NP: Syria, part 1

[jody2.718]

From the New Yorker, May 13, 2019

A Times Reporter Documents the Horror of Syria’s Torture Sites

By [Isaac Chotiner](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/isaac-chotiner)

May 13, 2019

On Sunday, the Times published [an exhaustively reported and harrowing story](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/world/middleeast/syria-torture-practices.html) about Bashar al-Assad’s secret network of prisons, which also serve as torture sites and execution centers. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group, nearly a hundred and twenty-eight thousand people are presumed to have been killed in the prisons or are being held there in custody—and nearly fourteen thousand have been killed by torture. Many prisoners die from conditions so dire that a United Nations investigation labelled the process “extermination.”

Eight years into [the Syrian civil war](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/bashar-al-assads-war-crimes-exposed), with Assad’s regime quickly gaining ground, Anne Barnard, of the Times, tells the stories of numerous survivors of the prison system, including details of the torture, sexual violence, and dehumanization that they faced there. Former prisoners recalled a guard who went by the name Hitler, who forced them “to act the roles of dogs, donkeys and cats, beating those who failed to bark or bray correctly.” Mariam Khlief and six other women were held in a basement cell, where they were beaten, tortured, and repeatedly raped. Survivors recalled blood from violent rapes staining the floor, guards stuffing excrement in the mouths of prisoners, and “a man who doubled as a nurse and a guard and called himself Azrael,” the angel of death, who murdered prisoners at night. It is almost impossible to do justice to the depth of Barnard’s reporting and the evil it describes.

Barnard, who has been working on the story for seven years, holds the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations. She previously spent six years as the Times’ Beirut bureau chief. After the story was posted online, I spoke with her by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Syria’s prisons have changed in the past several decades, whether the Western focus on ISIS warped our understanding of the Syrian civil war, and the long-term consequences of systemized torture....

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-times-reporter-documents-the-horror-of-syrias-torture-sites

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