Militants master torture methods
In Syria, the torturers change, but the tortures remain the same.
Prisons run by Islamic State jihadists are using the same punishments as those run by the Assad government, according to victims of both regimes.
The tortures are so well known to Syrians that they have names: the “German chair,” “the tire” and “the flying carpet.”
The favourite of both the regime and Islamic State ( also known as ISIL or ISIS) is the “shabeh” — hanging people by the wrists for long periods — a word some think is related to the Arabic for “ghost.”
The practice was described by liberal activists from the town of Raqqa who suffered it first under the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad and then of Islamic State.
“All you think about is pain,” said Hazm al- Hussein, adding that he was tortured by an ISIL leader previously jailed by the regime. “You can’t think about anything else. You just have to be patient. If you get angry, they will just take your head off. You know they want to do it.”
Raqqa is largely Sunni Muslim, with a Christian minority, and is historically less conservative than the surrounding countryside. Under the regime, protests were ruthlessly suppressed and many activ- ists who provided video footage to the outside world were arrested and tortured.
One, Jimmy Shahinian, was given the shabeh every four days for four months until his arms came out of their sockets.
The practice, long outlined in Amnesty International reports, is when the arms are handcuffed behind the back and the cuffs used to hoist the body in the air, putting pressure on the shoulder sockets.
In Shahinian’s case, this was combined with t he “German chair,” where the body is strapped into a chair with a back adjusted to inflict pain on the spine. “I was sure I was going to die,” the Armenian Christian said. “Mind you, when you were there, you wanted to die.”
Held at the notorious Palestine Barracks after being seized in Damascus in June last year, in a cell so tightly packed that two men died of suffocation, Shahinian was eventually released after his parents paid a bribe. It was four months before he could feel his hands again.