Beaten and starved: Hundreds of jail deaths exposed in Syria

Beirut - For many families, it has been the first time they have received news of their loved ones in years.

For years, Yasser Khoulani sought news of his brothers Abdelsattar and Majd after they were hustled away by Syria's secret police at demonstrations against President Bashar Assad in 2011.
He knew they were being held at the Saydnaya prison, where inmates are routinely beaten, raped and starved, according to testimony from former guards and inmates collected by rights groups. His mother spent close to $2,000 on a bribe to see one of the brothers behind a glass pane for just three minutes in 2012. The family held out hope that the two of them were alive.
But last week, Khoulani learned from their updated civil registries that Abdelsattar and Majd perished in prison in 2013 without a chance for the family to say goodbye. After years of silence on the issue, the Syrian government has started updating civil registries to reflect deaths among its incarcerated population, activists say.
Activists say they have learned of the passing of hundreds of detainees, including leading voices in the uprising against Assad, since the government began updating registries earlier this year, and they fear news of hundreds, if not thousands, of more deaths may soon follow.
For many families, it has been the first time they have received news of their loved ones in years.
Four civil registry extracts do not list any cause of death, but human rights groups say the sheer number of reports are further proof of a regime of abuse and mass killings in government prisons.
"This could add evidence to what we have already," said Mohammed Al Abdallah, director of the Washington-based Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre, which has been compiling testimonies from survivors of the conditions inside Syrian prisons.
The Syrian government has not commented on the recent revelations, and it has previously denied taking political prisoners.
The question of detainees has been a contentious issue in UN-sponsored peace talks that the government hopes will restore its legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. Many Syrians speculate the government, unable to shake off pressure by UN Special Envoy Staffan De Mistura to negotiate on detainees, is trying to wash its hands of the matter by issuing death certificates.
"The government wants to say there are no missing persons. They died - let's move on," said Al Abdallah. "It's a Syrian government version of a solution."
Rights groups say Syria's security agencies used arrests and torture to terrorise the population as protests against President Assad swept through the country in 2011.
Photos smuggled out of Syrian military hospitals by a defecting officer known only by his alias, Caesar, and disclosed to the public in 2014, showed how more than 11,000 detainees met their fate in various detention centres around the capital, Damascus. The corpses were emaciated and their genitals mutilated.
There were burn marks, gashes, and bruising visible across the bodies. Some had their eyes gauged out.
Activists say hundreds of families have learned of the deaths of their loved ones since word started to spread that the country's security agencies were passing lists of the deceased to municipal registries around the country.

• MENA