Asharq Al-Awsat in Quake-Stricken Jindires: Levelled Neighborhoods, Refugees under the Rubble https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/4151606/asharq-al-awsat-quake-stricken-jindires-levelled-neighborhoods-refugees-under
Asharq Al-Awsat in Quake-Stricken Jindires: Levelled Neighborhoods, Refugees under the Rubble
08 February 2023, Syria, Jindires: A general view of the destruction caused by the deadly earthquake that tore through the Turkish-Syrian border. (dpa)
Aleppo countryside – Firas Karam
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Asharq Al-Awsat in Quake-Stricken Jindires: Levelled Neighborhoods, Refugees under the Rubble
08 February 2023, Syria, Jindires: A general view of the destruction caused by the deadly earthquake that tore through the Turkish-Syrian border. (dpa)
Teams from Syria’s Civil Defense (White Helmets), as well as civilian volunteers, have continued their search and rescue efforts of survivors of the devastating earthquake that struck the country and neighboring Türkiye on Monday.
They are carrying out their efforts in the opposition-held regions in Syria's northwest.
They are in a race against time to rescue as many people as possible from under the rubble. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake has killed at least 20,000 people in Syria and Türkiye. Hopes are dwindling to find survivors.
In the Idlib’s Jindires region, Umm Mahmoud, 51, tearily look on at what was once her neighborhood. She looks at the rubble that was once her neighbors’ homes. They did not survive the quake.
She spoke to Asharq Al-Awsat about the early moments when the earthquake struck.
“We were asleep. My husband, son and I. We almost lost our minds from fright. The trembling started and parts of our house began to fall on us. We managed to escape and run to an area that is not surrounded by buildings,” she recalled.
Screams and shouts soon began to rise from the houses nearby.
“Dust and pitch darkness soon pervaded the area. The screams then started to die down. We soon realized that an earthquake had destroyed everything in the city,” Umm Mahmoud said.
She added that her family tried to head back to its home to retrieve some clothes and blankets, but the roads leading to it were blocked by piles of rubble. “It was then that we realized the extent of the calamity,” she remarked.
Hundreds of buildings were turned to rubble in the quake. Dozens of heavy vehicles and Civil Defense teams are working tirelessly on the rescue efforts.
Hassan, 33, is a refugee from the Hama countryside. He is leading a group of civilian volunteers in the rescue efforts in the eastern section of Jindires.
He only has simple tools and hammers at his disposal. Along with a number of his friends, he joined rescue efforts after witnessing the extent of the devastation and the limited means of the Civil Defense teams.
The chances of finding surviving are dropping by the hour, he stated. Every delay may take place at the cost of losing a life.
The latest figures showed that 513 people were killed and 831 wounded in Jindires. Dozens of families remain trapped under the rubble.
Given the limited means, the rescue operations are painfully slow. Some 233 houses were completely destroyed and 120 were partially damaged and are susceptible to collapse at any moment.
Predominantly Kurdish Jindires is located in northwestern Aleppo. Its population stood at nearly 13,000 people before the eruption of the Syrian conflict in 2011.
It was held by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) for years before Turkish forces and their allied Syrian armed factions seized control of it in March 2018 during Türkiye’s Operation Olive Branch.
Since then, it became home to over 30,000 refugees from the Aleppo and Idlib countrysides who had fled the regime. Now, many of these refugees have died in the earthquake.
Long Silenced by Fear, Syrians Now Speak about Rampant Torture under Assadhttps://english.aawsat.com/features/5098692-long-silenced-fear-syrians-now-speak-about-rampant-torture-under-assad
People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)
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Long Silenced by Fear, Syrians Now Speak about Rampant Torture under Assad
People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)
Handcuffed and squatting on the floor, Abdullah Zahra saw smoke rising from his cellmate’s flesh as his torturers gave him electric shocks.
Then it was Zahra’s turn. They hanged the 20-year-old university student from his wrists and electrocuted and beat him for two hours. They made his father watch and taunted him about his son’s torment.
That was 2012, and the entire security apparatus of Syria’s then-President Bashar Assad was deployed to crush the protests against his rule.
With Assad’s fall a month ago, the machinery of death that he ran is starting to come out into the open.
It was systematic and well-organized, growing to more than 100 detention facilities into which tens of thousands disappeared over more than a decade. Torture, sexual violence and mass executions were rampant, according to rights groups and former prisoners.
A blanket of fear kept Syrians silent about their experiences or lost loved ones. But now, everyone is talking. After the insurgents who swept Assad out of power on Dec. 8 opened prisons and detention facilities, crowds swarmed in, searching for answers, bodies of loved ones, and ways to heal.
