Survivors recollections of the Assad regimes Military Security Branch 215 in Damascus. Military Security Branch 215. The bodies decay before death and burial. Six days are enough to kill you in military security branch 215, even if youre not tortured with a whip. The prisoners are herded together in cells which are not big enough for even a quarter of the number crammed into each, and end up like pickles in a jar - piles of arms, legs, and heads. Some of the prisoners cant even touch the ground because of all the bodies underneath and on top of them and to their left and right. The prisoners are in this position for days on end, eating, urinating, and defecating where they stand. They sweat and bleed and their wounds fester and rot and they are still in this position. The ground underneath them takes all these things and takes with it rotten and mangled bits of flesh, which with time becomes like warm wax. It scrapes and washes away very easily. The excruciating pain leaves a hole in the body of the prisoner, which exposes the bones. This bizarre mix of liquids and substances piles up on the ground, then burns it, melts into it, and solidifies, becoming part of it. Because of this terrible overcrowding, a knot of human beings which cant be separated is formed - a knot whose strands are these prisoners who are injured with all the wounds, diseases, and pestilence we mentioned. Despite this, this knot is forced is to come apart, with all it contains of prisoners who cant stand on their feet, or are about to die. These prisoners are beaten with whips, plastic rods, and wooden sticks to force them to stand up for a few minutes either for the distribution of food (which consists of a loaf of bread with some yoghurt curd) or to count the prisoners. The guards push the prisoners back after they stand up, in order to make a space of two metres in order to count them one by one. Most of the time it is impossible for the guards to count them like this. The days go by for the prisoners in this state, and they literally cant find a foothold. When a prisoner finds a foothold, he stays standing up for hours, or even nights when he sleeps occasionally standing up, only to fall on top of the mass of his fellow prisoners. He then stands back up. Some of the prisoners cannot take the lack of sleep in this state, so they die. This way of dying has become so common in branch 215 that the prisoners have a term for it, to disconnect. Some of those who collapse of exhaustion sleep deeply for a while and then wake up. The others find that these have gone insane. Every day more prisoners fall dead, either because of lack of sleep, or asphyxiation, or illness. Their bodies are pulled out like old carpets by the guards and other prisoners and they pile up in the corridor, which is slightly cooler than the rest of the prison, where the temperature reaches 40 degrees centigrade during the coldest days of winter. The prison is full of unbearable noise. The noise is a mixture of the groans of the dying, the screams of the injured, the pleas of the tortured, the shouts of the arguing, and the agonies of those wounded by the kicks and stamping of those walking over their bodies as they are taken for interrogation or torture. What happens in this branch, and every branch cannot be imagined by anyone. No poet or writer can describe it, and no living creature can stand it - not even a rock can. In Branch 215, the bodies of prisoners rot before they die and before theyre buried. Save the prisoners in the security branches. The situation is getting worse day after day. This article was compiled from testimony from former prisoners in the cells of Branch 215 of the Assad regimes military security division in Damascus. The unimaginably horrific scenes described above are still happening there right now. Translated by Amr Salahi
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 00:08:46 +0000
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