‘Assad regime released over 13,000 prisoners, planted them in terror groups’

The Assad regime supported certain radical groups and released them from prison when the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, planting them in terror groups, according to former prosecutor of Aleppo Anwar Majni, who worked in different regions of Syria after graduating from the Faculty of Law at the University of Aleppo in 1996.

“More than 13,000 terrorists were set free, mainly from the prisons in Tadmur, Sidnaya, Adra and Hama. Those who were released in 2011 and 2012 were then planted in terrorist organizations by the al-Mukhabarat (Syrian intelligence organization), and it was the U.S.’s Abu Ghraib prison model in Iraq which served as an example for the regime’s actions on this matter,” said Majni.

He also stated that all terror elements in Syria, particularly the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Daesh, were somehow trained in the abovementioned Syrian penitentiaries and that 70 of these former prisoners are now top figures in the PKK terror organization.

“We, as the people of Syria, protested against the despotic Assad regime, regardless of our differences in terms of social class, ideology or ethnicity. Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad ran the country for 40 years, ignoring the will of the people. We protested against it as the people of Syria. However, Daesh and the PKK elements dragged our revolution to an ethnic and ideological dimension. Assad’s strategy of breaking the resistance by supporting terror was more effective than his bombardments, and it succeeded.”

“While the Damascus government released thousands of terrorists from prisons, it imprisoned 250,000 innocent civilians who supported the revolution across the country, 30,000 of whom were brutally slaughtered. The Assad regime which pardoned registered terrorists brutally tortured hundreds of thousands of men and women to death,” he added.

“Eleven thousand civilians died from torture at the military hospital known as Branch 215 Damascus. Additionally, ‘the Field Court,’ a court which was granted extraordinary powers, executed 13,000 Syrians. There are dozens of prisons in the Assad-controlled regions. They carry out all sorts of torture on the tens of thousands of innocent civilians who they arrested, deeming them as criminals. There are mass graves all around the country, mainly in Damascus, Homs, Daraa, Deir ez-Zor and Aleppo. The Baath regime is no different than the PKK or Daesh in that sense. Our people are the captives of Assad and his supporters,” Majni concluded.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011 when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity.