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Torture is one of many war crimes committed by Bashar al-Assad's regime...</i></ref>

Torture is one of many war crimes committed by Bashar al-Assad's regime...</i></ref>

{{Cquote|He called himself Hitler and loved to put on ‘entertainments’. <font color=red>To amuse his dinner guests, he would force the prisoners in his charge to act as dogs, donkeys, cats or other animals.

{{Cquote|He called himself Hitler and loved to put on ‘entertainments’. To amuse his dinner guests, he would force the prisoners in his charge to act as dogs, donkeys, cats or other animals.

Those who failed to play their part would be beaten. ‘The dog has to bark, the cat meow, the rooster crow,’ recalled a former inmate. ‘Hitler tries to tame them. When he pets one dog the other dog should act jealous.’ </font>

Those who failed to play their part would be beaten. ‘The dog has to bark, the cat meow, the rooster crow,’ recalled a former inmate. ‘Hitler tries to tame them. When he pets one dog the other dog should act jealous.’  

 

‘Hitler’ was a guard at a prison at the Mezze Air Base in Damascus and his sadism was unyielding even by the standards of Assad’s Syria. At Mezze, guards would regularly hang prisoners from a fence naked and spray water on them during cold nights. The New York Times described how one prisoner there was crammed into a tyre and beaten. He said an officer once told him that a screaming woman also in the prison but out of sight was his mother. He counted 19 cellmates who died from disease, torture or neglect in a single month. Since Assad’s fall, my social media feeds have swelled with images of rebels storming prisons, of bewildered prisoners stumbling through opened doors, of crying women blinking in daylight, and a toddler wandering out of an open cell door. There are scenes of men drilling into steel plates to reveal layers of prisoners wedged into the earth in hidden underground cells.

‘Hitler’ was a guard at a prison at the Mezze Air Base in Damascus and his sadism was unyielding even by the standards of Assad’s Syria. At Mezze, guards would regularly hang prisoners from a fence naked and spray water on them during cold nights. The New York Times described how one prisoner there was crammed into a tyre and beaten. He said an officer once told him that a screaming woman also in the prison but out of sight was his mother. He counted 19 cellmates who died from disease, torture or neglect in a single month. Since Assad’s fall, my social media feeds have swelled with images of rebels storming prisons, of bewildered prisoners stumbling through opened doors, of crying women blinking in daylight, and a toddler wandering out of an open cell door. There are scenes of men drilling into steel plates to reveal layers of prisoners wedged into the earth in hidden underground cells.

In one video I cannot get out of my head, a male figure sits upright on a bed, one foot manacled to its end. So motionless is he that, after watching it over a dozen times, I still genuinely cannot tell if he is a human or a mannequin.<ref>Patrikarakos, David. (Dec 10, 2024). [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14175927/Assads-prisons-thousands-suffered-72-types-torture.html What happened inside Assad's prisons where thousands suffered 72 types of torture and 157,000 people have vanished: As new horrors are revealed by the hour, David Patrikarakos beholds atrocity on staggering scale]. ''The Daily Mail''.</ref>}}

In one video I cannot get out of my head, a male figure sits upright on a bed, one foot manacled to its end. So motionless is he that, after watching it over a dozen times, I still genuinely cannot tell if he is a human or a mannequin.<ref>Patrikarakos, David. (Dec 10, 2024). [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14175927/Assads-prisons-thousands-suffered-72-types-torture.html What happened inside Assad's prisons where thousands suffered 72 types of torture and 157,000 people have vanished: As new horrors are revealed by the hour, David Patrikarakos beholds atrocity on staggering scale]. ''The Daily Mail''.</ref>}}