My latest piece -- an OpEd on Syria. Excerpt: Yesterday, I met up with a Syrian refugee who was arrested and tortured by the regime merely for protesting. This man, who needs to maintain anonymity because he still has family inside Syria, was jailed four times, most recently for eight months, by the military. They were transferring him around from jail to jail. At one point, they put him in a cell the size of a small bathroom. It would have been a tight fit with three people, but, for two days, the 50-year-old man was in there with eight other Syrian prisoners. There were no windows – just a vent. The ventilation system stopped functioning. Slowly, he and the others started suffocating. He started to see things and hear the voices of his children. They pounded on the door, to no avail. By the end of the two days in that cell, seven of the other inmates were dead. The guards transferred him to a larger cell – about 25 feet by 25 feet. There, he was one of 105 prisoners. Enduring stifling heat and noxious smells, they had no room to sit; space was so tight that they had to remain standing. In shifts, the men folded their bodies into small balls to get some sleep. Many times, this former prisoner said, he’d wake up and feel the body of the person next to him had gone “very cold.” Inmates would die overnight as a lack of starvation and disease. Those still alive would knock on the door and tell the guards. The military men incinerated the bodies, dumped them into mass graves, dropped them into a river or just threw them onto the street, I was told. This refugee himself started out weighing about 210 pounds; when released, he weighed 120. “I was like a ghost,” he told me in Gaziantep, Turkey, just about an hour from the Syrian border Of course, the soldiers also tortured him. Because he was older, they only severely beat him with wooden and plastic sticks. For the younger men, the guards attached wires to other Syrians and electrocuted them. They scalded the men all over their bodies with hot metal or “just cigarettes,” he said. “Many, many people” died under this torture.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 21:48:26 +0000
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