Long, productive, rewarding, and also sad, day in Aleppo. The sad–tragic–part was meeting a man, Abdel Aziz, who was held in the terrorists’ underground prison in the Eye/Children’s Hospital complex, occupied by terrorist factions until liberation of eastern Aleppo areas in late 2016.
Held for over a year, he said, in solitary confinement most of that time, he said.
In mid 2017, I saw an underground prison in that terrorist-occupied hospital complex, and saw the cells he would have been held in
…also in Lairamoun, Aleppo.
Solitary confinement there was a narrow, suffocating, cement and metal cell just wide enough for an adult to fit in. At best he could probably sit, knees to chest… but not lie down.
He was one of many civilians kept in such horrific circumstances. He started to cry when I asked him questions about this unjust incarceration, so I didn’t push much beyond asking the very basics.
This man is traumatized, probably for life.
These terrorism was done by terrorists backed by the West, who still dare to call them “rebels”.
When interviewing others today, on a variety of issues, including rebuilding in Aleppo, whenever the matter of the terrorists came up they were clear that all of the terrorists, whatever name they go by (Free Syrian Army, etc) are the same, something I’ve heard over and over again around Syria. And it’s logical, because these thieves and criminals all commit acts of terrorism, whether shelling and sniping civilian areas, holding civilians hostage, starving them, torturing them, beheading them…
From my article on liberated Aleppo:
“…in the Eye Hospital complex, I passed a building marked as the headquarters of the Tawhid Brigade, and a building marked on an outside wall with the writing, “The Sharia court in Aleppo and its countryside,” before entering and descending to another underground prison.
It contained the same tight solitary confinement cells as in Lairamoun, as well as many dank, windowless, concrete rooms serving as mass cells for the unfortunate Aleppo residents imprisoned by the terrorists.
Many of the cement room-cells contained religious texts, in boxes and plastic crates, and on the main level two rooms had been used as classrooms, segregated by sex, for teaching the extremists’ beliefs to Aleppo’s mostly-Sunni Muslims.
Prisoners’ writings, with dates, on the walls showed that at least some of them were held in this dungeon for over a year. The fate of some prisoners was execution, depending on the perverted rulings of terrorist judges.
Western media played down the militarization of hospitals in Aleppo by al-Qaeda affiliates.
Independent British journalist Vanessa Beeley visited the hospital complex-turned-prison in April 2017 and interviewed a man who had been imprisoned for seven weeks by Jabhat al-Shamiya (the Levant Front coalition of al-Qaeda and Salafi terrorists) because he talked about how bad conditions were in East Aleppo, under the terrorists.
Beeley told me some of what the man, Ahmad Aldayh, a shopkeeper, had told her:
“I was eyewitness to one execution: A young man, the only child in his family, was arrested because the terrorists found on his mobile phone a photo of his friend holding the Syrian flag. They tortured him for more than four hours and then executed him.
We were all treated very badly. One woman begged three times for food and said she was starving. The warden ordered the prison guards to torture her for three hours as punishment for complaining. Just before the SAA fully liberated the area and the Eye Hospital on the 4th December 2016, 22 other prisoners were executed. They were all shot. They were also about to throw another prisoner off the roof of the building but the SAA advance was so fast they fled without killing him.”…”
