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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/13/syria-torture-evidence?newsfeed=true
Syria's Torture Machine
(Guardian-UK) Jonathan Miller - Nadim Houry, the Beirut-based deputy director of Human Rights Watch for the Middle East and North Africa, has taken testimony on hundreds of cases of torture from Syria. "The odds are, if you're detained, you will be ill-treated and most likely tortured. We know of at least 105 cases of people who were returned from the custody of security services in body bags to their loved ones...and those are only the ones that we know of." A weathered former tractor driver in his 50s from Tal Kalakh in Syria, who escaped to Lebanon, can barely move; his right leg is now gangrenous below the knee. He told me in gruesome detail of beatings he'd received with batons and electric cables on the soles of his feet. He had been hung upside down for hours, then hung up by his wrists and whipped and tormented with electric cattle prods. When he wasn't being tortured, he had been crammed into cells with up to 80 people, without room to sit or sleep. "I saw at least 200 children - some as young as 10," he said. "And there were old men in their 80s. I watched one having his teeth pulled out by pliers." He told of forced confessions, knives and other people's severed fingers, boiling water, cigarette burns and finger nails extracted - and worse: electric drills. I met other survivors and each account corroborated the other. What emerged was a pattern of systematic brutality, a revolving door of terror through which thousands of people have passed in recent months. This is Syria's torture machine. It is torture on an industrial scale. A former platoon commander in the army said he had accompanied officers in house-to-house searches for wanted men in Homs. "When they don't find their target, they either rape the women, or kill the children." When they had failed to find one man on their wanted list, he claimed, they had taken his son, beheaded him and hung his head above the door of the family home. This, he told me, was what had prompted his defection.