Mass Torture Photos Taken in 'Hospital 601' in Mezzah-Damascus: Source

[elszADaQ]

The atrocious photos of mass torture by Syrian security had been taken in a well-known military hospital in Mezzah neighborhood of Damascus.

Hospital 601 was the photographing scene of Bashar al-Assad’s war crimes where the leaked photos showed hundreds of lifeless bodies with signs of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation and other forms of torture and killing.

Zaman al-Wasl published last week 5 photos of mass torture that illustrate apparent actions of serious international crimes committed in the chambers of security services against 11,000 detainees, according to human rights advocates.

Some of the photographs will take back the reader to the torture memos of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003 when the U.S. soldiers used to take photos with tormented bodies. Here the Syrian soldiers are doing the same.

Zaman al-Wasl has obtained the names of the two soldiers who appeared in some photos. Mohamed Ahmed Tafankji (R) was born in Aleppo. Racan al-Sabsabi (L), was born in Homs- Bab Draib neighborhood. Both two soldiers were doing their compulsory military service in Mezzah hospital (dubbed: 601).

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Here are two of the monsters who disposed of emaciated bodies of dead Syrians tortured to death by Assad in Damascus' Mezzeh district, in Hospital 601, where disposal occurred, possibly torturing them too. Mohammad Ahmad Tefnakji is on the right. Next to him is Racan Sabsabi on the left. The hospital is known as the "slaughterhouse" because of what is done to innocent people there. It's also close to Assad's home:Center for Documentation of Violations in Syria - The Testimony of the Detainee: Mazen Besais Hamada On Air Force Branch-Mazzeh Military Airport

There's another photo of another unknown man posing next to the victims with an evil grin, but I'm too disgusted and horrified to post it.

Apparently torturing people and then clearing up their remains is an occasion to celebrate with a photo? Here's Mohammad's profile. Playing in the snow one day, taking part in genocide the next? Muhammad Tefnakji | Facebook

Thank goodness these vile people are exposed. Racan closed his page I think, but now we have names that could potentially be sent to courts in the future.

The Syrian government, which earlier accused the rebels of gassing themselves and their families to provoke international intervention also dismissed the report on the industrial scale torture and killing made by three eminent former war crimes prosecutors, saying it has no credibility. Syria's Justice Ministry Najm al-Ahmad, the same liar who blamed the rebels for the Ghouta chemical attack dismissed the photos and accompanying report as "lacking objectiveness and professionalism", according to the Associated Press.

The ministry questions the credibility of the photographer, saying he was "a fugitive who fled Syria and who was already facing legal action," and asks how he would have got the necessary documents to leave the country. Aside from the photos of "foreign terrorists," other individuals shown are "civilians and military personnel who were killed as a result of torture by armed terrorist groups because they were accused of being pro-state," it claims.

Alahednews:: Syrian Justice Minister: Army Did Not Use Chemical Weapons
Syria: Photos charging mass torture by regime 'fake' - CNN.com
http://www.newsweek.com/photos-syria-allegedly-show-torture-systematic-killing-278894
10,000 Bodies: Inside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's Crackdown - WSJ

How many times do you get to lie before you are a liar? #SyriaMassTorture

 

[Syrian Lion]

more lies and BS...

 

[elszADaQ]

Profile Pictures - Muhammad Tefnakji | Facebook

 

[al-Hasani]

 

[elszADaQ]

 

[Gufi]

@Nihonjin1051 you forget the root problem that caused the formation of radicals like ISIS

 

[OTTOMAN]

Ayatolla soldiers are far above Hitler.

'Afghan' in Syria: Iranians pay us to fight for Assad - CNN.com

@Nihonjin1051 you forget the root problem that caused the formation of radicals like ISIS

Go through the interviews i posted in CNN link above, you'll know that ISIS is B team of axis of evil.
Afghanistan, Yemen, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Iraq are the rich source of fighters, available to axis of evil.
In the end they all die, one way or the other, after serving for few months to years.

 

[Aepsilons]

Very unpleasant to read !!

 

[forcetrip]

Very unpleasant to read !!

But the graphic chart in the end was the most toughest. Why only 95.5%?

 

[elszADaQ]

Well certainly those figures weren't pulled out of nowhere sir.

Methodology
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) is an independent nongovernmental nonprofit human rights organization that was founded in 2011 to document the ongoing violations in Syria and publish periodic studies, researches, and reports while maintaining the highest levels of professionalism and objectivity as a first step towards exposing violations perpetrators, hold them accountable, and insure victims’ rights.
It should be noted that the U.N. relied on SNHR’s documentation, as its most prominent source, in all of its statistical and analytical reports concerning the victims of the Syrian conflict. Furthermore, SNHR is approved as a certified source by a wide range of Arabic and international news agencies and many international human rights organizations.

