Mother says her raped imprisoned daughter is dead to not be killed by family

(Writing by Lama Shammas; Translation by Yusra Ahmed)

Amal, the 23-year-old Syrian girl was hesitant to talk about her traumatizing experience during detention in Syrian regime’s prisons.

Amal joined the revolution since the beginning, despite she is from Hama, the Syrian city known of its brutal massacre in 1982. She worked in organizing demonstrations and transfering news to the revolutionary Coordination bodies and she took advantage of the presence of her fiance in the Syrian army to obtain information and transfer it to fighters in the Free Syrian Army “FSA”.

"I was very cautious in every each activity I did because I knew exactly the punishment I might face if I was caught” Amal said

However, unfortunately Amal forgot her mobile phone in the cafeteria of the English literature college where she was studying, and her colleague who was loyal to regime found it and looked in messages between her and members of Coordination and started blackmailing her for money first, then she handed the phone to the intelligence then Amal got arrested in 1st January 2013.

Amal with tears in her eyes and signs of stress and pain started telling what happened when she was arrested: “from the first day the investigator used cigarette to burn my body as a method to me to tell the names of activists in the Coordination and places of members of the Free Syrian Army, he was laughing and said that my beauty needed some deformation.”

 

After that stage, according to Amal, the investigators started hitting her and the torture lasted for more than a week, then the investigator had the idea of tightening Amal’s legs to two chairs to rape her in front of soldiers. 

“I don’t know how many times or how many person raped me, I was in deep pain, I then I was transferred to the prison’s hospital and after that the investigator stopped torturing me”, Amal said that crying in panicked and stressful way. 

After a while, one of Amal’s friends in prisons was freed and met Amal’s mother and told her mother about what the torture and rape Amal was subject to, but the mother chose to tell Amal’s brothers and uncles that she died in prison. 

At the beginning of 2014, Amal was freed via a exchange deal, but she did not find a place to go after it was considered dead, moreover, she knew that her fiance had left her a week after arresting her. She found no option but to leave the country and went to Turkey. 

Amal talked to her mother only once after she arrived to Istanbul, but her mother told her that she would be killed by her brothers and uncles if they knew that she was raped. 

Amal these days works on a sewing workshop for a payment of almost 700 Turkish liras, she lives in a share-accommodation with other Syrian girls.