YERRES FRANCE: Najah Albukai’s head is filled with the dead and disappeared of Syria’s civil war.
The prisoners with whom the 49-year-old art teacher shared a cell in Syria fill two black ink drawings hanging on the wall in the living room of his French apartment where he lives in exile with his wife and teenage daughter.
One of them shows row upon row of hunched naked men with dark, sunken eyes, their arms shielding their genitals.
In another, they look down on stacks of jumbled emaciated corpses, as if contemplating their fate.
“In prison you’re suspended between life and death. It’s an apocalyptic time. You feel as if you’re in a nightmare,” Albukai said in an interview.
Three years after his escape from the homeland, Albukai’s experiences in the regime’s torture chambers continue to explode on to his sketchpad.
Dozens of drawings, which he has exhibited across France, depict the horrors he witnessed, from prisoners being hung by their wrists from the ceiling to being folded in two in a wooden contraption nicknamed the “Flying Carpet.”
Another prop used by the torturers of President Bashar Assad was called the “German chair,” which saw prisoners lashed to the back of a chair and stretched to breaking point.
“I will draw this German chair until the end of my days to denounce this form of torture,” said the artist with a piercing gaze, whose bookshelf contains works by Jean-Paul Sartre and Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Like many in the Damascus suburb of Jdaidet Artuz, near the town of Daraya, a longtime rebel stronghold, Albukai was infected by the revolutionary fervor that swept Syria in early 2011.
But it was only when the government’s crackdown on the peaceful protests left 55 dead that he and his wife Abir joined the protests.
In 2012, he was arrested on a bus on his way to work and taken to military intelligence center “227” near Damascus where he was interrogated and beaten for “weakening national morale.”
“They would interrogate several people at the same time and while others beside you are being tortured you have to answer questions,” he said of the sessions, during which the prisoners were blindfolded.
Held with 70 others in a cell measuring five by three meters, he found it nearly impossible to sleep and illnesses such as scabies and diarrhea spread quickly.
Even while behind bars, Albukai found an outlet in art, trying to imagine the horrific scenes on canvases.
“I tried to find comparisons with paintings by Goya, or the Raft of the Medusa by (French Romantic painter Theodore) Gericault, which shows a group of people trying to escape,” he said.
After a month he was released when his wife paid €1,200 ($1,400) to have a judge drop the case.
Using a pseudonym on Facebook he continued to post about abuses by government forces online, but he tried to keep a low profile, fearing he could be arrested again at any time.
In late 2014, he tried to flee to Lebanon, but was caught on the border and returned to center 227.
By now, nearly four years into the war, “even the walls were diseased” and the bodies were piling up.
Albukai saw several people die from torture or common diseases like diabetes left untreated.
The center also acted as a sort of “temporary depot” for bodies collected from other military intelligence centers, with prisoners called on every night to unload bodies from trucks for storage in the basement.
“Some had weak necks as if they had been strangled and most were very thin and bore signs of illness,” he said.
Each had a number inscribed on the head or chest with a marker. He remembers two: 5535 and, 60 days later another: 5874.
Tens of thousands of people are missing, believed to be in government jails across Syria, where authorities have recently begun updating civil records to mark detainees as “deceased.”
In a 2016 report, Amnesty International estimated that 17,723 had died in custody between March 2011 and December 2015.
Were it not for his wife, Albukai might have been another name on a list of the deceased.
A French teacher with a salary of $80 a month, she sold their car and enlisted help from abroad to cobble together 20,000 dollars in bribes to win his freedom after around 10 months in detention.
In October 2015, the pair managed to reach Lebanon with their daughter and applied for asylum in France, where they now live in a quiet suburb south of Paris.
As government forces step up their bombardments of Idlib province, the last region still in rebel hands, Albukai is prepared to admit that “maybe we’ve been defeated and the revolution failed.”
But drawing what he witnessed helps keep the flame alive, says Albukai, who has received offers to publish his output.
“It is a way of not giving in, of not laying down arms,” he said.
Syrian torture chambers brought to life in haunting drawings
Syrian torture chambers brought to life in haunting drawings

- Held with 70 others in a cell measuring five by three meters, he found it nearly impossible to sleep and illnesses such as scabies and diarrhea spread quickly
- Dozens of drawings, which he has exhibited across France, depict the horrors he witnessed, from prisoners being hung by their wrists from the ceiling to being folded in two in a wooden contraption nicknamed the “Flying Carpet
‘What wrong did he do?’ Gaza family mourn three-year-old shot dead

