Finally home in Türkiye, Mehmet Erturk cannot eat the bread that his wife made for him. After 20 years in prison in Syria, half of his teeth are missing and the other half are in danger of falling out.
“It was torture upon torture,” he told AFP, mimicking the blows he was subjected to by guards at the notorious Damascus prison known as the Palestine Branch, where he spent some of his time in captivity. Had spent.
Arrested in 2004 on smuggling charges, Erturk finally returned Monday evening to his home in Magrasik, a village at the top of a winding road lined with olive groves about 10 minutes from the Syrian border.
“My family thought I was dead,” said the 53-year-old man, whose face and way of walking make him look 20 years older.
On the night of his release, he heard gunshots and began to pray.
“We didn’t know what was happening outside. I thought my job was done,” he said.
Then they heard a loud hammer blow and within minutes the prison doors were opened by rebels who ousted Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad from power.
‘Like being in a coffin’
“We had not seen him for 11 years. We had no expectations,” admitted his wife Hatice, sitting cross-legged outside their house baking bread with their youngest daughter, barely 6 months old When his father was arrested.
After being sentenced to 15 years in prison, prison officials left this father of four to die in an underground dungeon at the mercy of brutal guards.
“When they hit our wrists with hammers, our bones would pop out of their sockets,” he said.
He said, “They even poured boiling water over the neck of one prisoner. The flesh from his neck slid down to his hips.”
Pulling up his right trouser leg, he reveals his right ankle, the chain he wore darkening his skin.
“During the day, talking was strictly prohibited… there were cockroaches in the food. It was damp, it smelled like a toilet,” he said, recalling days “without clothes, water or food.”
“It was like being locked in a coffin.”
And there was a huge crowd there.
‘The dead were thrown into the boat’
“They put 115, 120 people in a cell for 20 people. Many died of hunger,” he said.
And the guards “threw the dead into the trash.”
Erturk said he paid the price for Syrian officials’ hatred of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who urged Assad to step down at the start of the war.
“We Turks suffered a lot for this,” he told AFP. He said he was refused medication based on his nationality.
He stooped so low that he even expected that 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.
When he tells of the horrors, he often thanks “our dear President Erdogan” that he is back, alive with his family and not one of the countless victims of Syria’s brutal prison system.
According to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), the number may exceed 105,000 since the war began in 2011.
One of his sisters gives him some old photographs.
In one, he is depicted with a lifelong friend named Faruk Karga, who was jailed with him in the same prison shortly after the picture was taken.
But Karga never came home.
“He died of starvation in prison around 2018,” Erturk said.
“He weighed about 40 kilos.”