Syria’s military hospital where detainees were tortured, not treated

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Former detainee in Sednaya Mohammed Najib sits across from a discarded portrait of ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, in front of a facility which was used as a jail for the Tishreen Military Hospital, currently out of service, in Damascus on January 10, 2025. (AFP)
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Former detainees in Sednaya Osama Abdul Latif (L) and Mohammed Najib revisit a cell at a facility which was used as a jail for the Tishreen Military Hospital, currently out of service, in Damascus on January 10, 2025. (AFP)
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Former detainee in Sednaya Omar al-Masri revisits a cell at a facility which was used as a jail for the Tishreen Military Hospital, currently out of service, in Damascus on January 10, 2025. (AFP)
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Updated 22 January 2025
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Syria’s military hospital where detainees were tortured, not treated

DAMASCUS: Former Syrian detainee Mohammed Najib has suffered for years from torture-induced back pain. Yet he dreaded being taken by his jailers to a military hospital, where he received beatings instead of treatment.
The prison guards forbade him from revealing his condition, only sending him to hospital for his likely tuberculosis symptoms — widespread in the notorious Saydnaya prison where he was detained.
Doctors at Tishreen Hospital, the largest military health facility in Damascus, never inquired about the hunch on his back — the result of sustained abuse.
Freed just hours after the fall of Bashar Assad, Najib has a tennis ball-sized bulge on his lower back.
The 31-year-old can barely walk, and the pain is unbearable.
But he insisted on showing AFP around a jail in the military hospital compound.
“I hated being brought here,” Najib said as he returned with two friends who had shared the same cell with him after they were accused of ties to the armed rebellion that sought Assad’s overthrow.
“They hit us all the time, and because I couldn’t walk easily, they hit me” even more, he said, referring the guards.
Because he was never allowed to say he had anything more than the tuberculosis symptoms of “diarrhea and fever,” he never received proper treatment.
“I went back and forth for nothing,” he said.
Assad fled Syria last month after Islamist-led rebels wrested city after city from his control until Damascus fell, ending his family’s five-decade rule.
The Assads left behind a harrowing legacy of abuse at detention facilities that were sites of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances.
Hours after Assad fled, Syrian rebels broke into the notorious Saydnaya prison, freeing thousands, some there since the 1980s.
Since then, Tishreen Hospital has been out of service pending an investigation.

NEGLECT AND TORTURE
Human rights advocates say Syria’s military hospitals, most notably Tishreen, have a record of neglect and ill-treatment.
“Some medical practitioners that were in some of these military hospitals (were) assisting... interrogations and torture, and maybe even withholding treatments to detainees,” Hanny Megally of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria told AFP.
Former Saydnaya detainees told AFP about the ordeals they went through after they got sick.
It would begin with a routine examination by two of the jail’s military doctors.
One of them used to beat prisoners, sometimes to death, four ex-detainees said.
Guards relentlessly beat them from the moment they were pulled from their cells to the hospital jail, then to its main building to meet the doctors, and finally escorted back to prison.
At the hospital’s jail, those who were too ill were left to die or even killed, several former detainees said.
Three years ago, Najib and other inmates were tortured using the “tyre” method inside Saydnaya for merely talking to each other.
They were forced into vehicle tires and beaten with their foreheads against their knees or ankles.
After a first check-up by a military doctor at Saydnaya, Najib was prescribed painkillers for his back pain.
The doctor eventually accepted to transfer him to Tishreen Hospital for tuberculosis symptoms.
Former prisoners said guards looking to minimize their workload would order them to say they suffered from “diarrhea and fever” so they could transfer everyone to the same department.
When Omar Al-Masri, 39, was taken to the hospital with a torture-induced leg injury, he too told a doctor he had an upset stomach and a fever.
While he was awaiting treatment, a guard ordered him to “clean” a very sick inmate.
Masri wiped the prisoner’s face and body, yet when the guard returned, he angrily repeated the same order: “Clean him.”
As Masri repeated the task, the sick prisoner soon took his last breath. An agitated Masri called out to the guard who gave him a chilling response: “Well done.”
“That is when I learnt that by ‘clean him’, he meant ‘kill him’,” he said.
According to a 2023 report by the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison, security forces at the hospital jail and even medical and administrative staff inflicted physical and psychological violence on detainees.
A civilian doctor told AFP she and other medical staff at Tishreen were under strict orders to keep conversations with prisoners to a minimum.
“We weren’t allowed to ask what the prisoner’s name was or learn anything about them,” she said, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisals.
She said that despite reports about ill treatment at the hospital, she had not witnessed it herself.
But even if a doctor was courageous enough to ask about a prisoner’s name, the scared detainee would only give the number assigned to him by the guards.
“They weren’t allowed to speak,” she said.
After a beating in his Saydnaya cell, Osama Abdul Latif’s ribs were broken, but the prison doctors only transferred him to the hospital four months later with a large protrusion on his side.
Abdul Latif and other detainees had to stack the bodies of three fellow inmates into the transfer vehicle and unloaded them at Tishreen hospital.
“I was jailed for five years,” Abdul Latif said.
But “250 years wouldn’t be enough to talk about all the suffering” he endured.


