DAILYMAIL
A former inmate in one of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s prisons has revealed how he saw a boy cry for his mother while he was sexually abused by his torturers.
René, one of six million Syrians who fled the country following the brutal civil war in 2012, was imprisoned for being gay and for going to a pro-democracy protests by Assad’s secret police.
He said that while he was in prison, he saw a boy no older than 16 getting raped by Assad’s guards.
René told the BBC: ‘There was a boy. He was 15 or 16 years old. They were raping him, and he was calling his mother. He was saying, ‘Mama… my mother… Mom’.’
René himself was also raped, by three guards who laughed when he begged for mercy.
‘Nobody heard me. I was alone,’ he recalled back in 2012.
He said he was abused every for six months by the same guard.
The former prisoner said that memories of his time in the horrific prison system came back to him upon seeing the swathe of prisoners leaving Damascus after Assad fell.
‘‘I’m not in prison now, I’m here. But I saw myself in the photos and the images of the people in Syria. I was so happy for them, but I saw myself there’, he said.
‘I saw the old version of me there. I saw when they raped me, and when they tortured me. I saw everything in flashback.’
Since Assad’s fall, the conditions of the prisons he ran have been revealed in detail for the first time.
The infamous Sednaya Prison near Damascus, nicknamed the ‘Human Slaughterhouse’, was the epicentre of this systematic terror where huge numbers of detainees were subjected to all manner of inhumane treatments and executed.
Rebel fighters were cast into jails along with intellectuals, activists and regular civilians – all were subjected to heinous treatment, in many cases for several decades.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights claims that since the beginning of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, over 157,000 people remain under arrest or have been forcibly disappeared – including 5,274 children and 10,221 women.
More than 15,000 are said to have died under torture in that time.
The network also documented 72 different methods of regime torture that included electrocuting genitals or hanging weights from them; burning with oil, metal rods, gunpowder or flammable pesticides; crushing heads between a wall and the prison cell’s door, and inserting needles or metal pins into bodies.
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