“They held a knife to my throat and threatened to kill me more than once”, Mahmoud told North-Press the story of his torture by Turkey-backed armed opposition groups in a prison in Syria’s northwestern Kurdish region of Afrin.
Mahmoud was arrested along with his mother Amina by Ahrar al-Sham, Turkey-backed Syrian Islamist opposition armed movement in Afrin.
“I was walking on the main street in Afrin, when a group of militants arrested me and asked for my ID, then they blindfolded me and forced me into a car”, Mahmoud said, adding that he was taken into a prison in the village of Kura, in the district of Jenderes in Afrin.
“I was tortured and severely beaten with cables and hoses directly on my head. We’ve wished to die at any moment. I thought about committing suicide, but I had no tool to do it!” Mahmoud added.
Mahmoud was tortured and beaten in various ways, as he was questioned by Turkey’s backed armed groups’ commanders and interrogators, indicating that he was transferred to several different prisons, and “each time to another armed group, including Sultan Murad armed militia”.
Mahmoud added: “They forced us to take small pills three times a day, we had no idea what was going on around us”, stressing that he was arrested for the sake of “a ransom money”, where the armed groups’ members “interrogated us and took information about our family members, our whereabouts, our field of work, and how much of real estate and property we own, as ransoms were demanded from our families depending on our financial situation, they demanded my family to pay $4,000 for my release”.
As a result of the severe beatings on his head, Mahmoud suffers from temporary amnesia at times.
The case of his mother “Amina” was no better than the case of her young son in the prisons of the Turkish army and its affiliated armed groups in Afrin region, where she was also beaten and tortured by several different armed groups.
Amina was arrested in the village of Kafr Janah in Shara district In Afrin, “under accusations of dealing with the Autonomous Administration” (the previous local Kurdish administration of Afrin), where she stayed in a prison that she could not identify for 44 days.
“They blindfolded me and took me to an unknown place, the cars drove for hours while I was blindfolded, I couldn’t know where the prison was”, she said, noting that they were “interrogating me repeatedly, along with other nine women of varying ages”.
“They were psychologically humiliating us, insulting us for being Kurds, as well as reducing the amount of food and making us starve for days”, she said.
Amina noted that these armed groups had dealt with them “upon ethnic and religious basis, they were calling us infidels and gave us the holy book of Quran, asking us to memorize it, they also imposed a veil on one of the female prisoners and beat her severely”.
Amina also witnessed the tortures of the young men who were exposed to in the same prison, “we were looking at the lawn through a crack in the door, they were tormenting young men brutally with hoses, and hanging them from their hands, we could hear their screams out of torture”, she added.
Amina was event released after 44 days of torture and beating, to return home and see that it was resided by a militant’s family, she said: “They drove me to my house in Kafr Janah where I found a strange family living in my house, it was a very cruel thing to see!”
Amina indicated that the family that was living in her house asked her to join them at the same house, “I was harassed and provoked by the family, I left my house and lived in the city of Afrin, in a house of one of our relatives”, she added.
Mahmoud and his mother stayed in their relative’s house in the city of Afrin for about seven months without going out, fearing to get arrested by other armed groups. Thereafter, “some of our relatives abroad sent us a sum of money to escape to Tal Rifaat in northern Aleppo countryside”, Amina said.
“We fled Afrin by some smugglers, who belong to those armed groups, as we paid 400 thousand Syrian pounds ( equals about $640) to get to Manbij, we then headed towards the areas of northern Aleppo countryside”, Mahmoud said.
Turkey and its backed armed opposition groups took control over the Syrian-Kurdish region of Afrin in March 18 2018, after fierce battles that lasted for about two months against the local forces of People’s Protection Units (YPG), followed by operations of kidnaping and arresting of civilians by Turkish army and the affiliated armed groups, and demanding large sums of money for their release, in addition to killing some of them on multiple charges.
On the 25th of August, an armed opposition group killed the old man “Mohieddin Osso” under torture, after breaking into his house in al-Ashrafieh neighborhood of Afrin, while his wife Horiya Muhammad Bakr died days after her husband was killed as a result of the severe beating by those armed groups.
North-Press Agency
Dejla Khalil