Trump says he would take hard stance on Gaza on Saturday

Updated 15 February 2025
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Trump says he would take hard stance on Gaza on Saturday

  • “Beyond the emotional burden and difficult experiences he faced in captivity, he had to bear this horrible loss on the first day that he left from there,” his brother told Israeli Army Radio

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Friday he would take a hard stance on Saturday on Gaza, the Palestinian enclave for which he has proposed a US takeover and where a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants is in place.
 

 


Top commander with UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon is injured by protesters

Updated 15 February 2025
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Top commander with UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon is injured by protesters

  • “We are shocked by this outrageous attack on peacekeepers who have been serving to restore security and stability to south Lebanon during a difficult time,” it said
  • The Lebanese army intervened to disperse the protesters

BEIRUT: The outgoing deputy commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon was injured Friday when protesters attacked a convoy taking peacekeepers to the Beirut airport, the force known as UNIFIL said in a statement.
“We are shocked by this outrageous attack on peacekeepers who have been serving to restore security and stability to south Lebanon during a difficult time,” it said.
The Lebanese army intervened to disperse the protesters. The army said in a statement that acting commander Maj. Gen. Hassan Odeh had contacted UNIFIL and promised to “work to arrest the citizens who attacked its members and bring them to justice.”
Demonstrators have been blocking the road to the airport and other roads in the capital to protest a decision by Lebanese authorities to revoke permission for a passenger plane from Iran to fly to Beirut on Thursday, leaving dozens of Lebanese passengers stranded.
The decision to ban the Iranian plane came after the Israeli army issued a statement claiming that Iran was smuggling cash to the militant group Hezbollah via civilian flights.
Lebanon’s civil aviation agency said Thursday that “additional security measures” meant some flights were temporarily rescheduled until Feb. 18 — the same day as a deadline for Israel and Hezbollah to fully implement their ceasefire agreement, including a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon.


Syria receives local currency printed in Russia before Assad’s fall

A view of the Syrian central bank, after the ousting of Syria's Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, January 12, 2025. (REUTERS)
Updated 14 February 2025
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Syria receives local currency printed in Russia before Assad’s fall

  • Syria has been facing a liquidity crunch since Assad’s ouster, with Syria’s new central bank governor, Maysaa Sabreen, saying in January that she wanted to avoid printing Syrian pounds to guard against a surge in inflation

DAMASCUS: Syria’s central bank said a batch of Syrian currency had arrived at Damascus airport from Russia, where banknotes were printed under the rule of toppled President Bashar Assad, Syria’s state news agency SANA reported on Friday.
The central bank did not specify the amount of currency that had arrived, but a source with knowledge of the matter said it was in the “hundreds of billions of Syrian pounds,” equivalent to tens of millions of US dollars.
The source said the cash had been printed in Russia under Assad’s rule but had not been shipped to Syria by the time he was toppled in early December 2024.
Syria’s new leadership ordered the Russian company printing the currency to stop after Assad fled to Moscow, the source said, without providing details on what prompted Friday’s delivery of the previously printed cash.

BACKGROUND

A source said the cash had been printed in Russia under Bashar Assad’s rule but had not been shipped to Syria by the time he was toppled in early December 2024.

Syria has been facing a liquidity crunch since Assad’s ouster, with Syria’s new central bank governor, Maysaa Sabreen, saying in January that she wanted to avoid printing Syrian pounds to guard against a surge in inflation.
Syria’s pound has strengthened on the black market since the new leadership took over, helped by an influx of Syrians from abroad and an end to strict controls on trade in foreign currencies.
It traded 9,850 pounds to the US dollar on Thursday, according to exchange houses closed on Friday.
According to statements by the central bank, the official foreign exchange rate has stayed around 13,000 pounds to the US dollar.
But that has sparked concerns about liquidity in Syrian pounds.
The central bank only has foreign exchange reserves of around $200 million in cash, sources said, a considerable drop from the $18.5 billion that the International Monetary Fund estimated Syria had in 2010, a year before civil war erupted.
Russia is hoping to retain the use of naval and air bases in Syria under its new leaders.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin held a phone call with Syria’s President Ahmad Al-Sharaa on Wednesday, the first call between the two leaders since Assad’s ouster.
The Syrian presidency said Putin had invited Syria’s new foreign minister to visit Moscow.

