More than 1,000 Syrians died at a military airport on the outskirts of Damascus, who were killed by execution, torture or malnutrition at a site, which were widely frightened, according to a report, according to a report, according to a report published on Thursday, the death of seven suspected grave sites was detected.
In the report, especially shared with Reuters, the Syria Justice and Accountability Center said it identified the grave sites using a combination of witness testimony, satellite imagery and documents in the Damascus suburb of Mezeh after the exit of President Bashar al-Assad in December.
Some sites were on the airport ground. The other were in Damascus.
Reuters did not examine the documents and were unable to independently confirm the existence of the tombs on a large scale through their review of satellite imagery. But journalists from Reuters saw signs of disturbed earth in images of many places mentioned by SJAC. Two sites, one on the property of the Mejeh Airport and the other in a cemetery in the dignity, show clear signs of long trenches dug during the period in line with witnesses from SJAC.
One of the authors of the report, Shadi Aaron said he was one of the prisoners. Organized in many months in 2011-2012 for organizing protests, he described daily inquiries with physical and psychological torture, which aims to force him into baseless confession.
Death came into many forms, he told the Reuters.
Although the prisoners saw nothing but their cell walls or inquiries, they could “ever firing, shoot by shot, hear every two days”.
Then his pain caused injuries.
Aaron said, “A small wound on the leg of one of the prisoners, which is caused by a whip he obtained during torture, was left out or untreated for days, which gradually turned into an gangrene and its position deteriorated until it reached the point of the entire leg dissection,” Haran said “Aaron described a crisis.
In addition to obtaining the documents, the SJAC and the Association for the custody and the missing persons were interviewed by 156 survivors and eight former members of the Air Force intelligence, Syria’s security service, which was assigned with monitoring, imprisonment and murder of government critics.
The new government has released a decree to refuse the former government officials to publicly and was not available to comment.
A colonel in the new government’s internal ministry said, “Although some tombs mentioned in the report were not discovered earlier, the discovery does not surprise us, because we know that there are more than 100,000 missing persons in Assad’s jails, who did not come out during liberation days in early December.”
“Searching for the fate of those missing persons and searching for more graves is one of the biggest legacy left by the Assad regime,” he said.
Hundreds of Syrians have died since 2011, when Assad’s protests were spiral in a full -scale war. Both Assad and his father Hafz, who died as President in the first and 2000, have long been accused of prosecutors of exceptionally extraordinary murders by rights groups, foreign governments and war-prone prosecutors, including collective execution within the country’s prison system and using chemical weapons against Syrian people.
SJAC said that all the remaining people interviewed were tortured.
The report focuses on the first years of the rebellion from 2011 to 2017.
According to the report, Mejeh Military Airport was an integral part of the disappearance of the implemented government’s disappearance and at least 29,000 detainees were placed between 2011 and 2017.
By 2020, according to the report, Air Force Intelligence had converted more than a dozen hangers, dormitory and offices into jails in Mejeh.
Until a recent funding freeze by SJAC and Trump administration, a US-based Syrian-led Human Rights Group funded by European governments, the US government said that the estimates of the dead come from two air force intelligence datasets, linging a total of 1,154 detainees between 2011 and 2017. The estimate is not included in the estimate who was sentenced to death by a military area court established inside the hangar.
According to the witness testimony in the report, officers and soldiers were killed by firing squad, while the citizens were hanged. Two witnesses said that many of them were buried near the hangar.
In December, the US Justice Department ignored the allegations of war crimes against two -ranked Syrian Air Force intelligence officials, “due to brutal and inhuman treatment under their control, including American citizens in custody facilities at Mejeh military airport.”
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is published by a syndicated feed.)
