Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government has been running a network of secret torture facilities across Syria while the country's civil war unfolded, a new report has found.

In a lengthy report, the New York Times found that the rate at which people are being detained in the country is still increasing, despite Assad's military win in the bloody conflict - now in its ninth year.

In the report, several survivors shared gruesome testimonies of how they were arrested and tortured across a number of prison facilities run by the Syrian intelligence.

The survivors are just a handful of hundreds of thousands of people believed to have passed through the secret prison system since the Syrian uprising kicked off in 2011.

Memos sent to Syria's head of military intelligence, and obtained by the New York Times, are reporting the deaths of those imprisoned, while also apparently showing government officials ordering crackdowns and discussing deaths in detention, the Times reported.

"The memos were signed by top security officials, including members of the Central Crisis Management Committee, which reports directly to Mr. al-Assad," the Times reported.

The exact number of civilians detained in these prisons is unknown, but around 128,000 Syrians are either considered to be detained or dead, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

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Nearly 14,000 were killed as a result of torture. Testimonies by survivors of the prison system reveal torture methods including regular beatings, hanging by the wrists, being shocked with electricity, rape, and other forms of sexual assault.

Other methods have forced detainees to "act like animals" and "beat or kill one another".

Methods of routine torture have been utilised as a tool to crack down on opposition and dissent, and according to the Times, have been "critical" to Assad's military success in Syria.

Although the Syrian government has denied that it carries out systematic abuse, it has recently acknowledged the death of hundreds in detention by issuing death certificates, or "listing them as dead" in family registration files.

The Times said the millions of relatives of those missing detainees remain living in "social and psychological limbo".

"Without death certificates, presumed widows cannot remarry. Children cannot inherit," the report read.

A United Nations panel said last year that the conditions of the prisons – where detainees, crammed in tiny cells, are often denied water, clean food, blankets, and clothes – amounted to "extermination".

Medical neglect and poor hygiene conditions have claimed the lives of many in detention, the Times revealed. The Times said those transferred to a military hospital are also unsafe as many have been tortured and killed by the staff.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, government detention accounts for about 90 percent of all disappearance cases in Syria - a figure significantly higher than the number of people detained by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS), the Times said.

While Assad and his aides remain in power, a growing movement is seeking justice via European courts. French and German prosecutors have arrested three former security officials, the Times said, and have issued arrest warrants for individuals including Syria's national security head, Ali Mamlouk.

Today, there are nearly six million Syrian refugees who fled the war in Syria. Even as the war ends, many fear persecution upon returning and have voiced their need for a UN-sponsored safe return process. </s> Ghabbash, a law student from Aleppo, repeatedly confessed his actual offense: organizing peaceful anti-government protests. But the torture continued for 12 days, until he wrote a fictional confession to planning a bombing.

That, he said, was just the beginning.

He was flown to a crammed prison at Mezze air base in Damascus, the Syrian capital, where he said guards hung him and other detainees from a fence naked, spraying them with water on cold nights. To entertain colleagues over dinner, he and other survivors said, an officer calling himself Hitler forced prisoners to act like dogs, donkeys and cats, beating those who failed to bark or bray correctly.

In a military hospital, he said, he watched a nurse bash the face of an amputee who begged for painkillers. In yet another prison, he counted 19 cellmates who died from disease, torture and neglect in a single month.

“I was among the lucky,” said Ghabbash, 31, who survived 19 months in detention until a judge was bribed to free him.

As Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, closes in on victory over an eight-year revolt, a secret, industrial-scale system of arbitrary arrests and torture prisons has been pivotal to his success. While the Syrian military, backed by Russia and Iran, fought armed rebels for territory, the government waged a ruthless war on civilians, throwing hundreds of thousands into filthy dungeons where thousands were tortured and killed.

Nearly 128,000 have never emerged, and are presumed to be either dead or still in custody, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group that keeps the most rigorous tally. Nearly 14,000 were “killed under torture.” Many prisoners die from conditions so dire that a UN investigation labelled the process “extermination.”

