Sunday Times, 18/12/2011
"We beat, raped and shot for the highest god, Assad"
For the first time, a former Syrian military intelligence officer tells of the torture used to crush the uprising
Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand Published: 18 December 2011
Abu Ali's eyes are empty of emotion, his voice as steady as his hands, as he describes without elaboration or outward regret the torture, murder and rape that he witnessed as an officer in Syria’s feared military intelligence.

“They have no problem torturing a child to death,” said Abu Ali. “All they know is he is not from their sect. The regime has planted sectarianism inside them since the 1970s to make sure they are loyal only to the regime, to the highest god.”

Abu Ali, who defected and fled across the border into Lebanon, was still wearing the trademark leather jacket and plain trousers favoured by the enforcers of the Assad family’s 41-year dictatorship.

“I was living with the thugs and the security men,” he said. “Some of them are my friends and I know what kind of hatreds they carry.”

Like Abu Ali, three-quarters of Syria’s population are Sunni Muslims. The regime, and particularly its security services, are drawn largely from the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

“The torturers have only one problem with what they do: the person tortured to death only has one soul. They wish that a second soul could return to the body so they could continue their torture and satisfy their hatred,” he said.

Speaking freely to a newspaper for the first time in his life, Abu Ali said he was now seeking the downfall of a regime under which torture is routine.

“There’s electric shocks, beating the face, stripping nails, pulling hair out from the face, from eyebrows or the head or the eyelashes,” he said, listing torture methods that have been practised in Syria since the 1970s when President Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, was first in power.

“We used to give thirsty prisoners salty water to drink, one time, two times, three times, then give them pure water. When they wanted to urinate we put a rubber band around the penis so they couldn’t. So whatever we wanted, they would be ready to confess.”

For a decade Abu Ali served in military intelligence under Assad’s brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat. When the Syrian uprising was triggered in March in the border city of Dera’a by the arrest and torture of children for scrawling anti-regime graffiti, Abu Ali was sent south to put it down.

“We saw the peaceful demonstrations and we shot and gave orders to the army and the shabiha [militia thugs] to shoot.”

Abu Ali described how security forces stormed the main Omari mosque of Dera’a and planted weapons, filming them in the hope the West would believe the Assads were fighting terrorists.

“The regime knows how the West thinks: that mosques are places for terrorists,” he said.

“We demolished Dera’a. Every man we could find we killed or arrested or injured. We took mothers, daughters and wives hostage. We surrounded hospitals and stopped doctors treating injured protesters. We even destroyed pharmacies. Despite all that it was too early to talk about defection.”

For Abu Ali, the breaking point came when he was redeployed to put down protests in his home town of Homs, an industrial city in northern Syria that for the past few months has been the focus for the regime’s rage.

“When protests broke out in Baba Amr [a district of Homs] we received orders to crush it. We were authorised to do whatever we wanted. The orders came from the leader, Bashar.

“It was like a genocide against the people and I was part of it. The army went to the streets and shelled houses with tanks. We shelled the civilians and the demonstrations.”

In April, Abu Ali said, the orders for a crackdown in Homs’s Clock Square had come directly from Major-General Jamil Hassan, an Assad insider. Hassan was one of 74 commanders and officials named in a report by Human Rights Watch last week as responsible for the torture and killings.

“We received orders to make Homs an example to other cities. We fired on the protesters for about 15 minutes, then military vehicles and forklift trucks smashed through the area, crushing a lot of people. The general informed Jamil Hassan that we had crushed the protest and Hassan asked if there were any people left. The general told him, ‘There are around 60 people’, so Hassan shouted at him, ‘Kill them and get rid of them’.”

Abu Ali said dozens of bodies had been taken by forklifts and vans and dumped in mass graves, an account corroborated by a second member of military intelligence who witnessed the scene.

Later a fire engine arrived to hose the blood off the street.

In another report last month Human Rights Watch said the onslaught in Homs, including systematic torture, constituted crimes against humanity.

A senior western diplomat said a sectarian war in Homs is under way. Last week 14 Sunnis, including six women, were reported to have been kidnapped as they travelled by bus near an Alawite district.

Assad has denied all responsibility for the killing of protesters, insisting in an interview with the US network ABC that Syria’s security forces “are not my forces”, although he is the commander-in-chief.

The United Nations estimates that more than 5,000 Syrians have been killed since the crackdown began in mid-March. Avaaz, a human rights group that has researchers inside Syria, says it has recorded more than 6,500 deaths, with at least 20,000 arrested or disappeared.

The regime says 1,100 members of its security forces have been killed by “armed gangs” or “terrorist groups”.

Abu Ali said that during the early months of the uprising the security forces met no armed resistance. But divided as they were into 17 rival agencies, they managed to shoot each other by mistake. The regime then sought to use these deaths as propaganda.

Abu Ali said defecting from Assad’s security forces had not been easy. “We were all keeping an eye on each other,” he said. He was helped by opposition supporters who provided safe houses in Homs.

“The way was hard and it was a long walk but in the end they managed to deliver us to Lebanon,” said Abu Ali, who went on to become a commander in the fledgling Free Syrian Army that is now leading an armed insurgency against Assad’s troops.

Before he travelled back to Syria to fight those he had once served, Abu Ali came face to face with one of the survivors of the torture he and his colleagues had inflicted.

In a Lebanese village he met Mohammed, a 30-year-old farmer from the countryside south of Homs who had endured a month of suffering at the hands of forces Abu Ali had once helped to command.

