Freedom to die: Inside the Syrian torture chamber : Support Kurds in Syria

Freedom to die: Inside the Syrian torture chamber : Support Kurds in Syria
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At first glance Abu Ali doesn’t look like much of a villain. He is a Syrian man of average height and build, forty something in age, with nothing remarkable about his appearance; except his dark leather jacket that gives him away, it’s virtually a uniform, a trademark of his profession, as a Praetorian guard of the state. Abu Ali is not an ordinary man at all. He was until very recently one of President Bashar al-Assad’s secret policemen, an enforcer, a torturer, a man who spent most of his adult life compiling dossiers on his own people or extracting confessions from those considered undesirable or dangerous to the Assad dynasty’s ruthless regime that has held sway, passed down from father to son, almost unchallenged for nearly half a century, that is until now.

Syria’s uprising is now some nine months old and it has witnessed the most ferocious, blood soaked government crackdown in the whole of the Middle East’s so called Arab Spring; the awakening of revolution in progress first sparked in Tunisia’s and Algeria’s pro-democracy movements which soon swept the whole region toppling or threatening dictatorships from North Africa to the Persian Gulf.

Some western journalists privately poke fun at the Syrian strongman’s rather nebbish appearance as a “chinless wonder.” Assad does not strike the classic pose as a third world dictator in a bemedalled uniform. Outwardly, he is a mild mannered, fairly gawky figure in bespoke European suits, an effete tyrant with a pronounced lisp and bird like eyes rather too close together. But he is all powerful, referred to as the “upper god” by his Baath Party followers and there is nothing funny about a minimum estimated 5300 people, mostly unarmed civilians, security forces have killed so far, according to Syrian and international human rights groups.
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