Now, even as the war winds down, the world’s attention fades and countries start to normalise relations with Syria, the pace of new arrests, torture and execution is increasing. Detainees have recently smuggled out warnings that hundreds are being sent to an execution site, Saydnaya Prison, and newly released prisoners report that killings there are accelerating.

The Syrian government has denied the existence of systematic abuse. However, newly discovered government memos show that Syrian officials who report directly to Assad ordered mass detentions and knew of atrocities.

War crimes investigators with the non-profit Commission for International Justice and Accountability, or CIJA, have found government memos ordering crackdowns and discussing deaths in detention. The memos were signed by top security officials, including members of the Central Crisis Management Committee, which reports directly to Assad.

A military intelligence memo acknowledges deaths from torture and filthy conditions. Other memos report deaths of detainees, some later identified among photos of corpses smuggled out by a military police defector. Two memos authorise “harsh” treatment of specific detainees. A memo from the head of military intelligence, Rafiq Shehadeh, orders officers to take steps to ensure “judicial immunity” for security officials.

In an interview in 2016, Assad cast doubt on the truthfulness of survivors and the families of the missing. Any abuses, he said, were isolated mistakes unavoidable in a war.

Over seven years, The New York Times has interviewed dozens of survivors and relatives of dead and missing detainees, reviewed government documents and examined hundreds of pages of witness testimony. The survivors’ accounts align with accounts from other prisoners held in the same jails, and are supported by the government memos and by photos smuggled out of Syrian prisons.

There is little hope for holding top officials accountable anytime soon. But there is a growing movement to seek justice through European courts. French and German prosecutors have arrested three former security officials and issued international arrest warrants for Syria’s national security chief, Ali Mamlouk; its air force intelligence director, Jamil Hassan; and others for torture and deaths in prison of citizens or residents of those countries.

Yet Assad and his lieutenants remain in power, safe from arrest, protected by Russia with its military might and its veto in the UN Security Council. At the same time, Arab states are restoring relations with Damascus and European countries are considering following suit.

That impunity is not just a domestic Syrian problem. Without security reforms, the 5 million Syrian refugees in the Middle East and Europe are unlikely to return home to risk arbitrary arrest.

“Justice is not a Syrian luxury,” Mazen Darwish, a Syrian human rights lawyer, said in Berlin, where he has assisted prosecutors. “It’s the world’s problem.”

It was the detention and torture of several teenagers in March 2011, for scrawling graffiti critical of Assad, that pushed Syrians to join the uprisings then sweeping Arab countries. Demonstrations protesting their treatment spread from their hometown, Daraa, leading to more arrests, which galvanised more protests.

A flood of detainees from all over Syria joined the dissidents at Saydnaya Prison. The new detainees ranged “from the garbageman to the peasant to the engineer to the doctor, all classes of Syrians,” said Riyad Avlar, a Turkish citizen who was held for 20 years after being arrested in 1996, as a 19-year-old student, for interviewing Syrians about a prison massacre.

Torture increased, he said; the newcomers were sexually assaulted, beaten on the genitals, and forced to beat or even kill one another.

No one knows exactly how many Syrians have passed through the system since; rights groups estimate hundreds of thousands to a million. The Syrian Network’s tally of 127,916 people currently caught in the system is probably an undercount. The number, a count of arrests reported by detainees’ families and other witnesses, does not include people later released or confirmed dead.

Because of government secrecy, no one knows how many have died in custody, but thousands of deaths were recorded in memos and photographs. A former military police officer, known only as Caesar to protect his safety, fled Syria with pictures of at least 6,700 corpses, bone-thin and battered, which shocked the world when they emerged in 2014.

Ghabbash, the protest organiser from Aleppo, survived torture at at least 12 facilities, making him, he says, “a tour guide” to the system. His odyssey began in 2011, when he was 22.

