Human rights groups are wary of rebels' prisons in Syria

Al-BAB, Syria • An elementary school hallway in this north Syrian city is now a prison.

Behind a padlocked gate sit 10 men, accused by the rebels who have taken over the city of theft, thuggery and spying for the regime of President Bashar Assad.

The head guard says all prisoners get three meals a day and one shower. All will be tried by the town's new legal council, and no one is mistreated, he says.

One alleged crook, however, has two black eyes.

"I flipped my motorcycle," he said, speaking within earshot of his captors.

An accused regime informer has a bruised face and red stripes on his arm, as if he has been lashed with a cord.

"I fell down," he said.

The Al-Bab prison is one of the many lockups rebels fighting against Assad's regime have set up after seizing areas from government forces.

These facilities report to no national or regional authority, causing concern among rights groups and leading to a wide range of practices.

One badly bruised captive told Human Rights Watch he had been blindfolded and beaten daily for three weeks. Elsewhere, reporters from The Associated Press saw former regime soldiers frolicking in a swimming pool with their captors.

It is impossible to determine the number of rebel detention centers, but interviews with rebel commanders, activists, captives and human rights researches in northern Syria — plus visits to three facilities — provide a window into the issue.

Little evidence has surfaced that rebels are practicing the widespread, institutionalized torture that human rights groups accuse Assad's regime of. But many prisoners bear bruises and scars from beatings and lashings.

A number of rebel groups acknowledge sending prisoners believed to have blood on their hands to the firing squad. Others realize the living are worth more than the dead and seek "blood money" from captives' families or try to exchange them for rebels held by the regime.

The captors also vary. Running northern Syria's largest known rebel prison, in the town of Marea, is a barrel-shaped former truck driver nicknamed "Jumbo" who has a bullet lodged in his head from a gunfight with government troops. Others are run by civilian councils of lawyers, teachers and Muslim clerics who administer a mix of Syrian and Islamic law.

The lack of oversight worries human rights groups.

"It is extremely important that the opposition leadership send a strong message that the kinds of abuses we've seen are not acceptable and that those committing them will be held accountable," said Anna Neistat of Human Rights Watch, who is researching rebel prisons.

More than 17 months of unrest in Syria has killed more than 20,000 people, anti-regime activists say. The conflict has recently descended into a civil war between Assad's regime and rebels seeking to overthrow it.

Assad blames the violence on foreign-backed terrorists seeking to weaken the country.

While neither side appears to be approaching victory, rebels have recently pushed the army from a number of towns in the country's north, leaving them in charge of services such as distributing fuel and bread and running prisons. Their fractured approach to administering justice shows how far they are from forming an alternative national government should Assad's regime fall.

Northern Syria's two largest prisons are run by the Revolutionary Council of Aleppo and the Countryside, which is closely linked to the area's largest rebel grouping, the Islamist Tawheed Brigade. The group holds hundreds of prisoners.

A rebel group in the Aleppo suburb of Kafar Hamra held 13 captured soldiers in their rural, three-story villa. While technically prisoners, the captives moved about freely, ate with the rebels and swam with them in the villa's pool.

All were Sunni Muslims in their early 20s who had been doing their mandatory military service when caught. Even when interviewed alone, they said they ate better with the rebels than they had in the army and trusted them to get them home.

"Why would I flee?" asked captive Mohammed Kilani, 22. "They are feeding me and giving me cigarettes, and we play soccer together and they tell me they'll get me to my family."

A while later, the uncle of one of the captives paid the rebels $750 to release his nephew, a captured conscript from Damascus.

"It's fine," Jihad Khalid said of the money. "If they'd asked for more, we would have paid it."

(2012-08-26/stltoday)