{"id":261,"date":"2011-05-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-26T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/?p=261","title":{"rendered":"Syrian student tells of torture ordeal in mass stadium detention"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nSyrian student tells of torture ordeal in mass stadium
\ndetention<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

\nSyrian security forces cracked down on Banias residents
\nafter pro-reform protests\n<\/p>\n

\n24 May 2011\n<\/p>\n

\nA 25-year-old university student tells Amnesty International
\nof the beatings and torture he and other detainees suffered while held in a
\nsports stadium after he was seized with his 73- year-old father by security
\nforces from their home in the coastal town of Banias on 8 May.\n<\/p>\n

\n“Several soldiers knocked at the door, asked us to come with
\nthem for five minutes because the officer wanted to see our IDs. We went with
\nthem and there were many other men and boys being taken from their homes like
\nus. They gathered us under Ras al-Naba’ Bridge, which is at the Ras al-Naba’
\nneighbourhood where armed clashes between the army and a few armed men had
\ntaken place last month [April].\n<\/p>\n

\n“There were five Toyota buses, each accommodating 24
\npassengers, and a Mazda bus that accommodates 31 passengers, as well as
\nmilitary vehicles. I stayed away from my father because if they had hit my father
\nin front of me, we would both have felt very bad.\n<\/p>\n

\n“On the bus, three soldiers accompanying us started hitting
\nmen who were sitting in the front seats. I was sitting in the back. Then, the
\nbus stopped in al-Qooz [an Alawite part of Banias] for a few minutes. We were
\nled out of the bus and a soldier was passing by with scissors cutting off
\ndetainees’ locks of hair randomly. He cut off a lock of my hair at the back of
\nmy head for no reason.\n<\/p>\n

\n“Then they took us to the sports stadium at the end of
\nCorniche Street in Banias. When I stepped down off the bus, they blindfolded me
\nand tied my hands in front of me with plastic wires. Some had their hands tied
\nbehind their back. Then they started hitting us. They made us all sit on our
\nknees in the stadium’s open parking space. There were hundreds of us, so we
\nwere sitting close to each other.\n<\/p>\n

\n“Soldiers wearing green camouflage uniforms and security
\npeople wearing green uniforms would walk around slapping us hard in the face,
\nkicking us with their military boots all over our bodies, especially our backs,
\nand beating us with coshes, batons and clubs.\n<\/p>\n

\n“Then they would choose certain detainees randomly and drag
\nthem a bit away from the others so that they have enough space to beat them
\nhard. One came to me as I was sitting on my knees, placed his shoe on my head
\nand forced it down until my face touched the floor. He asked me: ‘Who is your
\nmaster?’ I said: ‘Bashar al-Assad.’ He left me. The same thing happened to my
\nfriend, but the soldier banged my friend’s head on the floor with his shoe
\nuntil he bled from his nose and mouth. He kept asking him, ‘Who is your God?’
\nand did not leave him until he said: ‘Bashar al-Assad.’\n<\/p>\n

\n“If the blindfold slipped down, one of them would hit me and
\ntie it up. When anyone of us asked for water, a soldier would throw some on our
\nhead and prevent us from drinking. If anyone asked to go to the toilet, they
\nwould say: ‘Pee in your pants.’ And some later told me that they peed in their
\ntrousers. You could see the big stains.\n<\/p>\n

\n“I remember hearing a man pleading with them as he cried,
\nsaying that he had asthma, but they didn’t care.\n<\/p>\n

\n“We all stayed like that, sitting on our knees, beaten badly
\nand sworn at from around 2pm until 5.30pm. Then they ordered us to stand up and
\nwait to register our names. As we were waiting, three soldiers came and asked
\nme, a cousin, a neighbour and a friend to step out of the queue. One at a time,
\nwe were beaten with a long thick piece of wood that is usually used in
\nconstruction. Two soldiers held me tight and the third struck me with all his
\nstrength with this piece of wood on the back of my legs. He hit me that way
\nthree times and I fell down. It was so terrible.\n<\/p>\n

\n“Then after one hour of waiting to register our names, we
\nwere taken to the athletes’ dormitory, which consists of a long corridor with
\nlarge rooms. They packed each room with dozens of us. As I sat on my knees, my
\nbody became stuck to those sitting next to me. Then the security asked that we
\nmove to make passageways. Of course they needed these passageways so that they
\ncould pass between us and reach and hit all of us.\n<\/p>\n

\n“I was on the edge of one of these ‘passageways’, which
\nmeant that I was easily reachable and was beaten badly. One slapped me so hard
\non my ear that I kept hearing buzzing for over two hours.\n<\/p>\n

\n“They were particularly targeting those men with long beards
\n[possibly perceived as Islamists opposed to the state] in their beatings. There
\nwas one man with a long beard who was a sailor, not an Islamist. They beat him
\nso badly on his face, he bled a lot. My blindfold was set up a bit and when I
\ntilted my head back, I could see.\n<\/p>\n

\n“After several hours, they gave us a bit of water in the
\ndormitory and allowed us to go to the toilet, only for peeing.\n<\/p>\n

\n“Two incidents during detention made me feel very bad. One
\nrelated to my cousin. He is also my friend and was among the detainees. His
\neyesight is so weak that he is almost blind. He told the security: ‘I can’t
\nsee. I have a card that shows I have disabilities.’ They came to him and
\nstarted beating him hard. I saw blood had run down from behind his ears on both
\nsides.\n<\/p>\n

\n“The other incident is related to a boy of possibly 15 years
\nold or less. He had blisters on the back of one of his hands… I asked fellow
\ndetainees what had happened to his hand and they told me the blisters were
\ncaused by the security personnel burning him using a lighter.\n<\/p>\n

\n“A doctor, who is around 32 and works at the Jam’iyat
\nal-Birr wa al-Khadamat Hospital was beaten so badly that his hand was broken.
\nThe security said the hospital treated what they called ‘terrorists’.\n<\/p>\n

\n“My friend told me that he was sitting near a schoolteacher
\nwe know well, who is in his sixties. He was beaten badly despite his age. My
\nfriend told me that the schoolteacher addressed two of those who were beating
\nhim and reminded them that he had taught them in the past when they were
\nyounger. They just didn’t care.\n<\/p>\n

\n“When it was around 11pm, a senior officer came in and
\nordered the beatings to stop, and they did. When it was time to sleep, one
\ndetainee put his head on my thigh, another put his head on my stomach and I had
\nto place my head on the belly of a detainee. It was hard to sleep that way. I
\njust couldn’t.\n<\/p>\n

\n“The following day, we were not beaten up. Many of us were
\ntold that we were going to be released, but others remain held there until
\ntoday. We had to pass by representatives of several security agencies, give our
\nnames and if our name was not on any of the lists, we were allowed to leave.”\n<\/p>\n

\nhttp:\/\/www.amnesty.org\/en\/node\/24508<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\nSyrian security forces cracked down on Banias residents
\nafter pro-reform protests\n<\/p>\n

\nA 25-year-old university student tells Amnesty International
\nof the beatings and torture he and other detainees suffered while held in a
\nsports stadium after he was seized with his 73- year-old father by security
\nforces from their home in the coastal town of Banias on 8 May.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}