The report, published on 13 August and based on 19 interviews with survivors, relatives and witnesses and an examination of 14 cases between June 2025 and June 2026, documented severe beatings, electric shocks, mock executions, forced confessions, unofficial detention, denial of access to lawyers and deaths in custody.<\/p>\n
STJ said the evidence does not point to a single, centrally directed torture apparatus comparable to Assad’s vast detention system.<\/p>\n
Instead, it warned that abusive practices are recurring across different security and armed bodies because the conditions that allowed torture to flourish have not been fully dismantled.<\/p>\n
Bassam Alahmad, co-founder and executive director of STJ, told The New Arab that human rights groups had hoped some of the most notorious practices associated with the Assad era would disappear with the regime.<\/p>\n
“We thought that some practices would at least stop after the fall of the Assad regime. One of them was torture, as well as forced disappearances and arbitrary detention,” he said.<\/p>\n
Alahmad, himself a former detainee, stressed that the scale remains very different from under Assad, when torture was systematic and widespread.<\/p>\n
“I was myself detained. I knew how much – I would say more than 90 percent of people – were tortured. It was almost automatic,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Here, of course, it is not widespread like that, but the practice itself is ingrained.”<\/p>\n
STJ documented detainees being beaten with cables, sticks and rifle butts, subjected to electric shocks and threatened with execution. In some cases, detainees were held in unofficial locations, denied access to lawyers and moved between facilities without their families being informed.<\/p>\n
From systematic torture to a recurring phenomenon<\/p>\n
Alahmad described the pattern as a “phenomenon” – more than isolated incidents, but not a centrally organised policy comparable to Assad’s torture system.<\/p>\n
“The groups that were integrated into the government and the army brought this practice with them,” he said. “It is not an order from the Ministry of Defence or Interior. It is not a practice coming from the top down.”<\/p>\n
He said the persistence of torture could not simply be explained by former Assad-era security personnel remaining in place, noting that Syria’s new security bodies<\/a> are largely staffed by members of armed groups that operated during the civil war.<\/p>\n Those practices were not confined to one faction, he added, pointing to previous allegations of torture involving Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Syrian National Army factions and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.<\/p>\n For Alahmad, the central problem is impunity. “If you think that there is really accountability, you will not do this kind of work,” he told\u00a0The New Arab.<\/p>\n STJ also found indications that some detainees had been abused because of their communal or ethnic background.<\/p>\n Alahmad said the organisation had received reports involving Kurds, Alawites and Druze in which insults used during torture appeared to indicate a sectarian or ethnic motive.<\/p>\n “Some people were tortured and beaten because they are Druze or Alawite or Kurds,” he said.<\/p>\n But he stressed that the abuses were not limited to minorities.<\/p>\n “There were also cases where Arab Sunni people were tortured, because there is a practice,” he said.<\/p>\n Questions over accountability<\/p>\n The report comes amid scrutiny of detention practices after the case of Mohammad Ghamira, a former Syrian Civil Defence volunteer who was hospitalised in critical condition after being held at a police station in al-Haffa, rural Latakia.<\/p>\n Ghamira’s family said he entered the station conscious and in stable health after being summoned over a financial complaint, but emerged several days later bleeding and seriously ill.<\/p>\n According to relatives, he was later found to have suffered a brain haemorrhage and remains unconscious in intensive care.<\/p>\n
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