The founder and head of SNHR is Mr. Fadel Abdulghani, the network’s team consists of 23 researchers and human rights activists.
SNHR relies in all of is reports and studies mainly on the investigations conducted by its members inside and outside Syria. These investigations are conducted through field-visits or interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses. All of the incidents listed in this report have been documented in extensive reports which were published on the network website in Arabic and English. In this report we selected the most prominent violations that were perpetrated in 2014.

The international humanitarian law and the customary international law in parallel with the international human rights law are all binding upon all the conflict parties.
We emphasize that all of the statistics and incidents included in this study reflect minimally the gravity and scale of the ongoing violations that have been perpetrated in Syria since 2011.

Harvest of the most prominent human rights violations in Syria in 2014 - Syrian Network For Human Rights

 

[elszADaQ]

Syrian regime document trove shows evidence of 'industrial scale' killing of detainees

Tuesday 21 January 2014

Senior war crimes prosecutors say photographs and documents provide 'clear evidence' of systematic killing of 11,000 detainees

Syrian government officials could face war crimes charges in the light of a huge cache of evidence smuggled out of the country showing the "systematic killing" of about 11,000 detainees, according to three eminent international lawyers.

The three, former prosecutors at the criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, examined thousands of Syrian government photographs and files recording deaths in the custody of regime security forces from March 2011 to last August.

Most of the victims were young men and many corpses were emaciated, bloodstained and bore signs of torture. Some had no eyes; others showed signs of strangulation or electrocution.

The UN and independent human rights groups have documented abuses by both Bashar al-Assad's government and rebels, but experts say this evidence is more detailed and on a far larger scale than anything else that has yet emerged from the 34-month crisis.

The three lawyers interviewed the source, a military policeman who worked secretly with a Syrian opposition group and later defected and fled the country. In three sessions in the last 10 days they found him credible and truthful and his account "most compelling".

They put all evidence under rigorous scrutiny, says their report, which has been obtained by the Guardian and CNN.

The authors are Sir Desmond de Silva QC, former chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, the former lead prosecutor of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, and Professor David Crane, who indicted President Charles Taylor of Liberia at the Sierra Leone court.

The defector, who for security reasons is identified only as Caesar, was a photographer with the Syrian military police. He smuggled the images out of the country on memory sticks to a contact in the Syrian National Movement, which is supported by the Gulf state of Qatar. Qatar, which has financed and armed rebel groups, has called for the overthrow of Assad and demanded his prosecution.

The 31-page report, which was commissioned by a leading firm of London solicitors acting for Qatar, is being made available to the UN, governments and human rights groups. Its publication appears deliberately timed to coincide with this week's UN-organised Geneva II peace conference, which is designed to negotiate a way out of the Syrian crisis by creating a transitional government.

Caesar told the investigators his job was "taking pictures of killed detainees". He did not claim to have witnessed executions or torture. But he did describe a highly bureaucratic system.

"The procedure was that when detainees were killed at their places of detention their bodies would be taken to a military hospital to which he would be sent with a doctor and a member of the judiciary, Caesar's function being to photograph the corpses … There could be as many as 50 bodies a day to photograph which require 15 to 30 minutes of work per corpse," the report says.

"The reason for photographing executed persons was twofold. First to permit a death certificate to be produced without families requiring to see the body, thereby avoiding the authorities having to give a truthful account of their deaths; second to confirm that orders to execute individuals had been carried out."

Families were told that the cause of death was either a "heart attack" or "breathing problems", it added. "The procedure for documentation was that when a detainee was killed each body was given a reference number which related to that branch of the security service responsible for his detention and death.

"When the corpse was taken to the military hospital it was given a further number so as to document, falsely, that death had occurred in the hospital. Once the bodies were photographed, they were taken for burial in a rural area."

Three experienced forensic science experts examined and authenticated samples of 55,000 digital images, comprising about 11,000 victims. "Overall there was evidence that a significant number of the deceased were emaciated and a significant minority had been bound and/or beaten with rod-like objects," the report says.

"In only a minority of the cases … could a convincing injury that would account for death be seen, but any fatal injury to the back of the body would not be represented in the images …

"The forensics team make clear that there are many ways in which an individual may be killed with minimal or even absent external evidence of the mechanism."

