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Who killed 8,000 prisoners in Syria’s slaughterhouses?

August 14, 2018 at 1:40 pm

Demonstrators in Syria demand justice for the many Syrian prisoners, tortured and killed in Assad’s prisons [Twitter]

While Russia, the Godfather of the Syrian revolution, was talking about forcibly returning Syrian refugees to the sectarian slaughterhouses, just as they were forcibly displaced against their will, the Syrian regime revealing that 8,000 detainees have died in its prisons, international human rights organisations revealed.

The message is intended to reach all Syrians warning them that their fate is going to be the same. Air Force intelligence Director General Jamil Al-Hassan, the real war criminal, revealed clearly the true nature of how he thinks, bragging since the start of the revolution that he is ready to kill one million Syrians. He’ll then head to the International Criminal Court to take sole responsibility for killing them.

Syrian refugees and Assad - Cartoon [Sarwar Ahmed/MiddleEastMonitor]

Syrian refugees and Assad – Cartoon [Sarwar Ahmed/MiddleEastMonitor]

Today, he is multiplying that figure 20 times. He has said that ten million obedient Syrians are much better than 30 million who are “terrorists”.

It was neither the Assad regime nor the occupiers alone who killed these people, and they were not the ones who killed the people in the pictures leaked in Caesar’s file, which included 55,000 pictures of 11,000 prisoners whose eyes were missing, their noses were drawn, their ears were cut off and their organs sold.

The real killers of those people are those who watched in silence since day one; who were silent to the crimes of Jamil Al-Hassan, and the crimes of the late Hafez Al-Assad in the eighties. It is the world that kept dealing with this regime as if it were a legitimate regime, and dealing with the Syrian people as if they were slaves.

READ: Amnesty calls for details of 75,000 forcibly disappeared persons in Syria

The criminal world continued to support him in all forums, and still stands in the face of the people’s will for demanding freedom through free elections just like the rest of the free civilised world.

About a million martyrs have perished, and now our prisoners, who number about a quarter of a million, are leaving us, while their parents have no way of knowing anything about them. According to the law they are “kidnapped”. They have not been arrested as per judicial orders, since the sectarian group in power for the past half a century does not follow such orders.

They left. Their families did not receive their bodies. They do not know where their graves are. We were not allowed to bid them farewell, or pray for them. The regime fears them after their deaths as it did while they were alive. It doesn’t want them to a legacy for the next generations.

It is a tradition started by the late Hafez Al-Assad, who never sent bodies of martyrs to their families. Thirty-thousand martyrs who were detained in Tadmur prison have been lost over three decades and no one knows where their graves are. But the inspiration is not going to come from the tombstones, rather from the people’s resilience which will be told from generation to generation, from grandparents to grandchildren, and which will feed the anger of generations to come against their murderers and torturers.

They left but their voices are still with us, deafening our ears and telling us not to reconcile and not to negotiate with the killers; not to give them legitimacy. Any negotiations or reconciliation will be an apology from the victim to the murderer. It will give legitimacy to murder, whether now or later. It is criminalisation of martyrs and vindication of their killers. This regime continued to murder; murder was the oxygen they breathed over the past half a century. The regime would die if it stopped killing and torturing.

READ: Shocking details revealed about ‘Bashar’s slaughterhouse’

“Do not reconcile,” is the slogan of the stage and all the stages to come until this sectarian gang leaves. There are some who call for return to the sectarian slaughterhouse, while we see how these sectarian gangs and the occupiers breach all agreements they reached with groups taking part in the revolution whether in Ghouta, Homs, Daraa or elsewhere. Killings, raids and arrests, even with those who reconciled with the sectarian gang, did not stop.

Those who’ve been killing us over the past years were not only Bashar, his gang and the occupiers. The one who killed us is the so called free world, which has participated, colluded or remained silent and is still pushing us towards slavery to Al-Assad.

But this is all impossible to achieve. Those calling for it do not really know history.

This article first appeared in Arabic in The New Khaleej on 12 August 2018

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.