More Than 1,000 Syrians Died in Airport Prison Under Assad, Report Says 

A satellite image shows a hangar at Mezzeh military airport in southwest Damascus, where witnesses told the Syria Justice and Accountability Center that detainees were sentenced to death and later executed and buried nearby. Satellite image from June 3, 2014. (Maxar Technologies via Google/Handout via Reuters)
A satellite image shows a hangar at Mezzeh military airport in southwest Damascus, where witnesses told the Syria Justice and Accountability Center that detainees were sentenced to death and later executed and buried nearby. Satellite image from June 3, 2014. (Maxar Technologies via Google/Handout via Reuters)
TT
20

More Than 1,000 Syrians Died in Airport Prison Under Assad, Report Says 

A satellite image shows a hangar at Mezzeh military airport in southwest Damascus, where witnesses told the Syria Justice and Accountability Center that detainees were sentenced to death and later executed and buried nearby. Satellite image from June 3, 2014. (Maxar Technologies via Google/Handout via Reuters)
A satellite image shows a hangar at Mezzeh military airport in southwest Damascus, where witnesses told the Syria Justice and Accountability Center that detainees were sentenced to death and later executed and buried nearby. Satellite image from June 3, 2014. (Maxar Technologies via Google/Handout via Reuters)

More than 1,000 Syrians died in detention at a military airport on the outskirts of Damascus, killed by execution, torture or maltreatment at a site that was widely feared, according to a report to be published Thursday tracing the deaths to seven suspected grave sites.

In the report, shared exclusively with Reuters, the Syria Justice and Accountability Center said it identified the grave sites by using a combination of witness testimony, satellite imagery and documents photographed at the military airport in the Damascus suburb of Mezzeh after the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad in December.

Some sites were on the airport grounds. Others were across Damascus.

Reuters did not examine the documents and was unable to independently confirm the existence of the mass graves through its own review of satellite imagery. But Reuters reporters did see signs of disturbed earth in images of many of the places pinpointed by SJAC. Two of the sites, one on the Mezzeh airport property and another at a cemetery in Najha, show clear signs of long trenches dug during periods consistent with witness testimony from SJAC.

Shadi Haroun, one of the report’s authors, said he was among the captives. Held over several months in 2011-2012 for organizing protests, he described daily interrogations with physical and psychological torture intended to force him into baseless confessions.

Death came in many forms, he told Reuters.

Although detainees saw nothing except their cell walls or the interrogation room, they could hear “occasional shootings, shot by shot, every couple of days.”

Then there were the injuries inflicted by their tormentors.

“A small wound on the foot of one of the detainees, caused by a whipping he received during torture, was left unsterilized or untreated for days, which gradually turned into gangrene and his condition worsened until it reached the point of amputation of the entire foot,” Haroun said, describing a cellmate’s plight.

In addition to obtaining the documents, SJAC and the Association for the Detained and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison interviewed 156 survivors and eight former members of air force intelligence, Syria’s security service that was tasked with the surveillance, imprisonment and killing of regime critics.

The new government has issued a decree forbidding former regime officials from speaking publicly and none were available to comment.

“Although some of the graves mentioned in the report had not been discovered before, the discovery itself does not surprise us, as we know that there are more than 100,000 missing persons in Assad’s prisons who did not come out during the days of liberation in early December,” said a colonel in the new government’s Interior Ministry who identified himself by his military alias, Abu Baker.

“Discovering the fates of those missing persons and searching for more graves is one of the greatest legacies left by the Assad regime,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Assad's crackdown on protests spiraled into a full-scale war.

Both Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, have long been accused by rights groups, foreign governments and war-crimes prosecutors of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions within the country's prison system and using chemical weapons against the Syrian people.

The SJAC said all the survivors it interviewed were tortured.

The report focuses on the first years of the uprising, from 2011 to 2017. But some of the testimonies from former regime officers based at Mezzeh detailed events up to the regime's fall.

The Mezzeh military airport was an integral part of the Assad government’s machinery of enforced disappearance and housed at least 29,000 detainees between 2011 and 2017, according to the report.

By 2020, according to the report, air force intelligence had converted more than a dozen hangars, dormitories and offices at Mezzeh into prisons.

SJAC, a US-based Syrian-led human rights group funded by European governments and, until the recent funding freeze by the Trump administration, the US government, said its estimate of the dead comes from two air force intelligence datasets listing a total of 1,154 detainees who died there between 2011 and 2017.

The datasets were leaked in a Facebook group monitored by SJAC as the regime collapsed and cross-checked by the organization against documents and witness testimony. The estimate does not include people who were executed after being sentenced to death by a military field court set up inside a hangar.

According to witness testimony in the report, officers and soldiers were executed by firing squad, while civilians were hanged. Two witnesses said many of those executed were buried near the hangar.