- In Gaza, “There’s no hope or peace”
KHAN YUNIS, Palestinian Territories: Gazan mother Amal Abu Shalouf ran her hand over her son’s face and hair, a brief farewell before a man abruptly sealed the body bag carrying the three-year-old who was killed just hours earlier on Tuesday.
“Amir, my love, my dear!” cried his mother, struggling to cross the crowded courtyard of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza’s main city, where several bodies lay in white plastic shrouds.
According to the civil defense agency, at least nine people were killed on Tuesday in the southern Gaza Strip as Israeli forces carried out military operations, more than 20 months into the war triggered by Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel.
Contacted by AFP, the military did not respond to a request for comment about Amir Abu Shalouf’s death.
At the hospital, a man carried the boy’s body in his arms through a crowd of dozens of mourners.
“I swear, I can’t take it,” his teenage brother, Ahmad Abu Shalouf, said, his face covered in tears.
“What wrong did he do?” said another brother, Mohammad Abu Shalouf. “An innocent little boy, sitting inside his tent, and a bullet struck him in the back.”
Mohammad said he had “found him shot in the back” as he returned to the tent that has become the family’s home in Al-Mawasi, a coastal area near Khan Yunis that is now a massive encampment for displaced Palestinians.
The devastating war has created dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza, where the United Nations has warned that the entire population is at risk of famine.
The grieving mother, comforted by relatives, said her young son had been begging for food in recent days and dreaming of a piece of meat.
“There is no food, no water, no clothing,” said Amal, who has eight children to take care of.
Amal said she too was injured in the pre-dawn incident that killed her son.
“I heard something fall next to my foot while I was sitting and baking, and suddenly felt something hit me. I started screaming,” she said.
Outside the tent at the time, she said she tried crawling and reaching for other family members.
“Then I heard my daughter screaming from inside the tent... found them holding my son, his abdomen and back covered in blood.”
A group of men formed lines to recite a prayer for the dead, their words almost drowned out by the noise of Israeli drones flying overhead.
In the second row, Ahmad Abu Shalouf held his hands over his stomach in prayer, unable to hold back a stream of tears.
Similar scenes played out at the hospital courtyard again and again over several hours, as the day’s dead were mourned.
At one point, an emaciated man collapsed in front of the shrouded bodies.
One mourner pressed his head against one of the bodies, carried on a stretcher at the start of a funeral procession, before being helped up by others.
At a distance, a group of women supported Umm Mohammad Shahwan, a grieving mother, with all of them in tears.
“We need the war to end,” said Amal Abu Shalouf.
In Gaza, she lamented, “there’s no hope or peace.”
Syria rescuers say two killed in drone strikes on northwest

- During a meeting in Riyadh last month, US President Donald Trump called on his Syrian counterpart Ahmed Al-Sharaa to help Washington prevent a resurgence by Daesh
DAMASCUS: Two people were killed in separate drone strikes Tuesday on a car and a motorcycle in the northwestern bastion of the Islamist former rebels who now head the Syrian government, rescuers said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the twin drone strikes in the Idlib region but a US-led coalition in Syria has carried out past strikes on terrorists in the area.
Earlier this year, the United States said it killed several commanders of Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate Hurras Al-Din in the area.
The group had recently announced it was breaking up on the orders of the interim government set up by the rebels after their overthrow of Bashar Assad in December.
US troops are deployed in Syria as part of a US-led coalition to fight the Daesh group.
When contacted by AFP, a US defense official said they were aware of the reports but had “nothing to provide” at the time.
During a meeting in Riyadh last month, US President Donald Trump called on his Syrian counterpart Ahmed Al-Sharaa to help Washington prevent a resurgence by Daesh.
Gaza-bound activist convoy enters Libya from Tunisia

