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In late 2011 or early 2012, I came into contact with a Syrian soldier
who was serving as a male nurse in a hospital described in this article.
So appalled was he by the torture taking place in a hospital that he
went AWOL and became a supporter of the revolution. We had long
conversations over Skype about the horrors of the Baathist dictatorship.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/the-hospitals-were-slaughterhouses-a-journey-intosyrias-secret-torture-wards/2017/04/02/90ccaa6e-0d61-11e7-b2bb-417e331877d9_story.html
One evening in the early days of Syria’s uprising, Mohsen al-Masri’s
band of activists slipped through the Damascus streets and waited for
the coast to clear. Then they crouched down, opened their bags and let
out a stream of color.
Thousands of ping-pong balls, painted green, pink, blue and yellow,
bounced past policemen, who scrambled to stop them. Residents would find
balls tucked in nooks and crannies for months. Each was marked with a
single word: “Freedom.”
The punishment for Masri’s acts of peaceful protest would begin a
journey into hell, unusual not because of what he saw, but because he
survived.
In a series of interviews, he described how he was tortured and
interrogated over a two-year period in four detention facilities before
arriving in a hospital at the heart of a nationwide system of brutality.
The hospital, known as 601, is not the only site of torture in Syria.
But after it was seen in a cache of photographs showing thousands of
skeletal corpses, it became one of the most notorious.
Inside the facility, about a half-mile from Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad’s palace, sick prisoners are tortured as they lie shackled to
beds crammed with dying men, according to Masri and former detainees and
military personnel who worked there. Corpses are piled in bathrooms,
outhouses and anywhere else they will fit, then meticulously documented
and trucked away for mass burial.
In interviews across Lebanon, Turkey and Europe, more than a dozen
survivors and army defectors described horrors in Syrian military
hospitals across the country for which war crimes lawyers say they have
struggled to find a modern parallel.
The former detainees come from all walks of life. Elite, working-class,
leftist and Islamist, their only connection to each other was
involvement in Syria’s 2011 uprising. Some were its instigators. Others
said they had simply commented on the Facebook statuses of friends who
supported protests.
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