Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the Assad administration has tortured and imprisoned thousands of women and children.
Anadolu Agency spoke with Ala al-Dari and Larin Jesry (both pseudo names for security reasons), two former Syrian detainees who are now involved in the NISVA (an initiative for solidarity with Syrian women).
While being imprisoned for over 100 days by the Syrian regime and being deprived of fundamental rights to feeding, Jesry says she was tortured into confessing to crimes she knew nothing about, leading up to her 12 days in a coma:
“I was detained for a week during demonstrations in Aleppo in 2012. In 2014, I had one last class left to graduate when I was arrested at the university campus. I was imprisoned for 100 days. They were hard times. They inflicted all kinds of torture on me.”
“Women who were sexually abused by the guards in the Assad prison were tortured for miscarriage. If pregnancy could not be prevented, babies were brutally killed,” she said.
Speaking on her 12 days in coma, she said:
“They thought I was dead and dragged me to the morgue. I regained my consciousness when my head hit the stairs. They transferred me to a military hospital. I had been taken back to the prison before I regained my health. Since the Assad regime intelligence was in Damascus, I was interrogated there for a week. I was tried for the death penalty. I was then released for paying a large sum.”
“When I was released, I went to my family in Aleppo. My family was so happy that I was saved, but I was shocked to see that the society stigmatizes detained women with the ‘seal of shame.’ Eastern societies stigmatize women who are imprisoned with the seal of shame. Realizing this, it caused me a lot of pain in my inner world,” Jesry said.
She noted that Syrian women are subjected to inhumane torture in prisons, but cannot withstand the psychological violence of society once they are released.
“Behind the bars, I suffered inhumanly torture. I will work until my last breath to deliver the message of female prisoners because they are our honour. Those women sacrificed their freedom for the freedom of others.”
There are also cases of women who escape from prison and have no choice but to migrate. One such case is that of Al-Dari.
Detained by the Assad regime forces two months after the civil war began, Al-Dari and endured torture for a year in four different prisons, leading to a heart attack. She was imprisoned again after her treatment. In her statement, she points out that while the physical violence may have ended for former women prisoners, the psychological violence still remains.
“Society thinks that the ‘honour’ of women who enter regime prisons was ‘tainted’ due to the torture they undergone. Women who were unjustly arrested have to migrate to other places after they are released from prison. Those who cannot migrate continue their lives on the condition that they do not speak.”
Al-Dari further said that the women held off filing criminal complaints with foreign courts because they feared their husbands, families, and society would reject them if they spoke out about the torture and sexual abuse they had endured.
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