More than 1,000 Syrians died in detention in a military airport on the outskirts of Damascus, killed by execution, torture or mistreatment at a location that was widely feared, according to a report that was published on Thursday in which the dead are traced to seven suspected serious locations.
In the report, exclusively shared with Reuters, the Syria Justice and Accountability Center said it identified the serious locations by using a combination of witness statements, satellite images and documents that were photographed at the military airport in the suburb of Damascus in the suburb of Mezzeh.
Some locations were at the airport site. Others were in Damascus.
Reuters did not investigate the documents and could not confirm the existence of the mass graves independently due to his own assessment of satellite images. But Reuters reporters did see signs of disturbed earth in images of many of the places demonstrated by Sjac. Two of the sites, one on the country house of Mezzeh and another at a cemetery in Najha, show clear signs of long trenches dug during periods that are consistent with witness statements from Sjac.
Shadi Haroun, one of the authors of the report, said he was until the prisoners. He was held for several months in 2011-2012 for organizing protests, he described daily interrogations with physical and psychological torture that was intended to force him to be unfounded confessions.
Death came in many forms, he told Reuters.
Although prisoners saw nothing except their cell walls or the interrogation room, they heard “incidental shootings, shot by shot, every few days”.
Then the injuries were inflicted by their clothes.
“A small wound on the basis of one of the prisoners, caused by a lashes he received during torture, was left untreated or untreated for days, which gradually changed in Gangrene and his condition until it reached the point of amputation of the entire foot,” said Haroun, who said the fate of a cell mate.
In addition to obtaining the documents, Sjac and the Association for the prisoner and missing persons in the prison of Sednaya 156 survivors and eight former members of Air Force Intelligence, Syria security service who had the task of surveillance, imprisonment and killing of regime criticians.
The new government has issued a decree that forbids former regime officials to speak publicly and there was none available to comment.
“Although some of the graves mentioned in the report had never been discovered, the discovery itself is not surprising because we know that there are more than 100,000 missing persons in Assad’s prisons that did not come out during the days of liberation at the beginning of December,” said a colonel in the interior ministery of the new government that identified itself by his military alias, Abu Baker.
“Discovering the fate of those missing persons and the search for more graves is one of the biggest legacies left by the Assad regime,” he said.
An estimated hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed since 2011, when Assad’s harsh action against protests in a complete war flushed. Both Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, have long been accused by law groups, foreign governments and prosecutors of war crime of widespread extrajudicial murders, including mass executions within the prison system of the country and using chemicals against the Syrian people.
De Sjac said that all survivors who interviewed the interviewee had been tortured.
The report focuses on the first years of the Uprising, from 2011 to 2017. But a few testimonies from former regime officers established on Mezzeh detailed events to the fall of the regime.
The military airport of Mezzeh was an integral part of the machines of the Assad government of forced disappearance and, according to the report, housed at least 29,000 prisoners between 2011 and 2017.
By 2020, according to the report, Air Force Intelligence had more than a dozen Hangars, dorms and offices in Mezzeh converted into prisons.
Sjac, a Syrian-based Syrian led by the human rights group led by European governments financed by European governments and, until the recent financing by the Trump administration, the US government, said that the estimate of the dead comes from two Air Force Intelligenate datasets that are a total of 1,154 prisoners there are. testimony. The estimate does not include people who have been executed after they have been sentenced to death by a military Veldhof founded in a hangar.
According to witness statements in the report, officers and soldiers were executed by shooting team, while civilians were hung. Two witnesses said that many of those who were executed were buried near the Hangar.
In December, the US Department of Justice dismissed war crimes against two ranking Syrian Air Force -Inflating officers about “The breach of cruel and inhuman treatment among prisoners under their control, including American citizens, in detention facilities at Mezzeh’s military airport.”
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)