along. So I think the idea that things got out of hand and this was somehow out of the norm—unfortunately, from our reporting, the more chilling thing is that these things were not that unusual. This was the way it was in these prisons.

Is the same true for sexual violence?

Yes. Of course not every female prisoner was raped every day, like Mariam [Khleif]. That really did seem to vary from location to location in these prisons. And anecdotally it varied, but one degree of sexual assault or another was extremely rampant. Everything from pretending that they’re searching your body cavities, but really it’s being done by a man to a woman, and it’s being done in a lewd manner—this kind of stuff. There was a recent study, which I don’t think was included in our story, that found that a very high percentage of men had experienced one form of sexual assault or sexual humiliation or another. The pattern suggests that it is a deliberate attempt to humiliate and demoralize people and to make the cost of any kind of civil protests too high.

In Syria, women who were been raped or sexually assaulted were often seen as having lost honor or having brought dishonor upon their family. But what you say is that, for some men, this is no longer the case, which I suppose at one level is a great thing, but it felt like maybe the implication of what you were saying is that this change has only come about because it’s become so widespread and overwhelming. Is my interpretation fair or am I reading too much into what you’re saying?

I don’t know whether it’s because of it being widespread, or if it’s because of the political context. But it was something that I wasn’t particularly looking for or expecting to find but found notable enough to mention in this story, that some families from very conservative backgrounds had changed their opinion about this as a result of the war.

There is an amazing story, which is not in this piece because it has to do with prisons. I met a woman who had been one of the survivors at the Hula massacre, which was a situation where militia members went into a village where some of the men were armed rebels, and went from house to house raping and killing women, mostly with knives. This woman witnessed the rapes and murders of several of her daughters, and they raped her. I can’t remember why they didn’t kill her, but, when her brother came to the door and found her naked, she came running to him and she thought he was going to kill her right there. And he didn’t. He said, “No, I’m not going to kill you.” And then I met her son, who said, “Yes, these women in our family who survived this, we honor them the same way we honor people that were wounded in the war.” So that was an incredibly disturbing and moving story—that she thought her own brother would kill her after she just survived this, and he immediately saw it differently.

That’s a good point you raise also about it occurring in the context of the civil war, that people might see it differently.

Well, that they’re like martyrs for the cause. Just like anybody else.

How does the group that you’re quoting, especially at the beginning of the story, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, compile these astonishingly bleak figures?

The reason that they are considered the most rigorous and reliably conservative numbers, which are used by many U.N. agencies and governments and human-rights organizations, is that their numbers are not extrapolations or estimates. Their numbers are actual counts of reports that they get. They have people on the ground and people outside Syria, and they basically just take phone calls, and they also have a form on their Web site that you can fill in. They go through the detailed report to them, they verify what they can, and they take this actual tally. A death has to be reported by a family member or direct witness. They don’t take third-party accounts. They even have a guy who goes back and calls the people who have been listed as possible family members of people who have been listed as missing for a long time, to find out if they’re still missing or not. The guy who runs the place told me that they all need therapy, because all they do is take these reports from these family members and contact all these family members. All the people in his organization, like all the Syrians who are working on this and journalists—it piles up to be a large load of trauma and despair.

You mentioned that, especially earlier in the war, there was more of a focus on things like barrel bombs. I do not mean this as a criticism at all of any of the incredible ISIS reporting that a lot of people have done, but do you ever think that the obsessive focus on ISIS and its brutality, including from the American government, warped people’s idea of what was going on in Syria, and which side was committing the most atrocities?

Yes. ISIS and Assad both, in their own ways, played on the tendency of people in the West to be disproportionately terrified by Islamist terrorism, which is partly a phenomenon of Islamophobia and partly the over-weighting of terrorism that everybody does, because it’s such a sensational type of event. ISIS wanted its attacks to be publicized, and they did it on purpose, to terrify people and to expand their reach through psychological terror. Assad very specifically wanted to show the world that he was fighting terrorists and jihadists, whereas, in fact, his government is using all the machinery of the state, and the numbers of people that they are killing and arresting is much, much higher than the numbers that were harmed by ISIS, as terrible and criminal as ISIS’s acts were.

If the war keeps going in Assad’s favor, do you see any sign of this slowing down? Or do you think that this level of repression is likely to be the new norm as the war goes even more in his favor?

Unfortunately, yes. There’s an offensive right now, this weekend, trying to take territory in Idlib, and, while Idlib had become the last bastion of a lot of militant groups, it’s also where several million civilians have taken refuge, including those who fled from other areas that the government took over. So that’s a population that typically went to Idlib to avoid being detained, and, if that territory is retaken, those people risk being detained. More broadly, five million refugees don’t want to go back to Syria when there’s still a danger of being sucked into the system.

I asked a lot of people this question. I said, “Is there any reason to believe that Assad will become, let’s say, more magnanimous in victory? That he would ease up on this?” Everybody who had an experience with this system said that they believe, to the contrary, that the oppression will stay just as tight and that, in fact, the system might come back around to arrest the people that they forgot before.

And, really, one of the things that has the most impact for me is that, just as after the Hama massacre, in 1982, it was forbidden to talk about these massacres. So all this trauma had to go underground. It was repressed both psychologically and politically. It could not be talked about. That buried trauma and anger and unresolved conflict is part of what burst into the open when the 2011 uprising began.

