NAIROBI: A former child soldier has urged the world to do more to help children devastated by Sudan’s brutal civil war, telling AFP on Thursday that “we can’t just leave them to it.”
Since April 2023, the conflict between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has killed tens of thousands, and displaced almost 11 million — among them five million children.
The United Nations warned earlier this year that “an entire generation could be destroyed,” with millions facing disease and malnutrition.
During a visit this week to the eastern city of Port Sudan, UNICEF goodwill ambassador Ishmael Beah — who was himself forcibly recruited into a Sierra Leone militia aged just 13 — met with displaced children and families.
“This collapse has really devastated a lot of their lives,” he told AFP in Nairobi shortly after the visit.
“It’s been difficult to constantly see what I experienced so many years ago is still happening to people.”
Beah described the plight of one woman he met, whose cousin and his wife were shot and killed after trying to defend themselves, leaving their child an orphan.
“So she took that child and basically ran with that child,” he said, describing it as just one case of remarkable resilience that he encountered.
“There are a lot of stories of rape and people being killed and constant bombardment, and people just running,” he added.
“It’s that restlessness and constant travel, the walking, and particularly for the girls, also then encountering checkpoints,” he said.
“There is a lot of rape.”
Beah said he had expected people’s spirits to be broken, but that was not what he found.
He said many of the young people he met were tough and, armed with the Internet, keen to share their own stories with the world.
“The message that all of them repeated over and over again was: ‘Can the world please help to end the war?’
“’We don’t care how they do it, but let it stop.’“
‘Can’t leave them to it’: ex-child soldier urges help for Sudan kids
https://arab.news/pw3qd
‘Can’t leave them to it’: ex-child soldier urges help for Sudan kids
- The United Nations warned earlier this year that “an entire generation could be destroyed,” with millions facing disease and malnutrition
- During a visit this week to the eastern city of Port Sudan, UNICEF goodwill ambassador Ishmael Beah met with displaced children and families
Militants ‘did not receive any international support to confront the Assad government,’ says HTS’ Al-Sharaa
- He says the weapons they fought with were manufactured locally
- ‘The Syrian people are exhausted from years of conflict, the country will not witness another war’
DAMASCUS: The leader of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham confirmed on Wednesday that the militants did not receive any international support to confront former President Bashar Assad’s government.
HTS’ leader Abu Mohammed Al-Golani, now using his real name Ahmed Al-Sharaa, said that the weapons they fought the Assad government with were manufactured locally, according to Al Arabiya news channel.
He added: “The Syrian people are exhausted from years of conflict, and the country will not witness another war.”
Those responsible for killing Syrians, and security and army officers in the former administration involved in torturing will be held accountable by the Military Operations Department, said Al-Sharaa.
He said in a statement: “We will pursue the war criminals and demand them from the countries to which they fled so that they may receive their just punishment.”
The leader confirmed that “a list containing the names of the most senior people involved will be announced.”
He added that “rewards will also be offered to anyone who provides information about senior army and security officers involved in war crimes.”
Al-Sharaa said that the military leadership is “committed to tolerance for those whose hands are not stained with the blood of the Syrian people,” adding that it granted amnesty to those in compulsory service.
Former prisoner revisits Syrian air base ordeal
- On Wednesday, 40-year-old father-of-three Riad Hallak was combing through the shattered ruins of a lecture theater that he said once held 225 detainees
- During the early days of Syria’s 13-year civil war, Hallak was arrested in 2012 while attending a funeral for protesters shot dead by government security forces
DAMASCUS: The surrender of the Mazzeh air base outside Syrian capital Damascus by Bashar Assad’s forces triggered a round of Israeli air strikes designed to prevent his former arsenal falling into the hands of Islamist rebels.
But it also allowed a Syrian former detainee to revisit the ordeal he suffered at the hand of Assad’s ousted forces.
The president’s long and brutal rule came to a sudden end last week, and on Wednesday young rebels were roaming Mazzeh, periodically firing an old Soviet-designed anti-aircraft gun into the sky.
Fighter jets and helicopters lay wrecked alongside the runway, some of them destroyed in an Israel strike, but the offices and workshops had been broken into by Assad’s local foes.
A pile of drugs, apparently the much-abused psychostimulant captagon, had been hauled out of an air force building and set alight in an impromptu bonfire, which was still smoldering as AFP visited the site.
Mazzeh was not only an air base for jets and attack helicopters, but also served as an ad hoc detention center run by Assad’s air force intelligence wing.
On Wednesday, 40-year-old father-of-three Riad Hallak was combing through the shattered ruins of a lecture theater that he said once held 225 detainees.
During the early days of Syria’s 13-year civil war, Hallak was arrested in 2012 while attending a funeral for protesters shot dead by government security forces.
