“There was no specific day or time, no method of torture… The worst part was when they entered the room. We were all in a corner, facing the wall. [Ils] carried plastic pipes, cables, steel pipes, and they hit us everywhere – on the shoulders, on the head, on the back, there was no part of your body that wasn’t beaten…”, begins Yusuf (who did not give his name). The story that this former inmate of Sini prison, located near Hassaké, in northeastern Syria, told to Amnesty International investigators describes a brutal and inhumane daily life, full of physical and sexual violence, humiliation, deprivation of water, food and medical care, which allegedly led to the death of hundreds of detainees.
Torture and ill-treatment could include sexual violence. “Every fortnight, they took us out into the courtyard, all naked… [Le garde] would take the broomstick, put soap on it and put it in our bodies. They raped people with this stick… Once they took me [hors de la cellule] with another guy… They brought an electric cable from the generator, and they continued to torture us with electricity… I think the guy next to me died. He stopped moving and screaming…”Yusuf confided again.
Ten thousand people, including teenagers and around a hundred women, are still imprisoned for belonging to the Islamic State (IS) group in prisons administered by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF, with a Kurdish majority), supported by the international anti-government coalition. -IS led by the United States. Since the self-proclaimed IS caliphate was defeated in its last stronghold in northeastern Syria in 2019, the fate of the jihadist group’s fighters and their families remains intractable. Many countries, including France, have not repatriated all of their nationals, who had joined Syria and Iraq to fight with ISIS.
“War crimes”
In a report entitled “Consequences: injustice, torture and deaths in custody in northeast Syria”, published Wednesday April 17, Amnesty International has documented widespread abuses in twenty-seven detention centers, as well as the Al-Hol and Roj camps, where ISIS continues to exert influence and where 56,000 people live, most of them women and children from Syria, Iraq, as well as seventy-four countries, including France. “People detained in this system face large-scale violations of their rights, some of which amount to war crimes”, alerts Nicolette Waldman, one of the authors of the report, carried out with 126 detainees and former detainees as well as representatives of the local administration and humanitarian workers.
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