Syrian Activists Call Upon International Community to Interfere and Save the Detainees (Hashtag)

Syrian activists launched a campaign under the title “Be Their Voice”, in order to highlight the suffering of detainees in the prisons of the Syrian Regime, and to demand their release.

For 10 years, the Assad Regime has denied the presence of hundreds of thousands of detainees in its prisons, as a result of the protests against its in 2011, he also denies the use of torture methods in the prisons of its security services.

It is noteworthy that hundreds of thousands of Syrians had been arrested since the beginning of the Syrian revolution against Bashar al-Assad's Regime in 2011, tens of thousands of them have died under torture in the prisons of the Syrian Regime so far, according to human rights and international organizations.

 

“To Raise their Suffering”

The “Be Their Voice” campaign was launched on June 20, 2021, it is scheduled to last until June 30,2021, by sharing several hashtags, most notably: #SaveTheSyrianDetainees

Through several activities, including raising the stories of detainees on social media, organizing protests in Syrian interior and in all countries of the world, especially the cities of Geneva and Brussels.

 

In turn, the campaign organizers said in a statement posted on Twitter: “Based on the painful suffering experienced by our detainees, and thousands of them still live, we - a group of independent Syrian revolution youth - invite you to participate in the (Be Their Voice) campaign, to highlight on the file of detainees, and work to organize protests, in an effort to raise their suffering”.

 

The campaign organizers also seek to communicate with organizations, official stakeholders, and influential political figures, by sending emails to their official identifiers, or by commenting within their accounts, with attaching campaign tags in the comments, in addition to messaging all the influencers on social media, and urged them to participate and promote the campaign.

 

A number of activists in the defense of detainees interacted with this campaign, among them, the Syrian opposition actress, Yara Sabry, she posted on her Twitter account a link to the campaign and invited participation in it, while activists and twitters published pictures of torture methods in the prisons of the Syrian Regime, and the suffering of the detainees there.

 

 

Human Slaughterhouse

During the years of the Syrian revolution, hundreds of testimonies from detainees who were released from Syrian prisons appeared to the public, as the torture and killings that were happening there, Amnesty International prompted to describe the famous Sednaya prison in the Damascus countryside as “a human slaughterhouse”.

 

In a report issued at the beginning of 2017, the organization stated that mass executions by hanging were carried out by the Syrian Regime against 13,000 detainees, most of whom were opposition civilians, between 2011 and 2015, the organization also described the Sednaya Military Prison as “the place where the Syrian Regime quietly massacres its people”.

On this, a member of the detainees’ committee in the Syrian opposition’s negotiating committee, Tariq al-Kurdi, says: “The number of documented detainees in the Regime’s prisons is less than the real number”, he points out that “most of the documents of the specialized organizations talk about 125,000 to 140,000 detainees”, pointing out that “satellite images confirm the presence of mass graves, it confirms that the Assad Regime has committed chilling crimes against Syrian women and men in prisons”.

 

For his part, Yasser Al-Farhan, who is responsible for the detainees’ file in the opposition Syrian National Coalition, points out that “International bodies have been unable for ten years to take effective measures to compel the Regime to release detainees and change its behavior”, he added: “This Regime is criminal by nature, it must be changed and a political transition must be achieved that ends the suffering of the Syrians”.

Fadel Abdel Ghani, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said: “There is negligence, disregard and dereliction in the file of detainees, this is due to the lack of sufficient attention to what is happening in Syria by the international community”, noting that “there is a sustainable failure in this file, and that there is no international pressure on the Assad Regime regarding the detainees”.

 

The File of Detainees 

Observers confirm that the Assad Regime strongly desires to close the file of detainees in its prisons, this is due to the fact that the presence of detainees and forcibly disappeared persons in particular breaks the Regime's diplomatic and media narrative, which portrays it as a legitimate force fighting terrorism in partnership with the international community.

Noting that the file of detainees has become little and rarely talked about in diplomatic discourses about the future of a political solution in the country, after it was mentioned more than any other file.

 

As the U.S. Embassy in Damascus said in a statement that was published during March 2021: “We will continue to press for the release of Syrians arbitrarily detained in accordance with Security Council Resolution 2254, we will prioritize accountability for human rights violations in Syria, we commend the work of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry in Syria for its report, which came as a documentation of a decade of mass detention and torture by the Assad Regime”, London also supported the report's findings.

In a related context, the Association of the Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison issued at the beginning of 2021 a report showing, the Syrian Regime and its officers have financially exploited the detainees’ families with nearly $900 million since 2011, in order to inform them of information about their detained sons, whether they are alive or dead, or inform them in which branch they are arrested.

 

In turn, the Syrian Network for Human Rights documented in a report that no less than 149,361 people are in prisons or enforced disappearance in Syria, among them 4,924 children and 9,264 women, from March 2011 until March 2021.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, from March 2011 to June 2020, at least 14,388 people were killed due to torture at the hands of the main perpetrator parties to the conflict in Syria, 14,235 of them were killed by the Syrian Regime, including 173 children and 46 women.

It is worth noting that the entire world shook for years, while contemplating tens of thousands of photos of torture victims of Syrian civilians in the prisons of the Assad Regime, which leaked by a defected photographer from the Regime, who was later called “Caesar”, he was in charge of photographing the bodies of civilians who were victims of torture and murder.