The Associated Press visited seven of these facilities in Damascus and spoke to nine former detainees. Some details of the accounts by those who spoke to the AP could not be independently confirmed, but they matched past reports by former detainees to human rights groups.
Days after Assad’s fall, Zahra — now 33 — came to visit Branch 215, a detention facility run by military intelligence in Damascus where he was held for two months.
There, he said, he was kept in a windowless underground cell, 4-by-4-meters (yards) and crammed with 100 other inmates. When ventilators were cut off -- either intentionally or because of a power failure -- some suffocated. Men went mad; torture wounds festered. When a cellmate died, they stowed his body next to the cell’s toilet until jailers collected corpses, Zahra said.
“Death was the least bad thing,” he said. “We reached a place where death was easier than staying here for one minute.”
A member of the security forces for the new interim Syrian government stands next to prison cells at the Palestine Branch, a detention facility operated by the General Intelligence Agency during Bashar al-Assad's regime, in Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 14, 2024. (AP)
Assad’s system of repression grew as civil war raged
After he and his father were released, Zahra fled to opposition-held areas. Within a few months, security agents returned and dragged off 13 of his male relatives, including a younger brother and, again, his father.
All were killed. Zahra later recognized their bodies among photos leaked by a defector showing thousands killed in detention. Their bodies were never recovered.
Rights groups estimate at least 150,000 people went missing since anti-government protests began in 2011, most vanishing into detention facilities. Many were killed, either in mass executions or from torture and prison conditions. The exact number remains unknown.
Even before the uprising, Assad had ruled with an iron fist. But as protests turned into a civil war that would last 14 years, Assad expanded his system of repression. New detention facilities run by military, security and intelligence agencies sprung up in security compounds, military airports and under buildings.
At Branch 215, Zahra hoped to find some sign of his lost relatives. But there was nothing. At home, his aunt, Rajaa Zahra, looked at the leaked pictures of her killed children for the first time – something she had long refused to do. She lost four of her six sons in Assad’s crackdowns. Her brother, she said, lost two of his three sons.
“They were hoping to finish off all the young men of the country.”
A site believed to be a mass grave for detainees killed under Bashar al-Assad's rule is visible in Najha, south of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 17, 2024. (AP)
Syrians were tortured with ‘the tire’ and ‘magic carpet’
The tortures had names. One was called the “magic carpet,” where a detainee was strapped to a hinged wooden plank that bends in half, folding his head to his feet, which were then beaten.
Abdul-Karim Hajeko said he endured this five times. His torturers stomped on his back during interrogations at the Criminal Security branch, and his vertebrae are still broken.
“My screams would go to heaven. Once a doctor came down from the fourth floor (to the ground floor) because of my screams,” he said.
He was also put in “the tire.” His legs were bent inside a car tire as interrogators beat his back and feet. Afterward, they ordered him to kiss the tire and thank it for teaching him “how to behave.”
Many prisoners said the tire was inflicted for rule violations -- like making noise, raising one’s head in front of guards, or praying – or for no reason at all.
Saleh Turki Yahia said a cellmate died nearly every day during the seven months in 2012 he was held at the Palestine Branch, a detention facility run by the General Intelligence Agency. He said he was given electric shocks, hanged from his wrists, beaten on his feet. He lost half his body weight and nearly tore his own skin scratching from scabies.
“They broke us,” he said, breaking into tears as he visited the Palestine Branch. “A whole generation is destroyed.”
Documents are scattered around Branch 215, a detention facility run by Bashar al-Assad's regime, in Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 17, 2024. (AP)
The mounting evidence will be used in trials
Now comes the monumental task of accounting for the missing and compiling evidence that could one day be used to prosecute Assad’s officials, whether by Syrian or international courts.
Hundreds of thousands of documents remain scattered throughout detention facilities. Some seen by the AP included transcripts of phone conversations; intelligence files on activists; and a list of hundreds of prisoners killed in detention. At least 15 mass graves have been identified around Damascus and elsewhere around the country.
A UN body known as the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism has offered to help the new interim administration in collecting, organizing and analyzing all the material. Since 2011, it has been compiling evidence and supporting investigations in over 200 criminal cases against figures in Assad’s government.
Many want answers now.
Officials cannot just declare that the missing are presumed dead, said Wafaa Mustafa, a Syrian journalist, whose father was detained and killed 12 years ago.
“No one gets to tell the families what happened without evidence, without search, without work.”
