Wives, Widows Of Syrian Detainees Lead Shackled Life

 

 'In the decade since Syria's régime pronounced her jailed husband dead, Ramya al-Sous was threatened by security forces, locked out of her spouse's estate and forced to flee abroad.

 The mother of three, now a refugee living in Lebanon, was never told how her husband died and is unable to sell or rent the properties confiscated by authorities.

 "By virtue of me being a woman, everything becomes nearly impossible," she said, echoing a plight shared by many wives and widows of Syrian prisoners.

 But the 40-year-old wants to put up a fight.

 "My children wouldn't have suffered as much if it had been me who was detained. They were left with nothing, but I insist on winning something back," she said.



 Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's régime waged a brutal crackdown on an Arab Spring-inspired uprising in 2011, sparking a war that has killed nearly half a million people.

 Around that number of people, mostly men, are estimated to have been detained in régime prisons since, with tens of thousands dying either under torture or due to poor conditions.

 Outside prison walls, their wives are anything but free, facing a maze of red tape in a society and legal system that favours men, said Ghazwan Kronfol, a Syrian lawyer living in Istanbul.

 Without their husbands' formal death certificates, widows cannot claim inheritance or property ownership, he said.



 Nor can they access their dead husbands' real estate if it was confiscated or escrowed by the state, the lawyer added.

 Worse still, guardianship over their children is not guaranteed, with judges often granting it to a male next of kin.

 "All of this comes on top of financial blackmail and sexual harassment" by security officers, Kronfol said.

 Syria's 2012 anti-terrorism law stipulates the government can temporarily or permanently seize the properties of prisoners accused of terrorism -- a blanket charge used to detain civilians suspected of opposition links.



 The government is believed to have seized $1.54 billion worth of prisoner assets since 2011, according to an April report by The Association of Detainees and The Missing in Sednaya Prison.

 The Turkey-based watchdog was founded by former detainees held in Sednaya, a jail on the outskirts of Damascus which is the largest in the country and has become a by-word for torture and the darkest abuses of the Syrian régime.

 Sous's home and farmland were among the properties escrowed after her husband was arrested in a raid in 2013 and later hit with terrorism-related charges she says were trumped up.

 A few months later, authorities handed her a "corpse number", she said.

 Alone and poor, she spent years being bounced around from one security branch to another as she tried to clear bureaucratic hurdles.



Sous said she was met mainly with harassment and intimidation.

 "Women are easy prey," she said.

 Fearing persecution by security forces, she fled to neighbouring Lebanon in 2016, clutching the old red and white plastic bag in which she keeps her property deeds and reams of other official documents.

 She has little money left but continues to pay bribes and lawyer fees in an attempt to reclaim assets from the state.

 "I want to sell them, not for me but for my children."

 Salma, a 43-year-old mother of four, also fled to Lebanon after her husband disappeared inside the black hole of Syria's prison system.

 The one time she enquired about his fate in 2015, security forces locked her in a room and threatened her.

 "I never asked about him again," Salma said, asking to use a pseudonym due to security concerns.



 When she tried to sell her husband's car and home, she found they had been seized by the state.

 "I sold all my jewellery to buy that house," she said.

 In their ordeal, some women have found a rare silver lining with the empowerment that being left to their own devices has brought about.

 Tuqqa, a 45-year-old mother of five whose husband also disappeared in prison, argued her life was already hard before the war due to social and religious conservatism.

 "I wasn't even allowed to open the front door of the house, let alone go out to buy groceries or bread," she said.



 But all that changed when she became the sole guardian of her children.

 She eventually moved to Lebanon, where she secured work and attended livelihood trainings and workshops run by aid groups, a leap from her previously sheltered life.

 When she was sexually harassed by her landlord, she blamed herself: "That is what we were taught: women are always to blame."

 Her children may not inherit a family home from their father but Tuqqa is adamant they will inherit new values from her.

 "I am not raising my children the way I was raised," she said.

 "War has given women strength. They are learning how to say 'no'," said a Damascus lawyer who asked not to be named.

 While the odds are stacked against her, Tuqqa said she feels ready to face the challenges ahead.

 "I lost a lot, but I became a strong woman," Tuqqa said.

