(North Press) – On Saturday, the Violations Documentation Center in North Syria (VDC-NSY) published horrific photos and testimonies of the Turkish army’s participation in the torture and rape of kidnapped women in the prisons of the armed opposition groups in Afrin.
This came during meetings with the VDC-NSY which were documented with voice recordings of the victims.
A former female detainee, who was released from prison after being detained unlawfully for 878 days, narrated the horrors of torture and rape, and how they were photographed naked in the presence of officers of the Turkish intelligence service.
Nadia Suleiman spoke boldly and courageously after her illegal detention about cases of torture and rape in the prisons of the Hamza Division and the Turkish intelligence.
Suleiman, a resident of Afrin, said that she received a voice message from the phone of her husband who was detained by the Hamza Division asking her to visit him.
She added that she got the voice message on her phone via WhatsApp on August 2, 2018. It was the voice of her husband (26-year-old Ahmed Rashid Aref Rashid), asking her to visit him.
Aref Rashid, from the village of Bibaka in Afrin, was kidnapped by the Syrian National Army after they raided his home on May 25, 2018.
Nadia pointed out that it turned out that the voice message was to lure her and her husband’s friend in order to kidnap them. She then was arrested, and has still never seen her husband.
Nadia stated that she was beaten in the detention center, and after being questioned 25 times, she was put in a single small room.
Later, she was transferred to a larger prison with about 40 male and female detainees, and then she was put in a prison with eleven women and two children (a seven-month-old baby and a one-and-a-half-year-old child).
She added that she was detained with eleven women and two children, and that cold water was sprayed on all of them in the harsh winter. They lay on the floor of the room without covers.
They were not given blankets or sponges, and they were deprived of food and water. Food was served once every three or four days, and the nursing child was deprived of milk.
Nadia pointed out that she was tortured and photographed. She was tortured at first, and then raped several times. She stated that other women were raped, and that she witnessed the death of two people under torture.
She also talked about the militants, accompanied by Turkish-speaking people, filming them several times while they were naked and forcing them to thank Turkey and Erdogan in one of the videos.
In another video, they forced them to falsely confess through beatings and torture that they were terrorists involved in or planning bombings, and that they were agents for the benefit of the Syrian Democratic Forces.
The fate of more than four thousand detainees from Afrin region has been unknown since the armed opposition groups took control of the area in March 2018.
Source: The official page of the Violations Documentation Center in North Syria
