Journey in mercenaries' prisons… Fatal release paper!  

SHERIF AL-ABO/MANBIJ

The young man (AMB) ,20 years old from al-Bab city was arrested by the mercenaries of the Turkish occupation in early August and left alive a few days ago to disclose the darkness of the prisons of the Turkish occupation mercenaries in the occupied territories.

The young man (AMB) did not want to be named because he was worried that his family and relatives would be subjected to torture. He is from al-Bab; his hometown and where he grew up, and he has been residing in Manbij since 2 years.

The young man talked about the first moments when he was arrested, "Just before Eid al-Adha, I went to work in al-Bab. I crossed through the checkpoints along the road from Jarabulus to al-Bab without any problems .When I arrived at my destination, a group called "Military Police" came and took me to Azaz town where I was imprisoned. The prison is run by a man named Abu Yazan al-Jolani who is from al-Jolan.

Difficult conditions and brutal torture inside the prisons!

He added, "When I was taken to prison, they naked me and kept me in single prison for seven hours and then transferred me to a collective prison. The prison was a school I thought that it was the industrial school in Azaz. I was imprisoned in the basement, "The prison was divided into nine dormitories and more. I do not know how many they were because I was being transferred inside the prison blindfolded."

Inside the collective dormitories, the mercenaries jail every five or six people in a narrow place together, each one of them is from a different city from the other's so that they would not realize each other and would not tell their stories outside if one of them come out.

Amid a dirty place, AMB spent his first days in the prison. The temperature was high and drinking water's temperature was high too. They did not have any cover they could wear when sleeping or sitting.

Three days after he entered prison, the mercenaries began the series of torture described by the young man. "After 3 days, they took me to torture for the first time. I was handcuffed from the back with iron handcuffs and blindfolded. They were beating me while I was on the way to the torture room. They beat me on my head which led to raising the ring a bit from my eyes, and they sat me down and lifted my left hand and fingerprinted me on a sheet of paper. I could read the paper as it was passed from my left side on which it was written (release).

After he was forced to fingerprint the "release" paper, the mercenaries began to investigate him and torture was still going on. AMB remembers that a mercenary named (Abu Uday al-Homsi) from Homs city and another person from Idlib city he does not remember his name supervised his torture.

They tortured me and began to charge me that I was in the ranks of IS mercenary. I denied what I was accused of. After I stressed the denial and refused this charge, he asked me about my age. And when I told him that I was twenty, he said to me, "How do you go to Manbij?" I wondered about the reason of this question! He said, "Do not you know that the Syrian regime is in Manbij and young people are forcibly taken to its ranks?

As he continued to deny the mercenaries' charges, the level of torture increased in order to force him to confess under torture for a charge he did not commit.

He continued, "After three days of torture, they accused me of being IS. I kept refusing and denying this charge for 10 days under torture. They beat me with cables and sticks known as "Harwana". I was handcuffed with iron handcuffs and blindfolded. I was sitting down and they were beating me. They did not have any evidence because I did not do anything like that."

The brutal torture forced him to adopt charges he did not commit

After ten consecutive days of torture, the mercenaries resorted to new tricks in their quest to subjugate AMB, accusing him this time of being a spy for the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Manbij Military Council, working in the northern countryside of Aleppo, and they alleged that people have witnessed that. Although the young man asks them to bring witnesses, but they refuse and continue to torture him.

After 15 days, they took me out in the middle of the night and beat me and tortured me. "I could no longer bear the torture and realized that the continuation of torture would kill me so I said " write what you want, just stop beating and torturing" because the electric shock lost my strength. He wrote that I was within IS and when it started to collapse, I joined the Syrian Democratic Forces and that I came to the northern countryside to spy, transfer information and depict the sites, and so on. I was then transferred to a prison in al-Bab city.

AMB said that in al-Bab prison, there were children under the age of 16 in the same dormitory with us. We numbered about 50 detainees.

Everything for money!

After a month in the prison of al-Bab, the mercenaries began to interrogate him again, basing on what he wrote in Azaz. Despite his denial of everything written in the report and his request to review people who know him from al-Bab to make sure that he was a civilian and working to earn a living, the mercenaries restored him to the prison for more than a month and a half.

AMB said, "At the end of the month and a half, they asked my family for 1,000 Turkish liras, claiming that this sum was for the court fund, and I was released for the amount they asked my family. The amount they asked my parents was not large compared to others of whom 30 thousand Turkish pounds were demanded in exchange for their release."

He said, "In the interrogation rooms and the offices inside the prison, on each table, there was a small flag of Turkey referring to the presence of Turkish flags in each of the mercenaries' offices. According to the young man, the amount of money requested by the abductees was previously in US dollars, but now, they are asking for the amounts in Turkish lira in order to support the Turkish economy which has been collapsing.

To be continued…

A.H 

ANHA