The tailor was bound, beaten and held for a month in a room designed to instruct air force pilots, before being transferred to another facility and detained for another two months and 13 days.
When the bearded rebel fighters at the gate heard his story, they allowed him back to the scene of his torment, to seek out evidence he hopes might help other families find missing loved ones.
The once ubiquitous portrait of Assad now lies in the dust, alongside the logo of the air force intelligence wing and a roll of barbed wire, incongruous among the damaged college-style desks.
Hallak tells of how for a month he only left the room twice a day to use the toilet in batches of three prisoners, who otherwise slept in heaps, packed together on the cold concrete steps.
Once, when there was an explosion outside, he and his fellow inmates celebrated in the hope that rebels were storming the base — only to be mocked and threatened by a general and laughing soldiers.
“If anyone complained about the conditions, the general would tell us we were receiving five-star tourist treatment, and threaten to transfer us,” Hallak told AFP at the base.
Since his detention, Hallak and his wife have had three young children and now the family can hope to live more freely in a Syria that has shed the half-century rule of the Assad clan.
But looking in vain for records he hopes will shed light on his ordeal and the fate of missing friends, he struggled, like many in Syria, to express how this feels.
“It’s difficult to say,” he said, looking prematurely old with his close-trimmed grey beard.
“There’s no words. I can’t speak.”
International monitors have raised concerns that allowing former miliary bases to fall under the sway of the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) rebel group will lead to chemical weapons falling into the hands of extremists.
Israel has used this fear as a justification for stepped up air strikes, including one on Mazzeh.
But the most dangerous substance that AFP journalists saw was the haul of captagon.
Assad’s government was notorious for producing the amphetamine-based drug in commercial qualities, flooding the lucrative Gulf market to bolster its wartime coffers.
The US government slapped sanctions on Syrian officials allegedly involved in the illicit trade, and Syria’s neighbors have seized millions of pills in a losing battle to prevent its spread.
But on Wednesday the fighters paid little attention to the haul, which their comrades had apparently set alight, as they passed by on motorbikes or manned the gates of the complex.
Sudan largest humanitarian crisis ever recorded: IRC report
- Report highlights 20 countries at greatest risk of humanitarian deterioration, with Sudan ranking highest
CAIRO: Sudan has become the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded” after 20 months of devastating war between rival generals, the International Rescue Committee said in a report released Wednesday.
“The country accounts for 10 percent of all people in humanitarian need, despite being home to less than 1 percent of global population,” the New York-based organization said in their 2025 Emergency Watchlist.
Since April 2023, a war between the Sudanese regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted 12 million.
Nearly 9 million of those are displaced within Sudan, most in areas with decimated infrastructure and facing the threat of mass starvation.
Across the country, nearly 26 million people — around half the population — are facing acute hunger, according to the United Nations.
Famine has already been declared in the Zamzam displacement camp in the western Darfur region, and the United Nations has said Sudan is facing the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory.
IRC’s report highlights the 20 countries at greatest risk of humanitarian deterioration, with Sudan ranking highest on the list for the second year in a row.
They said a total of 30.4 million people were in humanitarian need across the northeast African country, making it “the largest humanitarian crisis since records began,” the IRC said.
There is no end to the war in sight, with both parties intensifying strikes on residential areas in recent weeks.
The IRC warned of total “humanitarian collapse,” as the health crisis was set to worsen and both sides continued to “choke humanitarian access.”
Around 305 million people worldwide are in need of humanitarian support, according to IRC, with 82 percent of them in watchlist areas such as the occupied Palestinian territories, Myanmar, Syria, South Sudan and Lebanon.
“It is clear that ‘the world is on fire’ is a daily reality for hundreds of millions of people,” IRC chief David Miliband said.
“The world is being cleaved into two camps: between those born in unstable conflict states, and those with a chance to make it in stable states.”
Netanyahu aide on trial in new case troubling Israeli PM
- Netanyahu and his supporters have decried Feldstein’s arrest and indictment as a political witch hunt and an abuse of the legal system
JERUSALEM: As the corruption trial of Benjamin Netanyahu resumed this week, Israel was gripped by another scandal involving the prime minister and the alleged leaking of classified documents.
Eli Feldstein, a former adviser to Netanyahu, is accused in the case of leaking a classified document related to hostage negotiations in Gaza to shift critical media coverage of the Israeli leader.
The case, critics say, highlights deep-seated corruption inside his office, including attempts to sway public opinion amid a divisive war.
It also casts a spotlight on disciplinary issues faced by the Israeli military during the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Feldstein, who was released to house arrest on Tuesday, allegedly received the classified information from a reservist noncommissioned officer who has not yet been named. In a combative press conference on Monday, Netanyahu said the charges against Feldstein were a part of a broader attack against him and his supporters.