The inquiry team said it was satisfied there was "clear evidence, capable of being believed by a tribunal of fact in a court of law, of systematic torture and killing of detained persons by the agents of the Syrian government. It would support findings of crimes against humanity and could also support findings of war crimes against the current Syrian regime."

De Silva told the Guardian that the evidence "documented industrial-scale killing". He added: "This is a smoking gun of a kind we didn't have before. It makes a very strong case indeed."

Calls for Assad or others to face justice at the international criminal courtin The Hague have foundered on the problems that Syria is not a member of the court, and that the required referral by the UN security council might not be supported by the US and UK or would be blocked by Russia, Syria's close ally.

Nice said: "It would not necessarily be possible to track back with any degree of certainty to the head of state. Ultimately, in any war crimes trial you can imagine a prosecutor arguing that the overall quantity of evidence meant that the pattern of behaviour would have been approved at a high level.

"But whether you can go beyond that and say it must be head of state-approved is rather more difficult. But 'widespread and systematic' does betoken government control."

Crane said: "Now we have direct evidence of what was happening to people who had disappeared. This is the first provable, direct evidence of what has happened to at least 11,000 human beings who have been tortured and executed and apparently disposed of.

"This is amazing. This is the type of evidence a prosecutor looks for and hopes for. We have pictures, with numbers that marry up with papers with identical numbers – official governmentdocuments. We have the person who took those pictures. That's beyond-reasonable-doubt-type evidence."

A US administration official told the Guardian on Monday: "We stand with the rest of the world in horror at these images which have come to light. We condemn in the strongest possible terms the actions of the regime and call on it to adhere to international obligations with respect to the treatment of prisoners.

"We have long spoken out about mistreatment and deteriorating prison conditions in Syria. These latest reports, and the photographs that support them, demonstrate just how far the regime is willing to go to not only deny freedom and dignity to the Syrian people, but to inflict significant emotional and physical pain in the process. To be sure, these reports suggest widespread and apparently systematic violations of international humanitarian law.

"The regime has the ability to improve the atmosphere for negotiations in Geneva by making progress in several areas. However, this latest report of horrific and inhumane prison conditions/actions further underscores that if anything, it is tarnishing the environment for the talks.

"As we have for over two years, and again today, we call on the Syrian government to grant immediate and unfettered access to all their detention facilities by international documentation bodies, including the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria.

"We have long said that those responsible for atrocities in Syria must be held accountable for their gross violations of human rights. The United States continues to support efforts to promote accountability and transitional justice, and we call on the international community to do the same."

William Hague, the UK foreign secretary, said: "This report offers further evidence of the systematic violence and brutality being visited upon the people of Syria by the Assad regime. We will continue to press for action on all human rights violations in Syria, and for accountability for those who perpetrate them."

Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch said his organisation had not had the opportunity to authenticate the images. But he added: "We have documented repeatedly how Syria's security services regularly torture – sometimes to death – detainees in their custody.

"These photos – if authentic – suggest that we may have only scratched the surface of the horrific extent of torture in Syria's notorious dungeons. There is only one way to get to the bottom of this and that is for the negotiating parties at Geneva II to grant unhindered access to Syria's detention facilities to independent monitors."

Syrian regime document trove shows evidence of 'industrial scale' killing of detainees | World news | The Guardian


It seems like Mohamed Ahmed Tafankji has closed his Facebook page down too

https://www.facebook.com/mohammad.tafnakji?fref=pb&hc_location=friends_tab&pnref=friends.all

 

[elszADaQ]

One of the 50,000 pictures leaked of torture victims in Syria maybe Colonel Hussein Harmoush,

Leading Syrian Military Defector Appears to Be Victim in 1 of Torture Photos

An activist notes that one of the thousands of photographs of torture victims in Syrian prisons, leaked by a defecting military photographer in January 2014, appears to show the defected Colonel Hussein Harmoush.

Harmoush left Syria in June 2011 but disappeared from a Turkish refugee camp in early September. Two weeks later, he appeared on Syrian State TV, accusing the opposition of “empty promises” and retracting his claim that the Syrian military fired on peaceful protesters on the Assad regime’s orders. Released ex-prisoners have confirmed that the Army defector was imprisoned in Sednaya Military Prison near Damascus, The sources saw Harmoush in 'the ''Red Building'' one of the most secure places for VIP prisoners.