Ghabbash was hung up, beaten and whipped in a string of military and general intelligence facilities, he said.

In March 2012, Ghabbash was flown to Mezze military air base, named for a well-off Damascus neighborhood nearby.

By then, he and numerous survivors said, there was an industrial-scale transportation system among prisons. Detainees were tortured on each leg of their journeys. Some recalled riding for hours in trucks normally used for animal carcasses, chained to meat hooks. Ghabbash’s new cell was typical: 12 feet long, 9 feet wide, usually packed so tightly that prisoners had to sleep in shifts.

Outside the cell, a man was blindfolded and handcuffed in the corridor. It was Darwish, the human rights lawyer. He had been singled out for lecturing a judge on Syrian laws guaranteeing fair trials.

He later ticked off his punishment: “Naked, no water, no sleep, forced to drink my pee.”

Prison torture grew more brutal and baroque as rebels outside made advances and government warplanes bombed restive neighborhoods. Survivors describe sadistic treatment, rape, summary executions or detainees left to die of untreated wounds and illnesses.

After weeks or months, many prisoners got so-called trials lasting minutes with no defense lawyers. Ghabbash’s was typical. At a military “field court” in 2012, he heard a judge rattle off his conviction, “terrorism that destroyed public property,” and his sentence: death.

“The whole trial was 1 1/2 minutes,” he said.

He expected to go to Saydnaya Prison, which by then was a mass execution center. Thousands have been hanged there after summary trials, according to an Amnesty International report.

“Good, it’s finished,” he recalled thinking. But it was not. He would endure another year of daily beatings.

His last stint was in a makeshift prison deep underground near Damascus, a military bunker of the elite 4th Division, a fief of Assad’s brother Maher. There were no more interrogations.

“Torture just for torture,” said Darwish, who was also transferred there. “For revenge, for killing, for breaking the people.”

Women and girls have been raped and sexually assaulted in at least 20 intelligence branches, and men and boys in 15 of those, a UN human rights commission reported last year.

Sexual assault is a double-barrelled weapon in traditional Muslim communities, where survivors are often stigmatised. Relatives have killed female ex-detainees in honour killings, sometimes merely on the assumption they have been raped, rights reports and survivors say.

Mariam Khleif, a 32-year-old mother of five from Hama, was repeatedly raped during her detention. Khleif said she had aided injured protesters and delivered medical supplies to rebels, acts that the government labelled terrorism.

Khleif’s family rejected her over what they considered her loss of honor and her politics, she said. Her pro-government brother texted death threats; her husband divorced her.

For some conservative men, the conflict changed attitudes. Several survivors and male relatives say their families now honour sexual assault survivors as war wounded. Khleif hid nothing from her new husband, a former rebel.

“You are a medal on my chest, you are the crown on my head,” she recalled him telling her.

Detainees and defectors have risked their lives to tell their families, and the world, of their plight.

In the 4th Division dungeon, several detainees decided to smuggle out the names of every prisoner they could identify.

“Even though we are three stories underground, still we can continue our work,” recalled one, Mansour Omari, who said he was imprisoned for human rights work.

Another detainee, Nabil Shurbaji — a journalist who, by coincidence, was the first to inspire Ghabbash to activism in 2011 and later shared his cell in Mezze — tried to write on cloth scraps with tomato paste. Too faint. Shurbaji finally used the detainees’ own blood, from their malnourished gums, mixed with rust. A detained tailor sewed the scraps into Omari’s shirt. He made it out.

The message in blood reached Western capitals; the shirt scraps were displayed at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Two years later, a released detainee reported that Shurbaji had been beaten to death.

Syria’s war remains without a political solution. With peace talks stalled, Russia is urging the West to normalise and finance reconstruction anyway, deferring reforms. The millions of relatives of missing detainees float in a social and psychological limbo. Without death certificates, presumed widows cannot remarry. Children cannot inherit.

In Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Germany, France, Sweden and beyond, families and survivors push on. After he was freed in 2013, Ghabbash landed in Gaziantep, Turkey, where he runs women’s rights and aid programs for refugees in the last patch of rebel-held Syria.

Darwish struggles with insomnia and claustrophobia, but continues his work for accountability. He recently testified about Mezze prison in a French court hearing in the case of a Syrian-French father and son who died there. That helped French prosecutors secure arrest warrants for Mamlouk, the top security official, Hassan, the air force intelligence chief, and the head of Mezze prison. Now, Mamlouk could be arrested if he travels to Europe.

The threat of prosecution, Darwish said, is the only tool left to save detainees.

“It gives you energy, but it’s a heavy responsibility,” he said. “This could save a soul. Some are my friends. When I was released they said, ‘Please don’t forget us.’” </s> Two suspected former secret service officers from the Syrian government have been arrested in Germany on allegations of carrying out or aiding torture and crimes against humanity.

The men, identified only as Anwar R, 56, and Eyad A, 42, were arrested in Berlin and in Zweibrücken, in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, on Tuesday. Both men are believed to have left Syria in 2012 and to have sought asylum in Germany.

The arrests follow years of investigation assisted by the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR).

As part of an operation coordinated with police in France, another Syrian alleged to have worked for the secret service was arrested by Parisian prosecutors on Tuesday. His name was not revealed.

It is the first time that western criminal prosecutors have arrested alleged torturers working for Bashar al-Assad.

The federal prosecution service in Karlsruhe said in a statement: “From April 2011 at the latest, the Syrian regime began to suppress all anti-government activities of the opposition nationwide with brutal force. The Syrian secret services played a vital role in this. The goal was to use the intelligence services to stop the protest movement as early as possible.”

Anwar R is suspected of heading a secret service department that operated a prison near Damascus. He is accused of participation in the torture and abuse of prisoners between April 2011 and September 2012.

The prosecutors said: “As head of the investigative division, Anwar R directed and commanded prison operations, including the use of systematic and brutal torture.”

Eyad A is thought to be a former officer who aided and abetted the murders and physical abuse of around 2,000 people between July 2011 and January 2012.

He is alleged to have been responsible for guarding a checkpoint close to Damascus in 2011, where typically around 100 people a day were arrested before being imprisoned and tortured in Anwar R’s jail.

The arrest warrants for the pair were issued several months ago. Warrants have also been issued against at least 24 other alleged members of Assad’s government, including Jamil Hassan, the head of Syria’s notorious Air Force Intelligence Directorate.

Hassan is wanted in Germany for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, and is believed to have tortured and murdered tens of thousands of civilians. The ECCHR is assisting torture survivors to file cases against their alleged torturers.

Evidence against Hassan was gathered in interviews with other Syrians, some of whom live in Germany.

Anwar R has apparently not made a secret of his role in torture, expressing the view that his flight from Syria and his application for asylum in Germany is evidence enough that he has distanced himself from his past.

Substantial evidence against the men was gathered as a result of the exhibition of so-called Caesar photographs in the UN headquarters in New York in March 2015, which depicted the corpses of thousands of torture victims alongside personal testimonies. The photographs were taken by a former member of the Syrian military police calling himself Caesar, who fled Syria with the images in 2013.

German authorities have approached the cases under the legal principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows the prosecution of crimes in one country even if they happened elsewhere.

It was on the same basis that the US judiciary ruled last week that the Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin was deliberately targeted and murdered by Assad’s rgovernment. </s> Berlin — Germany has arrested two alleged former Syrian secret service officers accused of torture and crimes against humanity, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

The men, 56-year-old Anwar R and Eyad A, 42, were arrested on Tuesday in Berlin and Rhineland-Palatinate state. Both left Syria in 2012.

Also on Tuesday, another Syrian believed to have worked for the secret service was arrested in France in what was a “co-ordinated” operation, the federal prosecution in Karlsruhe said.