“I do not intend to get involved in ongoing investigations, but I want to talk about this here as well,” Netanyahu said in response to a question from a journalist about the affair. He said he was shocked by the investigation and the methods used by law enforcement officials to extract information, adding the overarching goal was to get his former aides to give up sensitive information about him.
Both Feldstein, who served as an unofficial aide to Netanyahu, and the unnamed soldier, were indicted last month on charges of compromising state security.
Feldstein leaked a document to German newspaper Bild that detailed apparent Hamas tactics in the negotiations for a hostage release and ceasefire.
The information in the document has since been dismissed by the army as not accurately reflecting Hamas’s upper leadership.
Feldstein and the unnamed soldier had been held in police custody for more than two months and the charges against them are serious enough to carry a life sentence. Prosecutors have alleged the adviser had political motives in leaking the document.
They allege he was in possession of the document from July, but only chose to leak it to the media in September, after the murder of six high-profile hostages by Hamas in late August, with the aim of alleviating public criticism of the prime minister.
Feldstein’s case has sparked a fierce response from Netanyahu and his allies.
Netanyahu and his supporters have decried Feldstein’s arrest and indictment as a political witch-hunt and an abuse of the legal system.
In a lengthy video clip released on Nov. 24, Netanyahu said the Feldstein case was “selective law enforcement” aimed at harming him and his right-wing camp.
Some of Netanyahu’s supporters accuse the defense establishment of seeking revenge against Netanyahu and his government, which has pointed a finger of blame at the military, the Shin Bet security agency and the Mossad spy agency as being responsible for the failures that enabled Hamas to attack Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — sparking the ongoing war in Gaza.
In a direct response to Feldstein’s indictment, ministers in Netanyahu’s coalition have even advanced legislation that would allow soldiers — and other members of the defense establishment — to pass classified intelligence, even without authorization, to the prime minister or defense minister.
How Sednaya’s liberation exposed decades of systematic torture under Syria’s Assad regime
- Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham captured the infamous regime jail on Dec. 8 after a dramatic 10-day campaign to oust Bashar Assad
- Built in the 1980s, Sednaya became a symbol of state terror, with rights groups calling it a ‘human slaughterhouse’
DUBAI/LONDON: As jubilation spread across Syria following the overthrow of Bashar Assad on Dec. 8 after 13 years of civil war, Sednaya prison — a name synonymous with unspeakable horrors — finally fell into opposition hands.
Thousands of Syrians flooded the gates of the infamous facility near Damascus on Monday, desperate for news of loved ones who had vanished into the prison’s labyrinthine depths, many of them decades ago.
For years, Sednaya had been a black hole of despair, where political prisoners, activists and regime critics were detained, tortured and often executed.
Built in the 1980s under the rule of Assad’s father, Hafez, Sednaya began as a military prison but quickly morphed into a symbol of state terror.
Human rights groups have described it as a “human slaughterhouse,” a moniker reflecting the industrial-scale torture and execution that defined its operations.
Former detainees recount harrowing tales of abuse within its walls. Testimonies shared with Amnesty International, the rights monitor, detailed how prisoners were beaten, sexually assaulted and left to die of untreated wounds and diseases in squalid, overcrowded cells.
Others faced mass hangings after sham trials that lasted only minutes. Between 2011 and 2015, Amnesty estimates that up to 13,000 people were executed. The methods of torture were both medieval and methodical, including beatings, stabbings, electric shocks and starvation.
The horrors extended beyond death. The US has previously accused the Assad regime of using a crematorium at Sednaya to dispose of bodies, while surviving detainees described “confession” protocols involving sadistic torture.
On Sunday, Sednaya’s gates were forced open by opposition fighters from Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham after a 10-day campaign led by opposition chief Abu Mohammed Al-Golani that toppled the Assad regime.
Thousands of detainees spilled out of the jail, some barely able to crawl after years of abuse. Videos circulated online showed women, children and elderly prisoners emerging from filthy cells, their emaciated forms bearing witness to the atrocities they had endured.
One video showed hundreds of traumatized women emerging from filthy cells, among them a three-year-old child and scores of teenage girls.
Among the freed prisoners was Ragheed Al-Tatari, a former Syrian air force pilot imprisoned for 43 years after refusing to bomb civilians during the 1982 Hama massacre. Al-Tatari’s survival shocked even those accustomed to Sednaya’s grim history.
Another video circulating online showed an elderly lady in a squalid cell. The unidentified woman was only capable of laughing and repeating what the rebels told her, “the regime fell, the regime fell, the regime fell,” through her laughter.
Like her, countless prisoners seem to have lost their minds and are unable to comprehend what is happening.
Others emerged from their incarceration desperate to learn the fate of their loved ones outside. A QudsN clip circulating on social media shows a man who, on being released, immediately went to visit the graves of his children, who had reportedly been killed by the regime.