 

[elszADaQ]

 

[elszADaQ]

Inside Syria’s Jails

By ALISE MOFREJ

FEBRUARY 3, 2015

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In the spring of 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians rose up in protest to demand democracy and freedom and an end to the dictatorship of President Bashar al-Assad. The response of the regime was to escalate the methods of repression that had been tried and tested against political opponents since the 1970s: arbitrary detention, disappearance and torture.

I worked as an Arabic teacher in the Damascus suburb of Germana, where my husband and I lived. We were both activists in a left-wing opposition party that had been suppressed for decades. I also founded an organization called Syrian Women for a State of Citizenship, which has been active since the start of the revolution. We worked to create economic opportunities for women and to promote peace and reduce conflict between armed factions at a local level.

I was first arrested on July 20, 2011, for participating in a peaceful demonstration in downtown Damascus. Along with six other activists, I was beaten with fists and an electric rod by members of the shabiha, the Baathist militia loyal to the Assad family. The regime gave these thugs a blank check to terrorize anyone suspected of opposition sympathies. They abused and manhandled us, before handing us over to the police.

We were held by the criminal security branch — in effect, the secret police — for 12 days, and then appeared in court before a judge, who granted us bail. We later received summonses, but we never showed up; eventually, the case against us for an “unlawful demonstration” was dropped.

As the security situation deteriorated through 2012, the regime’s tactics became harsher. By some estimates, more than 200,000 people have been detained as political prisoners, including thousands of women, and even young children.

On Dec. 30, 2013, I was arrested again, when I went to a passport office to apply for a visa to attend a women’s conference sponsored by the United Nations. An arrest warrant was also issued for my husband, but he succeeded in going into hiding for the duration of my second detention. This time, I was fired from my job.

The worst thing about detention was not knowing whether it would ever end. I could have been killed at any time — prisoners die by the score every day from the effects of torture. I feel lucky just to be alive.

We were isolated from the outside world and had no access to lawyers. For more than a month, I shared a prison cell with more than 30 women who were all detained for different charges, either because of their relief activities in the besieged areas, their personal or family ties with members of the armed opposition, or as a result of a false security report. The cell was about 50 square feet, dark and cold, with no ventilation.

Torture was routine. Anyone who has been detained in Mr. Assad’s prisons will know these details. There are about 40 documented techniques, including suspending prisoners by their arms from the ceiling, electric shocks, beatings, cigarette burns and pulling nails. The screams of the tortured were unbearable; I nearly lost my mind in there.

More than 60 men were held in a neighboring cell. Regardless of the charge, the guards called us all terrorists and beat everyone. The number of detainees went down as some died, and up again as more were brought in. Some were forced to sleep next to corpses before the dead were disposed of. Among the living, our exhausted bodies became infested with lice; we got rashes and skin infections.

I was fortunate not to be harmed physically, unlike a doctor held with me who was falsely accused of kidnapping a Syrian Army soldier. They hung her from her hair instead of her wrists, and kept dousing her body with cold water and shocking her with electricity until she lost consciousness for days at a time.

We were interrogated for long hours, and the interrogators kept us in a state of stress all day and all night. I was blindfolded, handcuffed and dragged to the interrogation room. The interrogator would slap me in the face again and again, ordering me to sign blank sheets to which he would later add false confessions.

During this second detention of about 40 days I was transferred from one facility to another, until I was lucky enough to be released in one of the first “reconciliations,” a cease-fire agreement between the army and rebels. These often resulted after the regime had besieged an area and subjected its population to starvation; the armed resistance had to lay down its weapons and cede control of the area under the terms of the deal, which included prisoner exchanges.

Once I was out, my husband — who had stayed only because of our two children — fled across the border to Lebanon. I was confined to Damascus and banned from traveling. Because Syrian law does not recognize women’s rights, I also lost guardianship of our sons. Finally, a judge granted me temporary custody and a temporary travel permit. So we left for Beirut and have applied for asylum, but we are stuck — without work, and with our children out of school.

We who have seen the inside of Mr. Assad’s jails call on the international community to stand against the catastrophic brutality in Syria, and put pressure on all sides to resume political negotiations based on the 2014 Geneva peace talks. The first step toward a solution must be an end to the killings, detentions and disappearances. International observers must be permitted to visit the prisons to monitor the condition of detainees.

Despite the dire security situation, I intend to go back to Syria if I get the opportunity. Eventually, there will have to be an end to this terrible armed conflict, and I believe that to guarantee their rights, Syrian women, too, must have a role in negotiating any final agreement.

Alise Mofrej is an Arabic teacher and Syrian activist.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/opinion/inside-syrias-jails.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1&referrer=

 

[elszADaQ]