Hiba Muhammad, Baladi News, Damascus
Prior to the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution in early 2011, the Syrian Prisoner's Day used to mark the consensus among Syrian people on putting pressure on the international community to compel Israel to release the Syrian detainees who have been in its prisons for decades.
Surprisingly enough, the regime's policy did not differ from the policy of Golan Height occupiers, even after the outbreak of the Syrian revolution, but rather has exceeded Israel itself in criminality and terrorism.
The Syrian Prisoner's Day, commemorated annually on 21 of April, and the week of solidarity with the Syrian prisoners and detainees, used to aim at releasing the detainees of Syrians from Golan Heights who had been in prison since the Israeli occupation of the area, when Hafez Al-Assad handed over the hill to Israel in exchange for reinforcing the reins of his rule in the country.
However, the situation has changed since 21 of April 2011, as the Syrians are no longer arrested by Israelis, but rather by the Syrian regime, his thugs and mercenaries from the supporting countries. Furthermore, the number of Syrian detainees in the prisons of the so-called resistance advocates against Israel had exceeded doubles the number of detainees in the Israeli prisons.
Detainees in Bashar Al-Assad's prisons suffer unimaginable abuses, severe conditions including: genocides, horrendous field executions, rape or other forms of sexual violence, collective liquidation, and illegal human organ trade, some of them were even buried alive. On the other hand, Assad has no intention of releasing them because he would rather use them to keep their families under consequent pressure that will force them to accept to negotiate and reach a settlement with him.
Syrian Prisoner's Day reminds all Syrians of the evasion of the Syrian government to any settlement agreements concluded with rebellious cities, which are besieged by it with the help of Foreign sectarian militias. Whenever such settlement agreements tackle the detainees issue, Assad's officials start to evade the commitments and resort to battles and besiegement policy to twist the arms of the detainees families forcing them to forget their case, however, those policies failed to make Syrians stop demanding the freedom of their beloved ones who have been lost in Assad's prisons for years.
Since the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution, regime forces have been carrying out arbitrary arrests along all Syrian cities, capturing dozens of thousands of civilians who are against Assad's regime, weather the Father of the Son. Some of them are still languishing in the regime's prisons for years, and many other thousands were liquidated by regime's intelligence services during the people's uprising.
According to estimates by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, regime forces and intelligence services are still detaining more than 125,000 Syrian civilian, while other sources suggest that the numbers are much greater. The network said in a report regarding the past five years that regime forces and its intelligence are detaining 10,873 child and about 8,650 women who were arrested at different times along the years of the revolution.