Exclusive interview | Detained for five years: artist from Idlib tells details on his detention by regime security services
As regime security services have exerted diligent efforts to prosecute and arrest everyone demonstrated against injustice and tyranny, demanding justice and freedom since the first spark of the “Syrian Revolution” in March 2011, many educated persons and those with scientific and artistic skills were also imprisoned.
An artist known by his initial as A.R. from the southern countryside of Idlib and spent most of his life in Damascus, and later he became a professional in mosaic painting and opened a shop to show and sell his paintings. Unfortunately he was arrested inside his shop in Bab Sharqi in Damascus by the regime intelligence services on February 9, 2012.
In his testimony to SOHR, the artist attributed the reasons behind his detention to his participation in demonstrations calling for justice and freedom and for struggling with injustices perpetrated against Syrian people. A.R. said “I was taken by intelligence service to Mazzah military airbase where I was imprisoned inside a small cell with over 30 other prisoners who were in a miserable condition with no water, food or even medical treatment. The prisoners screams while being tortured echoed throughout the place, while torture was practiced under the supervision of a first lieutenant.”
“Long hours and days passed and I didn’t know the charge I was detained for, meanwhile I was tortured brutally, both psychologically and physically, and endured electric shocks and blindfolded Shabeh torture. I later was charged of participating in demonstrations and manufacturing IEDs. In one of the investigation sessions, the investigator got mad after I refused to admit the charges against me, so he pulled one of the detained youths, tied his hands and feet, and beat him on his head continuously until he died. That was the worst experience I have ever gone through during my detention.”
A.R. explained that he spent hard time in Mazzah military airbase where he stayed for about a year, then he was transferred on January 5, 2013 to Adra Central Prison where he saw detained women, children and elders. Although there was no torture practiced against them, the prisoners’ conditions were terribly bad, especially concerning the high prices of necessary supplies needed by the detainees, poor hygiene and medical negligence of prisoners. In addition to scam operations carried out by the prison’s officials who used to steal large amount of the money sent by the families to detainees.
A.R. added “I spent over five years in several jails and prisons, before I was finally released on November 24, 2017, only when I could pay 700,000 SYL to an influence pro-regime lawyer. As soon as I had been released, I returned with my family back to my home town in Idlib countryside, leaving Damascus which I lived in for many years. I later established an institute to teach kids and youth how to do mosaic. I tried to understand what I had been through during the past five years through which I had been detained for committing nothing wrong.”
After Regime forces and their proxy militias advanced and captured large areas of the southern countryside of Idlib during the latest military operation which started at the beginning of 2019, A.R. who survived regime prison, displaced with his family to Afrin city in the northern countryside of Aleppo where he now suffering from both displacement and horrible detain memories.