HATAY
Abdullah Ziya, a father of four, is one of thousands arrested and tortured in Bashar al-Assad regime’s prisons in Syria.
Having escaped and now safe in Turkey’s refugee camps 31-year-old Ziya wanted to tell his story.
He said he and others were tortured for nearly two months adding that three of his brothers were also arrested and tortured. “We don’t even know the reason of our arrest” he said.
Ziya who was kept in an unknown location in Hama, continued saying that “they didn’t give us a meal or water, but instead gave us electric shocks, those who couldn’t take it died in front of us."
Omer Yusuf says he lost his left eye, had his arm broken and has signs of torture all over his body. “I spent a year in prison and my wife and children were in prison for five months,” the 33-year old said.
Some 55,000 photographs taken by a former government official over a two-year period and accompanied by a report from forensic experts that purportedly show evidence of systematic torture and execution by Syrian government forces were published January 21 in a joint exclusive by Anadolu Agency, CNN and the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper.
More than 100,000 people have been killed during the three-year conflict, which has also internally displaced more than 6.5 million people, according to the UN. Over two million are now registered as refugees in neighboring Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq.
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