Assad torture victims reveal horror of ‘burned bodies’ & forgetting their names – amid hunt for tyrant’s thugs

Agency Report

ASSAD'S chemical attack victims have revealed the horrors of "burned bodies" while prison survivors have forgotten their own names as the hunt is on for the tyrant's puppet thugs.

In the 53-year-rule of the Assad's, Syria was shut off from the rest of the world - but now the heinous crimes committed under the brutal regime are finally being brought to light.

Death was a regular occurrence in Syria, specifically in a region called Ghouta.

This was an opposition-held area on the outskirts of Damascus, where in 2018, Syrian jets flew and rained chemicals over innocent people in one of its towns, Douma.

Two yellow cylinders were dropped from an air force chopper and went crashing through the top floor of one apartment building while the other landed on a balcony.

The people of the town had adjusted to the deafening sounds of relentless airstrikes - but had been less familiar with the hissing of chlorine gas that escaped the canisters.

In the regular air raids evil Assad ordered over the town, the people looked to find shelter in basements.

But as killer chlorine is heavier than air, the gas sank down through the storeys and below buildings into two basements.

At least 43 people choked to death from the heinous gas attack, with their blistered bodies found to be blue and black when civil defence workers tragically recovered them.

The last rebel group that were fighting in the Douma region surrendered to the regime a day after the gas attack.

Douma has silently grieved for six years following the inhumane assault, but after the spectacular fall of Bashar al-Assad last week, victims are finally able to tell their stories.

One man called Abdulhadi Sariel, 64, lived on the opposite side of the street from where the chlorine cylinders crashed through.

He said his family only survived because they stayed on a higher floor - but one of his daughters still suffers from respiratory problems because of it.

He told the Observer: "No one in that basement came out alive."

"Their bodies turned to black, their clothes went green and were burnt, they crumbled and stuck to their bodies."

Abdulhadi even described how the victims clothes "looked like wood," stressing just how strong, deadly and inhumane the attack was.

He added: "We threw out all of our clothes but [you can still see the effect] on the curtains.

"We can escape the bullets and the tanks, but chemicals travel through the air. We were afraid, children were afraid."

The Syrian government allowed OPCW investigators to visit Douma a few weeks later, but threatened to kill survivors if they told visitors the truth on what had happened.

Instead, residents like Abdulhadi were told to say that people had died from inhaling smoke and dust - not the raining chemicals.

He explained: "The commanders said ‘if you say a word other than what we tell you, we will kill you’.

"But I always kept the curtains [as evidence] for this moment, when the truth would come out."

Since Syria spiralled into years of bloodshed under Assad's regime in 2011, at least 300,000 people have been killed and 100,000 have gone missing.

Aside from being killed in heinous gas attacks or killed on the streets by Assad's soldiers, citizens would disappear, taken from their homes - presumed to be detained in one of the tyrant's brutal prisons.

Now the dynasty has spectacularly fallen after Islamist rebels led by Hayat al Tahir al-Sham (HTS) captured key cities in the country, the prisons have been opened and the surviving detainees released.