Tragically, not all inmates survived long enough to see liberation.
The decomposing body of activist Mazen Hamadeh, who had traveled the world detailing the horrors he had endured during a previous stint in the regime’s dungeons before being lured back to Syria in 2021 under false promises of security, was found inside.
He bore signs of recent blunt-force trauma.
For many Syrians, the fall of Sednaya has been bittersweet. Thousands remain unaccounted for, and families desperate for closure have scoured its grounds for clues.
Volunteers from the Syrian civil defense, known as the White Helmets, armed with maps and sniffer dogs, have searched for hidden cells and underground chambers. Despite rumors of secret detention areas, they reported finding no evidence of additional prisoners.
Sednaya’s facilities reveal the systematic cruelty that defined the Assad regime. Surveillance rooms with wall-to-wall monitors allowed guards to oversee detainees at all times.
Paraphernalia of torture, including ropes for hanging and devices for crushing bodies, were found in abundance. Mass graves and decomposing bodies near the Harasta hospital — where corpses were sent from Sednaya — underscore the scale of atrocities.
The “red wing” housed political prisoners, subjected to the worst abuses. Survivors describe being denied water, beaten into unconsciousness, and forced to relieve themselves in their cells.
Inmates were often forbidden from making noise, even during torture. Every morning, guards collected the dead for burial in unmarked graves, recording causes of death as “heart failure” or “respiratory issues.”
As the White Helmets and opposition fighters continued to make their way into Sednaya to ensure no cell had been left unopened, they came across several decomposed bodies and others that had been partially dissolved in acid.
Sednaya’s reputation as a site of systemic abuse predates Syria’s civil war. In the 1980s, it became a repository for Islamists the regime had once encouraged to fight US forces in Iraq but later deemed threats.
Following the 2011 Arab uprisings, the prison’s role expanded dramatically. Protesters, journalists, aid workers and students were detained en masse, many never to be seen again.
The prison’s practices bear the fingerprints of Alois Brunner, a Nazi war criminal who trained Syrian intelligence officers in interrogation and torture techniques.
Once a high-ranking Gestapo officer who oversaw the deportation of more than 128,000 Jews to death camps during the Second World War, Austrian-born Brunner was on the run until he was offered protection by Hafez Assad.
Assad refused on multiple occasions to extradite Brunner to stand trial in Austria and Germany in the 1980s, but later came to see him as a burden and an embarrassment to his rule.
In the mid-1990s, Hafez ordered Brunner’s “indefinite” imprisonment in the same squalor and misery the former Nazi officer had taught Syrian jailors to inflict on their prisoners. He died in Damascus in 2001 aged 89.
Despite overwhelming evidence, Bashar Assad consistently denied allegations of abuse. “You can forge anything these days. It is the fake news era,” he told Yahoo News in 2017 when confronted with Amnesty’s findings.
His denials, however, are contradicted by testimonies and reports such as the Caesar files — a cache of 53,000 images taken in Syria’s prisons and military hospitals and smuggled out by a defector — which document the regime’s crimes in horrifying detail.
On Monday, Fadel Abdul Ghany, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, broke down in tears during a televised interview when asked about the fate of missing detainees. “It is most probable that those who have been arbitrarily disappeared by the regime are dead,” he said.
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Abdul Ghany later posted on social media: “I deeply regret having to share this distressing announcement, but I feel it is my responsibility to share it.”
Syrian activist Wafa Ali Mustafa, whose father was forcibly disappeared in 2013, said on X that she has been searching “through harrowing videos, clinging to any chance” that he might be among the survivors.
The prison’s fall has prompted calls for accountability. “The blood that was spilled here cannot just run. They must be held to account,” Radwan Eid, a former detainee, told Reuters news agency.
Sednaya is also not the only regime jail where such abuses are claimed to have taken place. There are multiple facilities across the country, including Mezzeh military prison, Tedmor, and Fereh Falasteen, from which evidence of further horrors are likely to emerge.
The challenge now lies in preserving evidence and ensuring that Sednaya’s perpetrators face trial.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and other organizations have urged the armed opposition to protect records and prevent further destruction. However, looting and chaos at Sednaya has complicated these efforts.
As Bashar Assad and his acolytes have been granted asylum in Russia, it seems unlikely the deposed president and others in the upper echelons of his regime will stand trial for their role in the crimes perpetrated at Sednaya.
While the road to justice may be long, Sednaya’s liberation represents a turning point. For survivors and families, it offers a rare opportunity to confront the truth and honor the memories of those lost.
The dismantling of Sednaya’s imprisonment machinery is a symbolic step toward rebuilding the nation and serves as a reminder of the resilience of those who survived, and the enduring need for accountability.
