Tightened security grip and torture victims in 2022 | Nearly 1,000 Syrians arrested by regime security services and 104 died under torture amid Turkey’s reconciliation effort with regime
Turkey’s reconciliation effort with Syria continues to dominate the headlines and calls for normalisation with Al-Assad, the restoration of relations, and the coordination of meetings between Turkey and Syria are run as if nothing had happened as if the Syrian people had not suffered at the hands of the regime since 2011.
As more than 11 years have passed since the Syrian Revolution, Syrian regime continues its policy of tightened security grip and killing Syrians in prisons and security centres
SOHR has monitored and tracked the cause of forcible/arbitrary arrests in regime-controlled areas in 2022, documenting the arrest of 986 people, including three children and 30 women on different charges, the most prominent of which are “evading the mandatory and reserve conscription in the regime army,” “communicating with foreign bodies,” and “cybercrimes.” Many detainees were released after having paid ransoms, while 220 detainees remain in regime prisons and security centres. The people arrested arbitrarily in regime-controlled areas in 2022 are distributed regionally as follows:
• Damascus and Rif Dimashq: 243 people, including three women.
• Aleppo: 179 people, including nine women.
• Daraa: 147 people, including three children.
• Deir Ezzor: 109 people, including five women.
• Homs: 106 people, including seven women.
• Latakia: 52 people, including four women.
• Hama: 39 people, including two women.
• Idlib: 31 men.
• Tartus: 26 men.
• Al-Hasakah: 19 men.
• Al-Raqqah: 17 men.
• Al-Suwaidaa: 13 men.
• Al-Quneitra: Five men.
And here is a monthly breakdown:
• January: 84
• February: 45 people, including three women.
• March: 17 people, including four women.
• April: 21 people, including a woman.
• May: 38 men.
• June: 45 men.
• July: 181 people, including three children and five women.
• August: 160 people, including three women.
• September: 104 people, including five women.
• October: 117 people, including two women.
• November: 99 people, including a woman.
• December: 75 people, including six women.
Moreover, SOHR documented the death of 104 people under torture in regime prisons and security centres in 2022, including three regime officers, three regime army defectors, a fighter from a local faction in Daraa and 38 civilians from eastern Ghouta in Rif Dimashq, whose death certificates were delivered by the Syrian regime to their families in February. Here is a monthly breakdown of torture victims in regime prisons in 2022:
• January: 12 people.
• February: 45 people.
• March: Five people.
• April: Three people.
• May: Two people.
• June: Two people.
• July: Two people.
• August: Three people.
• September: Seven people.
• October: Five people.
• November: 12 people.
• December: Six people.
As more fatalities are recorded and updated regularly, the number of civilians dying under torture in regime prisons since the beginning of the Syrian revolution has exceeded 49,400, all documented by names: 48,984 men and young men, 349 children under the age of eighteen, and 67 women over the age of eighteen.
Reliable sources have informed the Syrian Observatory that the number of people killed, executed and/or died in regime prisons exceeded 105,000 people. Over 83% of the total death toll were killed and/or died in these prisons between May 2013 and October 2015, the period when the Iranian were supervising regime’s prisons. SOHR sources have also confirmed that more than 30,000 detainees were killed in the notorious prison of Saydnaya alone, while the second-largest percentage of killings occurred in the Airforce Intelligence detention facilities or prisons.