Syria 1st-Hand: How Abuse Created an Insurgent (Gunn)

Raw footage from the battle for Idlib

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Michael Gunn writes for Ahram Online:

Strapped upside-down to a steel chair, his legs thrashing in the air, Abu Youssef heard the steady hum of the electricity generator and felt its first searing jolt. With apparent glee, his tormentors attached the electrodes to his little fingers then the soles of his feet. 

"They told me 'Assad is your God --- worship your president'," the 43-year old Syrian recounted. "I'm a Muslim, I couldn't do that."

As the father of four gasped for mercy, Syrian security officers applied over a hundred volts to his private parts. Time and again they barked their demands: the names of activists, their addresses, and his contacts in the Muslim Brotherhood.

"If I'd known something, I'd surely have talked. But I had nothing to confess," Abu Youssef says, pausing to compose himself. Wearing a navy anorak, he sports a thin beard, his glance darting across the terrace of the chic, glass-fronted cafe in Antakya, southern Turkey. It's a far cry from the tiny cell in Idlib province, northwest Syria in which he was held with five others last autumn.

Released after six days, his feet were swollen "like footballs." The shoes he had been wearing when seized from outside his local mosque no longer fit. 

Far from cowing him, the Assad regime had created another enemy. Within a week this soft-spoken, formerly apolitical construction foreman was organising Friday protests in his hometown of Darkush, just a few miles from the Turkish border.

Abu Youssef's activism continues to this day, even as the settlement of 17,000 people is encircled by Syrian tanks, the country's death toll rockets, and peaceful protests seem a relic of more innocent times.

The Darkush native was just one of hundreds who passed through the torture chambers of Idlib - the capital of the northwest province whose rugged terrain has made it the hotbed of the armed uprising against Syria's president.

As rebel fighters retreat from Homs in central Syria, Assad's troops are turning their attention to the forests and farmhouses that flank the Turkish border. It's here that the defected soldiers and armed volunteers who make up the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and loosely affiliated militias control small patches of ground. The rebels appear to have substantial local support, even as their guerrilla tactics risk bringing retribution on the villagers who house them. 

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