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Freed Journalists Tell Of Torture Under ISIS
>> YOUR LINK HERE: ___ http://youtube.com/watch?v=_cat0lcPB_o
Moments after taking a seat at a coffee shop in Gaziantep, a Turkish city close to the border with Syria, Loay Abo al Joud pulled out a piece of paper. Before even saying a word he began to scribble. • Against the white paper he sketched a rough layout of the cell • Before saying a word, he pulled out a piece of paper and pen and began to sketch a rough layout of one of the prisons where ISIS held him for many months. Abu Ghraib prison (a nod to the American-occupied prison of the same name during the Iraq war) was in North Aleppo City, Syria. Loay was incarcerated there at the same time as many of the foreign journalists ISIS captured. He pointed out where James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Peter Kassig had been held. “I never got a chance to speak to any of them, as we were all held in solitary confinement.” • Loay was covering a barrel bomb attack for Al Arabia News in Aleppo City on November 28, 2013, when ISIS arrested him. Weeks earlier, they stormed the home of another local journalist, Ahmad Primo. After Ahmad’s arrest, ISIS showed him a dossier of information they’d collected on him. Everything he’d said in his reports, on Facebook, and even to his friends was used against him as evidence. Both captives saw heinous torture during their incarceration. “But, Loay said, “they had a special kind of torture for the journalists.” He recalled fighters coming to him often, holding knives to his neck, and telling him that soon, they would slaughter him. He met ISIS members from a number of nationalities, among them Morrocan, Iraqi, Tunisian, Russian, and of course, Syrian. He found the Syrians to be the kindest to him. The Russians and Tunisians, he said, were the most brutal. The most striking thing he noticed was that while he was incarcerated alongside a number of ISIS’ rivals, including Jabhat al-Nusra and the Free Syrian Army, he never once saw a member of Bashar al-Assad’s army. • In January 2014, Ahmad noticed that his captors were behaving strangely. He heard fighting outside the prison. Some of the ISIS members took about fifty prisoners with them, telling them that they would release them because the Free Syrian Army was attempting to overrun the prison. The battles continued for four days. Locked inside with no food, water, or information, the prisoners became restless and broke down the doors. The first thing they saw when they got outside were the bodies of the prisoners ISIS claimed they were releasing. They had all been shot in the head. Despite his ordeal, Ahmad soon returned to his work as a journalist. • “ISIS killed so many of my friends,” Loay said. Loay was lucky. A Wali (court official) in ISIS visited him in prison several times and heard his story. They called him to ISIS' court in Al Bab city, where an ISIS judge made Loay promise that he wouldn’t return to his work in the media. “I got a week of psychological treatment,” he said, smirking, “and then I went back to my work.” • Subscribe! http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c... • See more on our website: http://www.vocativ.com • Follow us on Twitter: / vocativ • Like us on Facebook: / vocativ
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