Mohammed’s account from inside Assad’s dungeons has none of Abu Ali’s clinical detachment but rather comes pouring forth from behind clouds of cigarette smoke.

Although he never learnt to read or write, Mohammed — who for his own security wished to use a pseudonym — gave an impassioned and eloquent account of the Kafkaesque nightmare of relentless and unanswerable interrogation, punctuated by bouts of intense violence, that awaits those unfortunate enough to be imprisoned in Assad’s Syria.

“They say you are taking weapons from the Hariri family [powerful Lebanese Sunnis] and transporting them to Syria. You are linked to terrorist organisations. You are the biggest terrorist. I tell them, ‘I’m a shepherd, I’m a farmer. Ask the village chief about me. If I did these things, arrest me’. You have to confess.”

Arrested by security forces in early August during a dawn raid on his village, where he insisted no anti-regime protests had taken place, Mohammed was imprisoned for a month in a 2 x 1.5 metre cell designed for solitary confinement but which he said held six or seven men at a time.

“The cell is underground. The moment you smell it, you gag. There are rats scuttling in and out of the cell. You can hardly breathe. It’s like a grave.”

Blindfolded and beaten in one interrogation after another, Mohammed said the questions had differed little: “Who was at the protest? Who’s smuggling weapons? Who’s supporting the rebels from Lebanon? Who’s arming the terrorist groups?”

“I said, ‘I swear to God I don’t know.’ They said, ‘Here there is no God. Here there’s only Bashar.’ And they beat you.”

The only thing that changed was the pain.

“He took the electricity stick and jabbed it into me. I felt my head burning and I fell to the ground. He got a bottle of water and threw it over me, shouting, ‘Will you confess or not?’ I said, ‘Sir, I don’t know anything to confess. If I knew, I would have told you.’ He threw water on me again and electrocuted me again. I smelt the burning flesh and the hair on my head stood up.”

Mohammed cannot remember the exact number of times he was stripped down to his boxer shorts and given electric shocks. Most of the times he would pass out and wake up being whipped with cable on his back. On one occasion his leg and hand were left paralysed for several hours.

He will never forget the time his jailor used electricity on his genitals, however: “He came back with the electricity stick and jabbed it into my testicles saying, ‘This is to cull your race.’ The sectarianism is obvious. They hear from the way you speak that you’re not an Alawite. It’s a kind of revenge.”

Although he has taken medicine for months, Mohammed still passes blood in his urine and is unable to enjoy sex with his wife. He is not ashamed to show the scars left on his genitals. He says he will not return to Syria until the regime has gone.

Sometimes in those cells, crammed in among the men, are children. The Sunday Times also interviewed a 13-year-old boy, arrested on his way home from school, who was beaten, given electric shocks and had his big toenail ripped out with pliers.

From the words of the officer who served on the inside of the Assad family’s terror state it appears clear that healing in Syria could take generations.

“There are some prisoners who have strong bodies and can tolerate this kind of torture,” said Abu Ali.

“So they used to bring his wife or his daughter or his mother, or any of his relatives, and torture them in front of him. And sometimes they are ready to rape the women, his wife, his mother, his daughter, in front of him. Just to make him confess.”

‘Kill or be killed’ as anarchy takes hold in Syria
Salam Hafez, Damascus
Sunday Times, Published: 18 December 2011
Nine months into the Syrian uprising, the country is descending into anarchy as civilians take up arms to defend themselves against President Bashar Al-Assad’s troops, and central authority appears to be on the brink of collapse.

Armed with Russian weapons smuggled in from Lebanon and Turkey, civilians in restive cities in northern Syria have become determined to hit back at troops loyal to Assad and are policing their own areas in the absence of law and order.

A well-organised campaign of civil disobedience is under way in cities such as Hama and Jabal Al Zawiya, which I visited last week. Some government institutions have collapsed, their buildings boarded up.

Residents complain of a lack of policing in parts of the country, where it is either kill or be killed.

“You don’t know where the bullets are coming from,” said one protester from the city of Homs, adding: “We don’t know who is shooting at whom and the security services don’t show mercy — they fire randomly at homes and people in the street.”

Criminals are flourishing, with murder, robbery and kidnapping on the increase, say lawyers, former government officials sympathetic to the protest movement and activists.

Protesters are attacking the premises of businessmen regarded as loyal to Assad. One of the country’s biggest textile factories, owned by a prominent government backer, was set ablaze. Its burnt-out shell acts as a warning to the business elite to drop their support for Assad.

In a gym in Aleppo, a note posted on the noticeboard bore the logo of the “Syrian Revolution General Commission”. It listed men in the local shabiha, or state-backed militia, threatening them with death if they continued attacking protesters. Nobody dared to take the notice down. Many militia or security men caught by protesters are filmed confessing before they are executed, often by a firing squad.

Government forces are still present, although they seem increasingly nervous of coming on to the streets except in huge shows of force.

Nevertheless, they are still capable of violent retribution. A fortnight ago security forces barricaded students at Aleppo University’s faculty of engineering, firing at it before storming in with knives and machetes. Three were killed with hundreds more injured and arrested.

The rebels’ strategy of civil disobedience includes a general strike that is spreading fast across the country, street barricades and the boycott of state mobile phone companies.

The first thing you see when you cross the border into Syria from Lebanon is a billboard that reads “Welcome to Al-Assad’s Syria”. The reality, at least in the northern cities, is that the country is now anything but Assad’s.