Evidence Of The Atrocities Of The Assad Regime Era, 1,000 Syrian Citizens Died Tortured In Detention At Military Airport

JAKARTA - More than 1,000 Syrians were killed in detention at a military airport on the outskirts of Damascus, killed by execution, torture, or maltreatment.

This is known from reports tracing deaths in seven places suspected of being graves.

In a report exclusively shared with Reuters, Syria's Center for Justice and Accountability said it identified the location of the cemetery using a combination of witness testimony, satellite imagery, and documents photographed at the military airport in Mezzeh, a suburb of Damascus, after the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad in December.

Several locations are in the airport area. Others are across from Damascus.

Reuters did not examine the documents and was unable to independently confirm the existence of mass graves through a review of his own satellite imagery.

But Reuters journalists did see signs of funerals from pictures in many places shown by SJAC.

Two of these locations, one on the Mezzeh airport property and the other at the cemetery in Najha, showed clear signs of long ditches excavated over a certain period of time in accordance with witness testimony from SJAC.

Shadi Haroun, one of the authors of the report, said he was among the prisoners.

Detained for several months in 2011-2012 for organizing protests, Haroun described daily interrogations with physical and psychological torture meant to force him to baseless recognition.

"Deaths come in various forms," he told Reuters.

Although the prisoners saw nothing but cell walls or interrogation rooms, they could hear the 'catching occasionally, gunfire after fire, every few days.'

Then there were wounds caused by the winners.

Small wounds on the feet of one of the detainees, caused by the whips he received during the torture, were left unsterled or treated for days, which gradually turned into gangrene and his condition worsened until he reached the all-leg amputation point, Haroun said, describing the suffering of his cellmate reported by Reuters on Thursday, February 27.

In addition to obtaining the documents, SJAC and the Association of Detained and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison interviewed 156 survivors and eight former air force intelligence members, the Syrian security services tasked with supervising, imprisoning, and killing regime critics.

The new government has issued a decree prohibiting former regime officials from speaking in public and no one can comment.

"Although some of the graves mentioned in the report have never been found before, the discovery itself does not surprise us, because we know that there are more than 100,000 people missing in Assad prisons who did not come out during the days of release in early December," said a colonel at the Interior Ministry of the new government who identified himself under the pseudonym of his military, Abu Baker.

"Finding the fate of the missing people and looking for other graves is one of the largest heritage left by the Assad regime," he said.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are thought to have been killed since 2011, as Assad's crackdown on protests grew into a full-scale war.

Both Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, have long been accused by human rights groups, foreign governments, and war crimes prosecutors over 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 focused on the first years of the uprising, from 2011 to 2017.

However, some testimony from former Mezzeh-based regime officials detailed the incidents that led to the fall of the regime.

Mezzeh military airport is part of the integral of the Assad administration's forced removal mechanism and accommodates at least 29,000 prisoners between 2011 and 2017, according to the report.