After losing contact with her family, Suad, 35, decided to leave her home in Marrat al-Numan, in the countryside of Idlib, to check on her family in Karm al-Zaitoun. After traveling for days she arrived at her childhood home. However she soon realized her family had left the house a long time ago, so she returned home.
On her return journey, she was arrested at the Wadi ad-Dahab checkpoint, and charged with being from a neighborhood which had rebelled against the regime. She spent five days at the checkpoint.
"On my way back to Idlib, the soldiers at Wadi ad-Dahab checkpoint arrested me and my child after they checked my ID. They led me into a horrible room, then suddenly, a group of soldiers attacked me and began to bite me. At the door, a man named Abu Naif stood: I later learned that he was the commander of the checkpoint. He supervised the torture and gave orders. His role in the tragedy was to put a knife to mine and my son’s throat, and threatened to kill us after the torture ended,” Suad said.
"On the third day, the level of the cruelty doubled and the soldiers began to bite me more violently. Then they injected me with something that made me lose consciousness. But I was woken later by violent punches to the face and verbal, sectarian abuse against me and my child,” Suad added.
She most wished to escape the torture of hours of rape, but could not. She described how the soldiers would “take turns to rape me, each one leaving my exhausted boy to the next one. They were filming everything with a camera, leaving me afterwards feeling half dead, amid the screams of my child. They released me after five days, and I walked for hours until I reached a Free Syrian Army checkpoint: they took me to my husband's house in Marrat al-Numan".
Suad encouraged every woman who has been raped in Syria to come forward and talk about what they have suffered. “This will not hurt their dignity, rather it will guarantee their rights, and will make sure that the criminals will be punished", Suad added.
Translated and edited by The Syrian Observer
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