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00:00Well as Syrians attempt to unravel years of unlawful arrests and detentions and
00:04hopefully locate some of the many thousands of missing people, the civil
00:08defense group known as the White Helmets has made an official request for the
00:12maps of secret jails and lists of prisoners. They're demanding that Moscow
00:17put pressure on Bashar al-Assad to release that information. They asked did
00:20presidents believed to have been granted asylum in Russia. Well after his regime
00:25was overthrown on Sunday, thousands flocked to Tsarnaev prison, the site of
00:29some of the worst atrocities committed under Assad's rule, hoping to find loved
00:33ones who had disappeared in government jails. Well for more on that we can now
00:37cross to Ahmad Helmi, co-founder of the Ta'afi Initiative which is a support
00:41network led by survivors of torture and enforced disappearance. Ahmad thanks so
00:46much for joining us. We saw those images of people being freed from the Tsarnaev
00:51prison over the weekend, a momentous occasion but there are still tens of
00:55thousands of people unaccounted for. What should be the next step in the
00:59short term to try and locate those people? Hi and thank you for having me.
01:05The first priority is to find those who are still alive. There are many other
01:11secret detention facilities or detention facilities that
01:16have not been accessed so far. We know some of them are in the
01:22fourth league that was controlled by Bashar al-Assad's brother called Maher
01:28al-Assad and many other prisons. So the first priority is to find those who are
01:32still alive. We're trying to map all those detention and secret detention
01:38facilities throughout survivors, testimonies, maybe also de facto
01:46people. It's an impossible task, it's a challenge but you are still working on
01:53identifying those persons. The second priority is in fact to support the newly
02:00released survivors because they hold a significant amount of information and
02:06data that will help in revealing the fate and whereabouts of those who
02:13are still disappeared. So many of those, we've documented around 130,000
02:23prisoners and forcibly disappeared persons in Syria. Only around 25,000
02:31were released in the past week so we still have around a hundred thousand
02:37people disappeared. So many of them unfortunately have been killed under
02:42torture. I've witnessed tens of people being killed under torture in my
02:48time in prison and then the next step would be to to locate the mass graves
02:53and exhumate those mass graves to deliver the remains to their families
02:57because by the international law the case of infidel disappearance doesn't
03:03end until the families receive the remains of their beloved ones.
03:08And Ahmad, as you mentioned you were detained yourself shortly after the
03:13beginning of the civil war in 2012. I believe it was for a period of about
03:16three years. We've heard these harrowing stories about those who've been freed
03:20over the years, clear cases of torture, war crimes. Can you give us a brief
03:25overview of what you witnessed in prison?
03:29Yeah, I mean, it's impossible to draw a picture of what happened in prison. So
03:38with all the pictures we have been seeing over the past week and all the
03:43documents, all the videos and all the people who have been, we've seen their
03:49almost dead bodies, this only reveals 10% of what happened in prison.
03:5610% of what happened in those prisons and those detention facilities. For me,
04:03one of the prisons, I've been through nine different prisons, one of the
04:09prisons, like only I witnessed the death of half of the people inside that cell.
04:18We were like 46 people. I witnessed in two months the death of half of them and
04:26they didn't die of, like they were not executed, rather they died because of
04:32the ill treatment.
04:36Indeed. Now your family were kept in the dark about where you were being held and
04:41on what charges, the Syrian regime being notoriously secretive about who was
04:45detained, when, where, if they survived. How did your family manage to access
04:50that all important information and secure your release in the end, which I
04:54suppose many families will be wanting to do now?
04:59I am one of the luckiest. I am privileged to have to have an
05:05iron mother who managed to get me out of prison, plus a huge amount of luck. My
05:10family didn't know my whereabouts by the government or by the regime.
05:18It was rather by a person, a friend who was 13 years old when he entered a
05:25prison and I welcomed him and I took care of him because he was like a child.
05:30And he was released after two weeks. The first thing he did, instead of going to
05:37his mom, to his family, he went immediately to my house and to my mom to
05:42tell her about my fate. And that was a factor of how my mom managed to get some
05:51more and more and more information to get me out. But again, I am one of the
05:57only few who were lucky.
05:59And as you say, accessing that information is extremely complex and key
06:04for those whose fate is still unknown. Last year, the UN created a special body
06:09to respond to the missing persons crisis in Syria. How do you see the work of that
06:14mechanism? Had there been any significant progress prior to the fall of the Assad regime?
06:19So, disclaimer alert here, this institution created by the UN is unprecedented in the
06:26history of the UN. And we were part of conceptualising and creating the whole
06:33the whole entity, the whole institution. It started its operation without a head.
06:41Now, the UN Secretary General is appointing the head of the institution. Yesterday,
06:47we sent a communication to the office of the Secretary General to expedite the process of
06:52hiring the head of the institution. In the past, there was a question of what would
06:59this institution do without an access to Syria? Today, we are pressuring to give it
07:04access. So the Jolani government in the past, when they were controlling Idlib,
07:09they said in a public statement that they will collaborate with this institution.
07:15So now we're holding them accountable for their statement and we're pressuring them
07:20to allow this entity or this UN institution access to Syria immediately so they can start
07:27working on the search and identifying the fate and whereabouts of the disappeared. We have a
07:32tremendous amount of mass graves. Some of them are being terminated and some of them are still
07:40unknown and that will take some time to work on.
07:45And the work of that UN body within that process could be decisive. We'll keep an eye on it.
07:50Ahmad, thank you so much for your insight and for sharing your experience with us today on
07:54the program. Thank you.