[Article] Battered corpses show the horrors of life and death under Syria’s Assad
Battered corpses show the horrors of life and death under Syria’s Assad | CNN
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The bruised *멍든 and battered *오래된 bodies inside the morgue *시체 공치소 of Mujtahid Hospital are hard to look at — tangible *명백한 evidence of the brutal regime of toppled Syrian dictator *독재자 Bashar al-Assad.
But crowds of desperate people wait to see them, hoping finally for an answer to what happened to a loved one.
“Where are they?” pleads *간청하다 one woman. “My mother, she’s been missing for 14 years, where is she? Where is my brother, where is my husband, where are they?”
The 35 or so bodies were found in a military hospital in the Syrian capital of Damascus, days after the regime fell. They are believed to be among the last victims of Assad. A man points to their tattered *너덜너덜한 clothing and suggests they were detainees *수감자 at the notorious *유명한 Saydnaya prison.
The bodies are identified only by number inside the fluorescent-lit *형광등 morgue. But there isn’t enough room, so a makeshift area *임시변통 구역 has been set up outside where families gather, using their cellphone lights to look at the faces of the dead, hunting for features they recognize.
But they also see the horrific wounds *상처 that seem to be consistent with torture. A woman searching among the bodies retches as she leaves the morgue.
Dr. Ahmed Abdullah, an employee at the morgue, condemns *비난하다 the people who left these marks, accusing *비난하다 the Assad regime. “This is the crime of the regime — the way they tortured people,” he tells CNN. “Even in the Middle Ages, they didn’t torture people like this.”
Assad fled to Russia on Sunday after a lightning advance by Syria’s rebel groups, and the population’s anger against him is palpable *알 수 있는. A woman, who says her only son was taken by the regime 12 years ago, shouts: “I ask Allah to burn him, him and his sons. I hope he burns, like he burned my heart.”
For so long there has been no information available at all to families about missing loved ones. The people gathered at this morgue just want answers, even in the form of a corpse.
The Assad government was known for keeping meticulous *세심한 records. A defector who once worked as a photographer in the Syrian military police smuggled *밀수입된 out almost 27,000 images in 2014, taken at a military hospital where he said “killed detainees” were brought. The bodies in the photos showed signs of starvation, beatings, strangulation *교살, and other forms of torture and killing, according to a report on the images compiled by a team of war crimes prosecutors *검사 and forensic experts.
Troves and troves of prisoner files remain in the so-called “Palestine Branch” of military intelligence *군사 정보국 in southeastern Damascus. CNN found evidence at the facility that officers burned some documents and destroyed hard drives before fleeing but the terror they wrought was on such an industrial scale that much of the evidence has been left behind.
In an interview for a UN Commission report issued last year, a former detainee at the Palestine branch described regular beatings, beatings with a hosepipe and cigarette burns, according to. Other detainees described sexual abuse, and beatings that left prisoners unable to walk.
The UN report also said tens of thousands of people were buried in mass graves by the Syrian regime, and the US State Department released evidence in 2017 that a crematorium *화장장 had been built at Saydnaya prison. A US official estimated at the time as many as 50 detainees a day could be being killed at Saydnaya.
Investigators now will have the official files to sift through for information on what happened in Assad’s prisons. The detainees themselves left their own clues, scratched into the walls of underground cells that are perhaps better described as dungeons.
Graffiti and names covered the walls of cells in a secret prison within the Syrian Air Force Intelligence headquarters — where CNN found a man locked in a cell and abandoned — and the other places we’ve seen where Syrians were held.
The stolen people were likely trying to leave marks for someone to find. And now, their relatives are hoping finally to get some answers.