 "I am no longer the woman living behind closed doors." '

Syrians in Idlib protest Assad régime's Ghouta chemical attack

 

 'People gathered at the city center of the opposition-held northwestern Idlib region on Sunday to protest against the chemical attack by the Bashar Assad régime in Syria on Aug. 21, 2013, in which more than 1,400 civilians died in the eastern Ghouta region of the capital Damascus.


 Protestors carried banners with messages written in Arabic and English: "We will not let the torch of justice go out," "We raise our voices on behalf of the victims and demand justice for them," "The massacres committed by the Assad régime with chemical weapons are not only against the victims but against all humanity" and "The souls of the victims are still waiting for justice."

 Firas Halife, one of the participants in the demonstration, said that they lit candles to keep the memory of the Assad régime's chemical massacre on Aug. 21, 2013, in the eastern Ghouta region.

 According to the data of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), more than 1100 of those killed in the attack by the Assad régime were women and children, and 5,000 civilians were affected by poison gas, Halife said.

 "Civilians were killed while they were sleeping. We want the perpetrators behind the massacre to be punished. It is not possible to forget the murderers. It is on the agenda until they are punished. We will keep holding these protests."



 Ismail Abdullah, one of the participants in the demonstration, said that they organized a demonstration so that the voices of the families of the survivors of eastern Ghouta and all chemical weapons massacres could be heard.

 Abdullah said that they are seeking justice by raising their voices, "We demand decisive steps from the international community."

 After the massacre, eastern Ghouta became the region where the Bashar Assad régime implemented the most strict blockade and used almost all weapons in 2018.

 The opposition in the region had to evacuate eastern Ghouta in April 2018 as a result of the forced agreement with the Assad régime and Russia.

 Civilians who emerged from the five-year siege are currently struggling to survive in the areas under the control of the opposition in the north of the country.



 According to the report of the SNHR, the Assad régime carried out 217 chemical weapons attacks on the settlements under the control of the opposition after the start of the civil war in Syria.

 Salim al-Muslat, the National Coalition for Syrian Opposition and Revolutionary Forces (SMDK) chair, also called on the United Nations to hold the Bashar Assad régime accountable for the attack. In his speech published on the official accounts of SMDK, al-Muslat accused the international community of being silent about the régime's chemical weapons attacks.

 He stated that the international community could not give serious and concrete reactions to the eastern Ghouta massacre.

 "This situation paved the way for the régime to commit massacres in various regions of Syria. Weapons prohibited by international law were used against civilians in these massacres. Today, the Assad régime and its allies still continue their massacres."

 Al-Muslat argued that the Assad régime violated the U.N.'s decision to use banned weapons in Syria 2,810 times and demanded that the U.N. take responsibility and hold the Assad régime accountable for its crimes.

 The head of SMDK emphasized that the political transition process in Syria should be implemented within a certain calendar within the framework of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 2254.



 Meanwhile, the U.N. High Representative for Disarmament, Izumi Nakamitsu, declared that "no progress has been made" in the dossier of the chemical weapons program in Syria.

 Speaking at the UNSC session on chemical weapons in Syria at the U.N. Headquarters in New York, Nakamitsu expressed his regret that the 25th round of consultations in Damascus could not be held after the "Syrian authorities" did not issue entry visas each time to the chief expert of the Technical Secretariat of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

 "We have not made any progress in this regard. I urge the Syrian government to cooperate with the Technical Secretariat and facilitate arrangements for weapons deployment, as outlined in Article VII, paragraph 7 of the Chemical Weapons Convention."

 "Using chemical weapons is a serious violation of international law and an insult to our common human values. We must be vigilant to ensure that these terrible weapons are never used again and are destroyed everywhere, not just in Syria." the high representative stated that the U.N. is determined to work with all member states to bring those who use these weapons to account.

 Nakamitsu also shared the information that the Syrian régime did not cooperate with discovering a chemical substance found in Barzeh facilities in November 2018.



 The Syrian régime joined the OPCW on Sept. 13, 2013, and the same month, the UNSC adopted Resolution 2118 on Syria's chemical weapons and the massacre it carried out in eastern Ghouta a month before it joined the OPCW.

 With the decision taken at the OPCW Meeting of States Parties on April 21, 2021, some membership rights of this country were suspended after it was determined that Bashar Assad régime forces used chemical weapons in al-Lataminah in March 2017 and Saraqib in February 2018.'