Ana Maria Luca and Nadine Elali

Ahmad put his hands on the table. They were badly scarred, but not from years of working in the fields.
“These are from the plastic cables they used to tie my hands in prison,” said Ahmad, a young Syrian man who took shelter in the Iman School in the village of Kneisseh in Wadi Khaled. “I stayed in for 20 days. During 15 of them I was beaten and tortured. The last five days, they left me alone for my wounds to heal,” he said calmly. He smiled and mimicked typing on a computer keyboard. “I used to upload the videos of our revolution on Facebook,” he said.
The other 50 Syrian men who were taking shelter in the school after crossing into Lebanon about two weeks ago had the same scars on their hands.
 
Many of the men had been imprisoned by the Syrian security forces cracking down on the anti-regime protests in the Homs governorate in northwestern Syria. Some of them were brought to Lebanon with severe wounds. And many of them have the terrible stories of their murdered friends, brothers and sons, and of their wives and daughters being arrested and raped. 

Ahmad said he knows how important it is that he got to tell his story. When the shabiha, the pro-regime Alawite militia, broke the door of his house in Tal Kalakh, the young man knew what awaited him. “They hit me with the gun in the back of my head, they tied my hands, made me kneel on the ground, and their boss farted in my face,” he recalled. He remembers being blindfolded and tied up, and transported to the nearby Alawite village of Hajar al-Abiad. “I think we were around 50 men. They made us kneel in the square, and people started throwing stones at us. Then they took us to Homs, but the prison was full, so they took us to a former French army station. We were around 400 people in a 60-square-meter hangar.  We had to take turns at sitting down,” he said. 

Other young men gathered around the table where Ahmad sat in the hallway of the school. They brought their own chairs and kept silent, nodding while he described his torture. “Then the investigation started. That’s what they call it, ‘investigation.’ I was one of the lucky ones. They beat me up, humiliated me, cursed me, tied my hands, my feet barely reaching the floor, and then they electrocuted me,” Ahmad said.

A man in his 40s who calls himself Ziad chimed in. “Yes, he is one of the lucky ones,” he said. “They took around 1,500 people from Tal Kalakh, including nine women. Only 500 of them were let go. They kept us crowded in cells. We had to take turns crouching so that we could rest. And then the ‘investigation.’ Most of us had our eyes swollen from the beatings, some had acid burns, cigarette burns. A doctor in my cell they had arrested for treating protesters had his legs broken from the beatings. And then when he asked for water, they urinated in his mouth.”

 “Look at my skin,” said a man in a sweatsuit, pulling up his shirt. His body was covered with cigarettes burns. “This is not all. My genitals look much worse. What they like most is to make you drink water and then kick you in your genitals so that you can’t urinate.  During the interrogations most of the prisoners are naked,” he shouted angrily.
Abdelrahman, a man in his early 20s, his head shaved and his beard irregular like many young Sunni sheikhs wear them, came out of one of the rooms. His face was full of stitches, and he had a dent in the middle of his skull. “He is the reason we crossed the border 15 days ago,” Ahmad said. The men revealed that they crossed into Wadi Khaled so that the young sheikh could get treatment, otherwise he would have died.

“It happened two weeks ago,” Abdelrahman said. “We went out with olive branches, and the shabiha attacked us with axes. They hit me only in the head with their axes. ‘What, you want freedom?’ they were shouting. Then they took me to the hospital in Tal Kalakh. I was bleeding all over. Then I remember waking up here,” he said.
Ahmad continued Abdelrahman’s story. “We had to go in to the hospital and save him. He was on the floor, and a nurse, together with some security agents, was hitting him. They stepped on his head. So we brought him to Lebanon barely alive. He was treated here. We donated blood for him,” he said.

The men said they have no doubt that the nine women from Tal Kalakh who were detained will never make it out of prison alive. “They raped some of the young men, so we have no doubt that they raped the women,” Ahmad said. “But we have no fear anymore. The world should know what happens in Syria. Shame on the international community for not caring.”