Hussein Malla/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Five years into the Syrian conflict, the increasing number of victims is almost mind-numbing, with over 400,000 killed and over 10 million displaced. Yet there is another group of victims whose plight is often overlooked: those who are being detained, tortured, and disappeared in Syria’s prisons.
Extent of abuse
Arbitrary detention and torture are not new in Syria; tens of thousands of political dissidents were held, brutalised, and executed during Hafez Al-Assad’s rule from 1971 to 2000, including at the notorious Tadmur Prison, and some 17,000 were disappeared.
In the current conflict, the use of mass arrests, torture, and sanctioned killing has only escalated. Numbers vary, with the Syrian Network for Human Rights recording 117,000 cases of arrest and detention between 2011 and 2015 but estimating at least 100,000 more undocumented cases, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimating close to 500,000 cases. In the majority of cases, the families of the detained and disappeared have no information on what happened to them.
