Mehmet Erturk, a Turk imprisoned in a Syrian prison, poses for a photograph after an interview with AFP journalists at his house in the village of Magaracik in Kilis on December 13, 2024. Agence France-Presse
MAĞARACIK, Turkey — Finally home in Turkey, Mehmet Erturk cannot eat the bread his wife has made him. After 20 years jailed in Syria, half his teeth are missing and the other half are threatening to fall out.
“It was torture after torture,” he told AFP, miming the truncheon blows to the mouth the guards would give him at a notorious Damascus prison known as the Palestine Branch, where he spent part of his time incarcerated.
Article continues after this advertisementArrested in 2004 for smuggling, Erturk finally made it back to his home to Magaracik on Monday evening, a village perched at the top of a winding road dotted with olive trees some 10 minutes from the Syrian border.
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“My family thought I was dead,” said the 53-year-old, whose face and manner of walking make him look 20 years older.
Article continues after this advertisementOn the night of his release, he heard gunshots and began to pray.
Article continues after this advertisement“We didn’t know what was happening outside. I thought I was finished,” he said.
Article continues after this advertisementREAD: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has left the country – war monitor
Then he heard loud hammer blows and within minutes the prison gates were flung open by the rebels who ousted Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad.
Article continues after this advertisement ‘Like being in a coffin’“We hadn’t seen him for 11 years. We had no hope,” admitted his wife Hatice, sitting cross-legged outside their home preparing bread with their youngest daughter, who was barely six months old when her father was arrested.
vegasslotsAfter he was sentenced to 15 years, the prison authorities left this father-of-four to languish in an underground dungeon, at the mercy of brutal guards.
“Our bones would pop out of the socket when they hit our wrists with hammers,” he said.
“They also poured boiling water down the neck of one prisoner. The flesh from his neck just slid all the way down” to his hips, he said.
Pulling up his right trouser leg, he shows his right ankle, the skin darkened by the chain he wore.
“During the day, it was strictly forbidden to talk… there were cockroaches in the food. It was damp, it stank like a toilet,” he said, recalling days “without clothes or water or food”.
Sitting at wooden benches, men and women stack tobacco leaves in one hand –- the components must be dry but soft, like the velvety texture of leather.
Data released by the BSP on Tuesday showed the public sector’s foreign borrowings from July to September this year went up by 36 percent from the $2.81 billion in the same period last year.
“It was like being in a coffin.”
And there was huge overcrowding.
‘Threw the dead into skips’“They put 115, 120 people in a cell for 20 people. Many people died of starvation,” he said.
And the guards just “threw the dead into rubbish skips”.
Erturk said he paid the price for the hatred Syria’s authorities bore for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who early in the war urged Assad to leave.
“We Turks suffered a lot of torture for that,” he told AFP, saying he was refused medication on grounds of his nationality.
He sank so low he even hoped they would hang him.
“They were taking us to a new prison block and I saw a rope hanging from the ceiling and I said: ‘Thank God, I’m saved’,” he said.
As he recounted the horrors, he often broke off to thank “our dear president Erdogan” for him being back, alive with his family and not one of the countless victims of Syria’s brutal prison system.
Those could number more than 105,000 people since the war began in 2011, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH).
One of his sisters passes him a handful of old photos.
In one, he is pictured with a lifelong friend called Faruk Karga, who ended up in the same prison with him shortly after the picture was taken.
But Karga never came home.
“He died of starvation in prison in around 2018,” said Erturk.
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“He weighed about 40 kilos.”phlboss
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