[Reader advisory] This is a Disturbing Report from Syria

I'm noting this grotesque report from Syria for future reference. The link is passed along by Joshua Landis.

“They Buried Them Silently.” The Stations Of The “Death Journey” From Assad’s Prisons To Mass Grave“

They were carrying me and beating me on the ground in the halls of Tishreen Military Hospital. This lasted a quarter of an hour, after which they expected that I was finished, so they placed me with the dead. The bodies were placed on top of each other, so my share came on top of two bodies, then they placed two more on me, who were killed after me.”

It is the story of the detainee Muhammad, who comes from the Hama countryside and was detained for two years in Saydnaya prison, which Amnesty International described as a “human slaughterhouse.”

Muhammad tells his story while he was transferred from prison to Tishreen Military Hospital, which is considered a station for sick detainees, who are transferred from prison to the hospital before being killed and buried in mass graves, according to what human rights reports documented.

Mahmoud continues his story by saying, “After about half an hour, I woke up and a shiver ran through my body, starting from my toes and gradually extending to the rest of my body. I moved a little and the two bodies fell on top of me and I started screaming in a voice that I had no idea where it came from.”

“They started hitting me on the head, stomach, kidneys and everywhere, and I would not stop screaming (..) After I left the prison, I told one of the doctors what had happened, and he said my heart had stopped, then it came back to life and began pumping blood again

Muhammad’s story is one of dozens of stories documented by the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison, and included in a report called “Bury Them Silently,” which talks about the mechanisms of killing and disappearance in Tishreen Military Hospital between 2011 and 2020.

The report was based on 154 interviews with 32 detainees, doctors and nurses who worked in Tishreen Military Hospital, and others who worked in military intelligence, the military police, political security, and the military judiciary.

The report explains the structure of military hospitals in Syria, their importance to the security branches, the network of relations between them, and the distribution of responsibilities between them in torturing, killing , and burying detainees in mass graves.

Glasses...the first step towards “death”

According to the report, the bodies of detainees, who were killed under torture in prisons and security branches, in addition to sick detainees, are transferred to Tishreen Military Hospital, so that torture stations in hospitals begin.

The first stop is in a place called “Al-Nadara” in Tishreen Military Hospital, which is a place where sick detainees are received as well as the bodies of the deceased, whether they were sick or those who lost their lives in a detention center.

The report confirmed that the process of transferring detainees from detention centers to hospitals is accompanied by brutal attacks that reach the point of loss of life in many cases.

The report says that the “glasses” is “the first stop for a sick detainee upon his arrival to the hospital, and it is also the place where the bodies of detainees are collected before they are loaded and transported to mass graves.”

He added, “The bodies are placed at the outer door of the prison, and the detainees are forced to carry the bodies of their colleagues and place them in the vehicles prepared to transport them to the cemeteries.”

Sometimes there are patients among the corpses who are between life and death, and the assistant in the hospital kills them. Members of the National Defense Forces who are arrested on criminal charges are also brought in to assault the sick detainees and kill them before bringing them to the doctor.

Alternative ambulance station

The second station is the “Alternative Ambulance Department,” which is the second station for detainees who survive death in the “Al-Nadara” station.

It is an old, one-story underground warehouse adjacent to the main ambulance department. Its area is about 100 square meters and contains 30 beds, and the medical staff in it is between 30 and 40, including nurses and doctors.

Sick detainees are presented to the “alternative ambulance” department only as a routine procedure and are given painkillers at best, without being presented to the relevant departments.

One of the detainees says: “They took me to the emergency department in the hospital. An assistant and a regular conscript entered and showed me to a doctor who looked nothing like doctors. I later learned that he was a colonel or brigadier general.”

“He entered angrily and started shouting at them, ‘Why are you bringing him to me?’ I mean, we are bringing him to sign a death certificate for him. The assistant replied to him, ‘Sir, his soul has not yet returned.’”

After that, the doctor left due to the end of his shift, and “the recruit turned to the assistant and said to him: What do we want to do with him?” The assistant replied: Put him back on the glasses so that he will vomit and give us relief from him.

The goal of this section, according to the report, is to completely isolate the detainees from anyone, and deprive them of any opportunity to communicate with the outside world or get to know one of them in any way.

The medical staff in the department carries out torture on patients, as the medical staff allowed to enter this place are strictly loyal to the regime, and it can be said that the majority of them are from the Alawite sect, according to the report.

Transport station for mass graves

The third station is transferring the bodies of detainees who were killed under torture in prisons and patients who were liquidated in the hospital to mass graves, after a death certificate is issued to them by the “forensic medicine” team.

According to the report, the role of the medical team is to “legitimize the process of liquidating opponents and hiding their bodies,” by writing a report on the causes and manner of the detainee’s death.

But in reality, doctors do not examine or autopsy the bodies of deceased detainees, and the causes of death are almost always written as related to heart diseases.

The bodies of detainees who died under torture in prisons and branches and who are being liquidated in the hospital are collected in several places next to the detainees’ cells and in the hospital’s transport area, and are loaded from their collection places into transport vehicles to be buried in mass graves.

There are six large refrigerated cars in the hospital’s transportation area for transporting bodies, as well as closed Mazda cars that have been modified to become ambulances that move within Damascus and its countryside.

There are also Chevrolet cars belonging to the Forestry Foundation in the Ministry of Agriculture, in addition to 16 Mazda microbuses with a capacity of 14 passengers, old military sanitary cars, and modern sanitary cars with about 20 cars (donations from Japan and Korea before the revolution).

The report confirmed that the detainees in the prison were forced to carry the bodies of other detainees in cars to transport them to mass graves.

The report also confirmed that bodies were being “beaten, insulted,” and trampled in the hospital by security personnel, nurses, and nurses.

One of the detainees said, “The bodies were brought by dump trucks, and they were lifted and lowered like sand. After filming was completed and the records were organized, they were transported to the dump cars by a truck if the number was large.”

The bodies are being transported, accompanied by members of the military police and two security vehicles from Branch 227, to three mass graves in Najha, Al-Qutayfa, and Baghdad Bridge near the labor city of Adra.

A former worker in the machinery factory in Damascus Governorate says in the report that he was asked to dig a trench 10 to 15 meters long and more than 3 meters deep.

After that, cars containing more than 450 bodies arrived, and “a security officer asked me to shovel them and lower them into the ditch. The bodies lying on the ground were disrupting my movement. I tried to get around them so as not to crush them under the bulldozer.”

“But he waved his hand and ordered me to come forward and forced me to crush them under the wheel, and I started carrying the bodies with the bulldozer bucket and throwing them in the middle of the trench that I had dug.