![]() “I was put in the hole for six days,” he says. The guards only release a detainee once he confesses to the charges directed against him. With the door closed, it is difficult to breathe, Raslan says. If a detainee does not confess to the charges, he is placed in a “solitary hole,” around seven feet deep. Despite a twenty-six day overlap in the prison, Raslan never met or saw the man with whom he shared the solitary confinement cell, and met him formally for the first time on Facebook.Īccording to Raslan, prisoners in al-Aswad face varying levels of torture depending on the charges leveled against them, including solitary confinement and electrocution. “A while ago, I was contacted by someone on Facebook who found my name and sent me a friend request,” this same person turned out to be a cellmate from al-Aswad. ![]() According to former prisoners, anyone who opposes the PYD ideology-whether Kurdish or Arab-is detained there. The YPG turned the mill into a prison during the second half of 2012. The building was originally an abandoned olive mill surrounded by olive trees for which Afrin is renowned. It’s hard to see anything in solitary cells, even those who share the same cell.” Raslan, clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress, smiles nervously as he recalls his arrest.Īl-Aswad Prison is located on the Afrin-Raju road. That’s why the prison is called the Black Prison. “In prison, I could not see my hands in solitary confinement. He was then transferred to al-Aswad (Black) Prison on the outskirts of Raju, northern Aleppo countryside west of Afrin, where he served the rest of his sentence.Īccording to testimony given directly to the author, among those arrested, Raju’s Aswad prison has a notorious reputation. Raslan was held incommunicado at Ghazzawiyah station prison for one month. Raslan was sentenced to one year in prison by a judge who spoke only in Kurdish. Detentions of anyone that is anti-regime may serve as a bargaining tool for future coordinations with the regime. It has been suggested that there is a tenuous alliance with several temporary military coordinations between both parties. ![]() The relationship between the YPG and the regime is complicated. At the Ghazzawiyah village checkpoint on the edge of the Afrin valley, then controlled by the SDF, he was arrested and detained on charges of being an informer and a participant in anti-regime demonstrations. When the area came under control by the regime in late 2016, Raslan, twenty-four years old at the time, fled with Syrian opposition fighter convoys, towards western Aleppo countryside. The YPG is the main militia in the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) the multi-ethnic grouping of militias that has done the bulk of the fighting against the Islamic State east of the Euphrates River, and against Turkish-backed Arab-majority rebels west of the Euphrates in the Turkish military intervention dubbed Operation Olive Branch.Īhmad Raslan was a teacher that lived in the al-Bab neighborhood of Eastern Aleppo city. A dim LED bulb lights the cell, under which hangs an old portrait of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who is part of an insurgent group active in Turkey since the early 1980s.Īt the time, Afrin was an enclave under the control of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), along with its militia, the Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG). New detainees sit and sleep closest to the dormitory’s entrance, standing up as the door is opened by the jailer and sitting back down to sleep when the jailer closes the door. As prisoners spend more time in the cell, they gradually move further from the door. Where they sit depends on how many days they have been imprisoned. Sixty-eight prisoners are crammed into an overcrowded communal cell somewhere in the Afrin valley.
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