 


Gazans return to ruined homes and severe water shortage

Updated 14 February 2025
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Gazans return to ruined homes and severe water shortage

  • Wells, pumps destroyed during the war
  • Israel claims it has repaired some damage

BEIT LAHIYA: A ceasefire has enabled some Gazans to go back to their ruined homes without fear of Israeli airstrikes, but they have returned to a severe water crisis.

“We returned here and found no pumps, no wells. We did not find buildings or houses,” said 50-year-old farmer Bassel Rajab, a resident of the northern town of Beit Lahiya.
“We came and set up tents to shelter in, but there is no water. We don’t have water. We are suffering.”
Drinking, cooking, and washing are a luxury in Gaza, 16 months after the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Rajab said he sometimes walks 16 km, hoping to shower in Gaza City. Some Palestinians have dug wells in areas near the sea or rely on salty tap water from Gaza’s only aquifer, contaminated with seawater and sewage.
The Palestinian Water Authority estimates it will cost $2.7 billion to repair the water and sanitation sectors. Palestinians were already facing a severe water crisis as well as shortages of food, fuel,  and medicine before the wells were destroyed in the war.
The Palestinian Water Authority said in a statement on its website that 208 out of 306 wells had been knocked out of service during the war, and a further 39 were partially out of service.
“There is a big shortage as the occupation (Israel) is preventing the entrance (into Gaza) of drills, excavators, machines, equipment, and generators that are needed to operate wells and to dig them,” said Beit Lahiya Mayor Alaa Al-Attar.
Attar said small companies were trying to fix the wells but had minimal equipment.
He added: “We are trying to establish new wells to mitigate the severity of the water crisis at this stage.”
COGAT, the branch of the Israeli military that manages humanitarian activities, has said it has coordinated water line repairs with international organizations, including one to the northern Gaza Strip.
The Hamas-Israel ceasefire has been in force since Jan. 19.
Gazans hoping to one day rebuild are squeezed by shortages of water, food, medicines, and fuel in Gaza, which was grappling with poverty and high unemployment even before the war erupted.
Youssef Kallab, 35, says he has to carry heavy water containers to the roof of his home using a rope. The municipality supplies water every three days.
“We do not have the strength to carry it up and down the stairs. We have children, we have elderly. They all want water,” Kallab said as he lifted water containers.
Twelve-year-old Mohammed Al-Khatib says he has to drag a cart for 3-4 km to get water.
Mohammed Nassar, a 47-year-old Palestinian supermarket owner, said he has to walk for miles to fill buckets from a water pipe despite health problems and cartilage damage.
“We turn a blind eye to the pain because we have to,” he said.

 


Tunisian startup takes on e-waste challenge

Updated 14 February 2025
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Tunisian startup takes on e-waste challenge

  • The aim is to have “an environmental and social impact, but also an economic gain,” Cheriha said, adding that refurbished products can be up to 60 percent cheaper in a country where the average monthly salary is around 1,000 dinars ($310)

TUNIS: Engineer turned social entrepreneur Sabri Cheriha hunches over a washing machine at a small depot in a suburb of Tunisia’s capital, the unassuming home of a startup he launched to tackle the country’s mounting electronic waste problem.
Cheriha said there were about 8 million household appliances and 9 million cell phones in use across Tunisia, but once these devices break down or are replaced, “there’s no service to dispose of them properly.”
WeFix, the startup that won him a second-place regional social entrepreneur award last year, stands out by offering an “all-in-one service,” providing collection, repairs, and recycling to reduce e-waste.
The aim is to have “an environmental and social impact, but also an economic gain,” Cheriha said, adding that refurbished products can be up to 60 percent cheaper in a country where the average monthly salary is around 1,000 dinars ($310).
The startup “avoided” 20 tonnes of waste in 2023 and 80 tonnes last year, according to its founder, who anticipates handling another 120 tonnes this year.
“When we talk about ‘avoided waste,’ we’re also considering the resources needed to manufacture a single washing machine — 50 or 60 kg of finished product require over a tonne of raw materials,” he explained.