the head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), Fadel Abdulghany, told The New Arab that abuses by doctors and medical staff in military hospitals under the former regime had been extensively documented over the course of the conflict.
“These confessions should be treated cautiously while investigations are ongoing,” Abdulghany said. “But the practices described inside prisons and military hospitals under Assad are not new to us.”
Abdulghany criticised the use of video confessions, saying that investigations into the matter should have been carried out in privacy.
However, he also said that SNHR had documented the torture of detainees transferred to military hospitals, where doctors and nurses were involved in abuse. According to Abdulghany, former detainees consistently described treatment inside some military hospitals as even worse than in the detention facilities themselves.
“There are large numbers of doctors and nurses implicated in war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and deaths under torture,” he said. “This is something we have documented for years, so these confessions were not surprising to us.”
