In an interview a May 18, 2012 interview on the Al-Jazeera Network, Palestinian-Syrian opposition activist Salama Kila described his torture by a Syrian security agency.
Salama Kila: "A group from a certain security agency came to my house. At first, I did not know to what agency they belonged, but their commander presented a badge of the Domestic Security Force. When I reached their branch, I saw that they belonged to the Airforce Intelligence....
"They placed me in a room for the night, and the following day, I was interrogated. The interrogation consisted of a single question. Someone had claimed that I had given him a leftist publication, issued as part of the revolutionary movement in Syria. They accused me of printing it, and wanted to know where.
"When I denied the allegation, they started beating me. I don't know how long this lasted – 15 minutes, half an hour, 10 minutes... Then they took me out. They forced me to stand so that I would collapse and admit it, but my answer remained the same. Then they returned me to my room.
"In the afternoon, they repeated this. Then they demanded that I write down my answer. I wrote about a page and a quarter, and they told me to sign it. So I signed it, and this ended the interrogation for the time being. I was taken back to the room.
"The following day, I was taken to an officer in some building. They kept talking about a slogan that appeared in that publication: 'We want to bring down the regime in order to liberate Palestine.' The interrogator was upset about this slogan, and kept mentioning it whenever he beat me. When I was taken to the officer, I was blindfolded, but the people around me were also talking about this slogan. They were upset too. They did not beat me on the way. It seems that they have regulations about the beatings."
Interviewer: "Did the beatings stop there, or did they continue?"
Salama Kila: "They continued, and got even worse later on, in another place. The officer asked me the same question, adding abominable comments about the Palestinians – 'You sold out your land,' 'We helped you,' 'Bashar Al-Assad helped you,' 'You've betrayed us,' 'You are ungrateful,' 'Even the Israelis are better than you'... Apparently these concepts are prevalent among the security agencies, because it repeated itself many times..."