In December, the US Justice Department unsealed war crimes charges against two ranking Syrian air force intelligence officers over "the infliction of cruel and inhuman treatment on detainees under their control, including US citizens, in detention facilities at the Mezzeh Military Airport.”



Israel's Bedouin Communities Use Solar Energy to Stake Claim to Land

This aerial view shows solar panels at an electricity-generation plant for the Bedouin community in the village of Tirabin al-Sana in Israel's southern Negev desert Photo: Menahem KAHANA
This aerial view shows solar panels at an electricity-generation plant for the Bedouin community in the village of Tirabin al-Sana in Israel's southern Negev desert Photo: Menahem KAHANA
TT
20

Israel's Bedouin Communities Use Solar Energy to Stake Claim to Land

This aerial view shows solar panels at an electricity-generation plant for the Bedouin community in the village of Tirabin al-Sana in Israel's southern Negev desert Photo: Menahem KAHANA
This aerial view shows solar panels at an electricity-generation plant for the Bedouin community in the village of Tirabin al-Sana in Israel's southern Negev desert Photo: Menahem KAHANA

At the end of a dusty road in southern Israel, beyond a Bedouin village of unfinished houses and the shiny dome of a mosque, a field of solar panels gleams in the hot desert sun.

Tirabin al-Sana in Israel's Negev desert is the home of the Tirabin (also spelled Tarabin) Bedouin tribe, who signed a contract with an Israeli solar energy company to build the installation.

The deal has helped provide jobs for the community as well as promote cleaner, cheaper energy for the country, as the power produced is pumped into the national grid.

Earlier this month, the Al-Ghanami family in the town of Abu Krinat a little further south inaugurated a similar field of solar panels.
Bedouin families have for years tried and failed to hold on to their lands, coming up against right-wing groups and hardline government officials.

Demolition orders issued by Israeli authorities plague Bedouin villages, threatening the traditionally semi-nomadic communities with forced eviction.

But Yosef Abramowitz, co-chair of the non-profit organisation Shamsuna, said solar field projects help them to stake a more definitive claim.
"It secures their land rights forever," he told AFP.

"It's the only way to settle the Bedouin land issue and secure 100 percent renewable energy," he added, calling it a "win, win".

For the solar panels to be built, the land must be registered as part of the Bedouin village, strengthening their claim over it.

Roughly 300,000 Bedouins live in the Negev desert, half of them in places such as Tirabin al-Sana, including some 110,000 who reside in villages not officially recognised by the government.

This aerial view shows solar panels at an electricity-generation plant for the Bedouin community in the village of Tirabin al-Sana in Israel's southern Negev desert
This aerial view shows solar panels at an electricity-generation plant for the Bedouin community in the village of Tirabin al-Sana in Israel's southern Negev desert Photo: Menahem KAHANA
Villages that are not formally recognied are fighting the biggest battle to stay on the land.

Far-right groups, some backed by the current government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have stepped up efforts in the past two years to drive these families away.
A sharp increase in home demolitions has left the communities vulnerable and whole families without a roof over their heads.

"Since 2023, more than 8,500 buildings have been demolished in these unrecognized villages," Marwan Abu Frieh, from the legal aid organization Adalah, told AFP at a recent protest in Beersheva, the largest city in the Negev.

"Within these villages, thousands of families are now living out in the open, an escalation the Negev has not witnessed in perhaps the last two decades."

Tribes just want to "live in peace and dignity", following their distinct customs and traditions, he said.

Gil Yasur, who also works with Shamsuna developing critical infrastructure in Bedouin villages, said land claims issues were common among Bedouins across the Negev.
Families who include a solar project on their land, however, stand a better chance of securing it, he added.

"Then everyone will benefit -- the landowners, the country, the Negev," he said. "This is the best way to move forward to a green economy."

In Um Batin, a recognised village, residents are using solar energy in a different way –- to power a local kindergarten all year round.

Until last year, the village relied on power from a diesel generator that polluted the air and the ground where the children played.

Now, a hulking solar panel shields the children from the sun as its surface sucks up the powerful rays, keeping the kindergarten in full working order.

"It was not clean or comfortable here before," said Nama Abu Kaf, who works in the kindergarten.
"Now we have air conditioning and a projector so the children can watch television."

Hani al-Hawashleh, who oversees the project on behalf of Shamsuna, said the solar energy initiative for schools and kindergartens was "very positive".

"Without power you can't use all kinds of equipment such as projectors, lights in the classrooms and, on the other hand, it saves costs and uses clean energy," he said.

The projects are part of a pilot scheme run by Shamsuna.

Asked if there was interest in expanding to other educational institutions that rely on polluting generators, he said there were challenges and bureaucracy but he hoped to see more.

"We need people to collaborate with us to move this forward," he said, adding that he would "love to see a solar energy system in every village".