- Convoy members were heard chanting “Resistance, resistance” and “To Gaza we go by the millions” in a video posted on the organizing group’s official Facebook page
BEN GUERDANE, Tunisia: Hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists taking part in a convoy crossed the Tunisian border on Tuesday into Libya, aiming to keep heading eastwards until they break Israel’s blockade on the Palestinian territory, organizers said.
This comes after Israel intercepted an aid ship attempting to breach its blockade on Gaza, which was carrying 12 people, including campaigner Greta Thunberg and European parliament member Franco-Palestinian Rima Hassan.
The “Soumoud” convoy, meaning “steadfastness” in Arabic, set off from Tunis on Monday morning, spokesman Ghassen Henchiri told Tunisian radio station Mosaique FM.
He said it includes 14 buses and around 100 other vehicles, carrying hundreds of people.
Convoy members were heard chanting “Resistance, resistance” and “To Gaza we go by the millions” in a video posted on the organizing group’s official Facebook page.
Henchiri also told Jawhara FM radio channel the convoy plans to remain in Libya for “three or four days at most” before crossing into Egypt and continuing on to Rafah.
Organizers have said Egyptian authorities have not yet provided passage to enter the country, but Henchiri said the convoy received “reassuring” information.
Organizers said the convoy was not bringing aid into Gaza, but rather aimed at carrying out a “symbolic act” by breaking the blockade on the territory described by the United Nations as “the hungriest place on Earth.”
Algerian, Mauritanian, Moroccan and Libyan activists were also among the group, which is set to travel along the Libyan coast.
After 21 months of war, Israel is facing mounting international pressure to allow more aid into Gaza to alleviate widespread shortages of food and basic supplies.
The Madleen aid boat, which set sail for Gaza from Italy on June 1, was halted by Israeli forces on Monday and towed to the port of Ashdod.
The 12 people on board were then transferred to Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, the foreign ministry said, adding that Thunberg had been deported.
Five French activists were taken into custody after they refused to leave Israel voluntarily.
Algeria man’s self-immolation investigated as ‘terrorism’

- The charges include “endangering the lives and physical safety of others” and “publishing and promoting false and malicious news”
ALGIERS: Algerian authorities have launched a counterterrorism investigation after a man had set himself on fire, an act investigators suspect was part of coordinated plot with links abroad, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Faouzi Zegout was injured as a result of the self-immolation on June 1 outside the justice ministry to protest a case he was involved in.
A video of the incident in the capital Algiers circulated on social media, showing Zegout saying he had done it “because of a judge... who arbitrarily threatened me with a 10-year prison sentence.”
At an Algiers court on Tuesday, a prosecutor said that five people had been detained in the case, without specifying whether Zegout was one of them.
One of the five has been released under judicial supervision, and the case has been transferred to a counterterrorism division, the court heard.
According to the prosecutor, investigators had found that the act was orchestrated by an “organized criminal group” with suspected ties abroad.
The prosecutor said the group had allegedly plotted the act and assigned roles, including filming and publishing the self-immolation online, to “disturb public order and disrupt institutions.”
The charges include “endangering the lives and physical safety of others” and “publishing and promoting false and malicious news.”
The person who filmed the incident had “communicated with people abroad,” had “multiple bank accounts” and “received money transfers from people,” the prosecutor said, without specifying when the alleged transfers had occurred or who made them.
Zegout has said that he recently appeared in court for launching a fundraiser without official authorization to help cover medical costs for sick people.
A court in Frenda, his hometown about 340 kilometers (200 miles) west of Algiers, was scheduled to deliver its decision the same day he set himself on fire.
Israel cancels waiver allowing Israeli and Palestinian banks to work together

JERUSALEM: Israel canceled a waiver on Tuesday that had allowed Israeli banks to work with Palestinian ones, threatening to paralyze Palestinian financial institutions, Israel’s finance ministry said in a statement.
“Against the backdrop of the Palestinian Authority’s delegitimization campaign against the State of Israel internationally, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has instructed Accountant General CPA Yahli Rotenberg to cancel the indemnity provided to correspondent banks dealing with banks operating in Palestinian Authority territories,” the ministry said.
Smotrich had threatened in May 2024 to cut the vital connection between Israel and Palestinian banks in the occupied West Bank in retaliation for the recognition of the State of Palestine by three European countries.
The Palestinian financial and banking system is dependent on the regular renewal of the Israeli waiver.
It protects Israeli banks from potential legal action relating to transactions with their Palestinian counterparts, for instance in relation to financing terror.
In July, G7 countries urged Israel to “take necessary action” to ensure the continuity of Palestinian financial systems.
It came after US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that “to cut Palestinian banks from Israeli counterparts would create a humanitarian crisis.”
The overwhelming majority of exchanges in the West Bank are in shekels, Israel’s national currency, because the Palestinian Authority does not have a central bank that would allow it to print its own currency.