SOHR: Syrian families seek word of loved ones missing in regime prisons

More than 70 families gathered in the opposition-held Syrian town of Azaz on Friday to highlight the plight of loved ones missing in the Bashar Assad regime’s feared jail system.

Since the civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, nearly one million people have been detained in the network of prisons and camps run by various security services, according to Britain-based monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

Of those, around 105,000 have died in custody, while others have been released, but tens of thousands remain unaccounted for, according to Observatory figures.

Lama Andani said it has been nine years since her husband was arrested.

For 18 months, she received some updates indirectly, but then nothing.

“I know what it’s like to be tortured in the jails of the regime,” said Andani, who said she spent nine years in prison during a previous outbreak of political unrest in Syria during the 1980s.

“We came here in the hope of getting our message through to the international community … so that it isn’t forgotten.

“I dream of seeing my husband … and of knowing what happened to him,” she said, as she joined others in posting messages in a square in Azaz.

The northern town, close to the border with Turkey, was taken under control by Turkish troops in 2016 to prevent it from falling to the United States-backed YPG forces, which had taken swathes of northern Syria from the Daesh terrorist group. The YPG is the Syrian branch of the PKK terrorist group.

It has since been under the control of opposition groups supported by Ankara.

In 2013, a military defector known as “Caesar” smuggled more than 50,000 photographs out of Syria, many of them documenting the deaths of prisoners in detention centers or military hospitals.

The name went on to be used in the title of U.S. legislation that provides for economic sanctions against the Syrian regime.

Despite efforts to open dialogue about the missing on both sides of the conflict, little progress has been made on establishing their fate.

 

 

SOURCE: Bulletin Observer.