Riyad Avlar spent 20 years languishing in Syria’s jails, together with a decade within the notorious Saydnaya jail, the scene of a few of the Bashar al-Assad authorities’s most brutal abuses.
These lengthy years behind bars have left him with one obsession: documenting and therapeutic the atrocities dedicated contained in the jail the place he himself was locked up.
“I’m certain we’ll see Bashar al-Assad in court docket sooner or later,” predicted Avlar, who’s Turkish.
In 2017, simply months after he was freed, he co-founded the Affiliation of Detainees and Lacking Individuals of Saydnaya Jail (ADMSP), which advocates for these jailed for daring to defy Assad’s rule.
“We do not need revenge, we would like justice,” he advised AFP on the organisation’s headquarters in Gaziantep, southeastern Turkey.
It’s right here that Avlar and others who survived the brutalities of Saydnaya acquire and compile documentation and testimonies relating the horrors that occurred inside an establishment Amnesty Worldwide has described as a “human abattoir”.
1000’s of inmates within the jail simply north of Damascus, some held for the reason that Eighties, have been freed on Sunday by Syrian rebels who seized the capital in a lightning advance.
Pictures of the previous captives strolling free, haggard and emaciated, some needing assist even to face, have been beamed all over the world as an emblem of Assad’s fall.
“It made me so glad to see them (freed) however after I noticed photos of the partitions and the cells, it took me straight again there,” mentioned Avlar, who was arrested in 1996 whereas learning in Damascus over a letter despatched to family members relating the federal government’s abuses in Syrian prisons.
“I can nonetheless really feel the trauma.”
– ‘So many individuals died’ –
Even at present, he typically jolts awake at night time believing himself to nonetheless be behind bars — he was as soon as held inside a cell in pitch darkness for 2 months.
“I noticed individuals die in entrance of my eyes, many from hunger,” mentioned the activist with fine-rimmed black glasses, whose salt-and-pepper beard hides a scar from the torture he was subjected to 25 years in the past.
The guards, he mentioned, would usually throw scraps of meals into the bathroom in entrance of ravenous prisoners.
“The prisoners ate it as a result of they needed to keep alive,” he mentioned.
A part of his restoration was by theatre and studying the saz, a long-necked lute common in Turkey — which for him was “artwork remedy”.
However it has additionally helped being a part of the affiliation’s work, by which he has been capable of assist numerous households purchase proof of life for family members held inside Saydnaya.
That was due to “insiders”, jail workers who secretly handed inner paperwork to the organisation, he mentioned, with out giving additional particulars.
– ‘No extra’ –
Saydnaya, the place a whole lot of Syrians rushed this week within the determined hope of discovering their family members, now stands empty.
Greater than 4,000 inmates have been freed by the Islamist-led rebels, the ADMSP mentioned.
The group estimates that greater than 30,000 individuals have been both executed or died on account of torture, hunger or lack of medical care between 2011 and 2018.
And with so many our bodies, the authorities have been compelled to make use of rooms lined with salt as makeshift morgues to make up for the dearth of chilly storage.
Haunted by his grisly recollections, Avlar has little interest in going again there however acknowledges he has lengthy dreamed of the day when “Saydnaya could be was a spot of remembrance”.
“I’m so glad there’s not a single prisoner left in there,” Avlar mentioned.
“And I simply hope there will not ever be any once more.”
