By: Hamida Ghafour
Source: thestar.com
WARNING: This report contains disturbing accounts of abuse and assault.
AMMAN, JORDAN—The cell was small with iron bars across the door. Three women, all naked, were chained to each corner. Nour was stripped, taken to the fourth, and handcuffed to the wall.
Every day, for more than 60 days, Nour says she and the other prisoners were raped in one of Syria’s most notorious detention centres. Some of her attackers at the Palestine Branch of Military Intelligence in Damascus were in uniform, others in civilian clothes.
“They had visitors in the prison playing cards and they said in front of us, ‘if you want sex, there are girls here,’ ” she says. Two girls died in the cell, she says.
Nour, which is not her real name, wrings her small white hands constantly as she speaks, the only sign of distress as she recalls with precision and composure the assaults she suffered between December 2011 and February 2012. When her body was being violated she emptied her mind, she says. Her body no longer belonged to her but she could try to protect her soul.
“This war has taken me from one world to another life,” she says. “We have a saying that the wheel of life turns. But the wheel turned over on me. I used to have a normal life.”
Her so-called crime was to take photographs of protesters in Homs one afternoon in November 2011, naively indulging a hobby that the authorities said demonstrated support for the uprising.
International human rights groups are alarmed at the consistent reports of rape from refugees flooding into Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Sexual violence is increasingly a “weapon of war” in Syria and perpetrated “by all sides,” senior UN official Erika Feller told the world body’s Human Rights Council in Geneva in February. The charity International Rescue Committee recently warned in a report that rape, or the fear of it, was the main reason why families were fleeing the country.
However, the full scope of sexual violence is not clear; whether it is a systematic policy of President Bashar Assad’s regime or by the rebels to punish pro-government supporters.
Read the entire report here.
