Saydnaya prison was like ‘hell’, says activist who fled after torturepublished at 18:39 Greenwich Mean Time
Maia Davies
BBC News
I have been speaking with Amneh Khoulani, a human rights activist who tells me she fled the country after being tortured in a Syrian prison.
Her husband and brothers were detained in Saydnaya prison, she recalls, and explains how she paid thousands of pounds to visit them.
“Visiting, it was not something legal in Syria,” she says.
“You have to pay a lot of money under the table.”
What’s more, she says, the process to get the visit included “humiliation”.
When I ask what it was like inside Saydnaya, she responds with one word: “Hell.”
Amneh Khoulani with former first lady Melania Trump and ex-US secretary of state Mike Pompeo when she received the International Women of Courage (IWOC) Award in 2020
Her three brothers have not been seen since 2011. Assad’s forces claim they died in prison, Amneh Khoulani says, but she does not know whether to believe them.
Now, faced with the possibility of returning to Syria for the first time in more than a decade, she feels great pain.
“Every street, every town in my country, every place, every shop, everything reminds me of my brothers.”
“They don’t even have a grave,” she cries.