“From April 2011, the Syrian regime started to suppress with brutal force all anti-government activities of the opposition nationwide,” a prosecution statement said.

“The Syrian secret services played an essential role in this. The aim was to use the intelligence services to stop the protest movement as early as possible.”

Anwar R had allegedly led a secret service division that operated a prison in the Damascus area, and had participated in the torture and abuse of prisoners from April 2011 to September 2012.

“As head of the investigative department, Anwar R directed and commanded prison operations, including the use of systematic and brutal torture,” it said.

Eyad A, a former officer who had manned checkpoints and hunted protesters, had allegedly aided and abetted two killings and the physical abuse of some 2,000 people between July 2011 and January 2012.

In the summer of 2011, he manned a checkpoint near Damascus where around 100 people per day were arrested then jailed and tortured in the prison headed by Anwar R.

The conflict in Syria has killed more than 360,000 people and displaced millions since it began in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.

Several other legal cases are now pending in Germany against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

In 2018, German prosecutors issued an international arrest warrant for Jamil Hassan, a top Syrian official who headed the notorious airforce intelligence directorate and is accused of overseeing the torture and murder of hundreds of detainees.

Although the alleged abuses did not happen in Germany, the case has been filed under the legal principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows any country to pursue perpetrators regardless of where the crime was committed.

The Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights has also joined with torture survivors to file criminal complaints against 10 high-ranking Syrian officials, accusing them of crimes against humanity and war crimes. </s> Two suspected former Syrian intelligence agents have been detained in Germany at the request of the German prosecutor’s office. According to the prosecutor, the men, aged 42 and 56 years and arrested in Berlin and Rhineland-Palatinate, are suspected of “orchestrating tortures” and crimes against humanity in Syria. Another reported member of the alleged Syrian secret service was arrested in France, according to the Paris public prosecutor's office. All three arrests were made in a joint coordinated operation.

The German authorities claim that the two men who were arrested in Germany belonged to the regional investigative department of the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate in the capital area of Damascus; however, no evidence of this has been revealed to the public.

The 56-year-old suspect, known by the name of Anwar R., was allegedly “involved in tortures and physical abuse” as a senior Syrian intelligence agent between April 2011 and September 2012. He allegedly oversaw a so-called investigation department that also had its own prison. During the interrogations there, prisoners were reportedly “tortured brutally", while Anwar R., who was allegedly in charge of the facility, is suspected of ordering the systematic “torture” its inmates.

The 42-year-old, called Eyad A., is suspected of working for a unit in the department run by Anwar R. The list of charges against him includes being an accomplice in the killing of two people, as well as torturing at least 2,000 others between July 2011 and January 2012, as he worked for the country’s intelligence service.

READ MORE: German Court Sentences Syrian to Life in Jail for War Crimes

Both suspects reportedly fled Syria and claimed asylum in Germany, but German media suggest that Anwar R. was not trying hard to conceal his past. Damascus has yet to comment on the charges brought against its nationals. Syria also denies the existence of the so-called "secret police prisons”, claims about which have been made by activists and mainstream media outlets since 2011.

Syria has been in a state of civil war since 2011, with government forces fighting against numerous opposition groups and terrorist organizations, such as Daesh*. Russia, along with Turkey and Iran, is one of the guarantor states of the Syrian ceasefire. Moscow has also been assisting Damascus by providing humanitarian aid to residents of the war-torn country.

Daesh* previously seized large swaths of land in the Middle East, primarily from Iraq and Syria, and declared a caliphate. The terror group’s activities have also been registered in other countries, such as Afghanistan and Libya. However, Daesh terrorists have been driven from the vast majority of the settlements and territories that they once occupied, including from Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

*Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS) is a terrorist group banned in Russia and many other countries.
Memos sent to Syria's head of military intelligence, and obtained by the New York Times, report that President Bashar al-Assad's government has been running a network of secret torture facilities across Syria, crushing opposition via routine torture in secret prisons.