So now we’re talking about something that was much bigger than Hama, and we’re talking about literally millions of Syrians who have a relative who is still missing inside the system and they can’t even talk about it. They can be arrested for even talking about it. And beyond that, there’s evidence that some of the people who have taken what they call reconciliation deals to stay in their homes and be under the government’s control—some of those people end up being arrested anyway.

How did reporting on Syria change over the course of the seven years that you reported this story?

There were a lot of things that evolved over time. Syria ended up becoming, in some ways, the most documented conflict maybe in history. What changed over time was that we were able to build amazing networks, really on all sides of the conflict, where we could have unprecedented real-time access to people in places that we couldn’t physically reach.

But, at the same time, the physical access has waxed and waned. The government is very unpredictable about when and if it will give a visa to go to their side. We used to have a team inside the rebel-held territories all the time. And then that stopped when the bombing from the government got so intense and the risk of kidnapping increased. Then at some point the New York Times didn’t let people go anymore. Then it became possible to go sometimes into Kurdish-held areas, but not always.

So it’s really been a mixed bag in terms of access, but I also think that one thing that’s happened is that, certainly, over the last year, the interest in day-to-day coverage and even enterprise coverage has really decreased. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this piece. Now, more than ever, it’s important to keep this in focus and not forget about it, as the world thinks that the war is over and they’re moving on and they’re even considering normalizing relations with this government. We have to know what it is that they’re normalizing with. </s> BEIRUT – The Syrian prison was known to detainees as “the slaughterhouse.” Behind its closed doors, the military police hanged as many of 13,000 people over the course of four years before carting out their bodies by the truckload for burial in mass graves, according to a new report issued by Amnesty International.

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

The report covers the period from the start of the March 2011 uprising to December 2015, when Amnesty says between 5,000 and 13,000 people were hanged.

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.

Amnesty said the killings were authorized by senior Syrian officials, including deputies of President Bashar Assad.

“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.

“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 defense minister.

There was no immediate comment from the Syrian government on Tuesday, and Amnesty said Damascus didn’t respond to its own letter seeking comment. 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 Amnesty report prompted a strong reaction from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who, “was horrified about what was in the report,” according to U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

“We have repeatedly raised serious concerns about the grave violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law in Syria, including in detention centers and government-run prisons,” Dujarric told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York. “What is important is that there needs to be accountability for all the victims in this conflict.”

Amnesty had 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 widespread 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 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.

Saydnaya has become the main political prison in Syria since 2011, according to a former official interviewed by Amnesty. A former guard said it held “the detainees of the revolution,” and a former judge said they were seen as “posing a real risk to the regime.”

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.

Detainees were told they would be transferred to civilian detention centers 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, 21, who spent nine months in Saydnaya and now lives in Sweden, said he would hear detainees being tortured. “Then the sound would stop,” he said.

He described how at times 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.

The Amnesty report contains similar accounts of abuse.

“We already know they will die anyway, so we do whatever we want with them,” Amnesty quoted a former guard as saying.

The detainees were transported to trials in vans known as “meat fridges,” and would not be informed of their fate until just before they were hanged, officials who witnessed the executions told Amnesty.

Medics would usually list the cause of death as “heart stopped,” or “breathing stopped,” before the bodies were taken to mass graves near Damascus.

Alshogre, who was arrested at the age of 17, spent time in several detention centers before being taken to Saydnaya.

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, he was summoned by guards “for execution,” he said. He was brought before a military tribunal and told not to raise his eyes to the judge, who asked him how many soldiers he had killed. When he said none, the judge spared him.

Alshogre survived nine months in Saydnaya before eventually paying his way out in 2015 – a common practice. He suffered from tuberculosis and his weight fell to 77 pounds.

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

Once when he was deprived of food for two days, a cellmate handed him his food ration – and died days later. 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 said. “Thinking was so hard. It could also kill.” </s> Bashar Assad is as evil as his old man was and will defend his grip on Syria down to the last Syrian.

Syrian President Bashar Assad has installed a crematorium in his most infamous prison complex in order to hide evidence of mass murder, and is executing as many as 50 people per day, according to newly-declassified U.S. intelligence.

“We now believe that the Syrian regime has installed a crematorium in the Saydnaya Prison Complex which could dispose of detainees remains with little evidence,” Stuart Jones, the acting assistant secretary of near eastern affairs, told reporters Monday at the State Department. “Although the regimes’ many atrocities are well-documented, we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison.”

Saydnaya Prison was branded a “human slaughterhouse” by Amnesty International, which estimates that as many as 13,000 people “were extrajudicially executed” between 2011 and 2015.

Jones added that the regime will put up to 70 prisoners in a cell designed to hold five people before they are killed. The State Department released the additional information in order to put pressure on Russia, which has provided Assad with crucial support.

“Russia holds tremendous influence over Bashar al-Assad,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Monday. “The killing and devastation has gone on for far too long in Syria.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin backs Assad because the regime has given Russia strategic benefits, such as access to a naval port on the Mediterranean Sea. Putin’s team is hosting a peace talks process in Astana, Kazakhstan, with the goal of ending the Syrian civil war in a way that allows them to retain the geopolitical benefits that first drew them to Assad. Former President Barack Obama’s team was not involved in those talks, and preferred a United Nations forum, but President Trump sent Jones to attend a conference in the first week of May.
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.