The Syrian Observatory For Human Rights

Torture victims | Syrian regime buries bodies of tens of thousands of detainees in mass graves in five provinces

As the Syrian regime has continued blackout regarding the fate of tens of thousands of detainees who died under torture in its prisons and security centres, reliable sources have told SOHR that tens of thousands of bodies of detainees who died under torture in the Syrian regime’s security basements have been buried, both individually and collectively, in graves in Tel al-Nassr in northern Homs and other graves in the south of Damascus, Aleppo, Hama and Latakia.

 

Meanwhile, the detainees’ families have exerted great efforts to know the fate of their sons, including the paying of large sums of money to the security services. The security service later informed the families about the detainees who died under torture and the place of graves where these bodies were buried, and that the bodies were marked in numbers not names. Accordingly, the families could communicate with the guards of these graves and tell them the number of the bodies of their sons, so that the guards could inform the families about the tombs where their sons were buried. However, the security services conditioned not to announce about the death of detainees under torture.

 

According to SOHR statistics, the number of people who were killed, executed and died in regime’s prisons since the beginning of the “Syrian Revolution” in 2011 exceeded 105,000 people. Over 83% of the total toll were killed, and died in these prisons between May 2013 and October 2015, the period when the Iranians were in charge of the file of detainees, as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and al-Quds Corps were supervising al-Assad’s prisons.

 

We, at the Syrian Observatory, would like to point out that we are exerting diligent efforts to document the names of tens of thousands of detainees who have died under torture, and further details will be reported so soon.