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    • ISIS Prison Museum: Documenting the horrors of Islamic State detention
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    ISIS Prison Museum: Documenting the horrors of Islamic State detention

    Sakege Posted on

    In October, the ‘ISIS Prison Museum’ website went live and offers virtual tours of former jihadist detention centers. The project also holds its first exhibition at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquarters in Paris until November 14, 2023, which includes virtual reality tours.

    The ‘ISIS Prison Museum’ is the result of the work of a team of journalists, filmmakers and human rights activists in Syria and Iraq who, since 2017, have documented 100 prisons and conducted interviews with more than 500 survivors. Syrian journalist Amer Matar, 38, is the director of the ISIS Prisons Museum. “IS kidnapped my brother in 2013 and we started looking for him,” he said, according to Al-Monitor. Matar has not found his brother.

    After US-backed forces began expelling jihadists from parts of Syria and Iraq in 2017, Matar and his team gained access to several former IS prisons. They decided to film the former prison sites and archive all the material they contained before they disappeared. The team managed to capture 3D photographs of around 50 former Islamic State prisons and 30 mass graves before their features were erased. They also converted more than 70,000 documents belonging to the Islamic State into a digital archive.

    Inside the football stadium in the Syrian city of Raqqa, the team found names of prisoners and Quranic verses carved into the walls. They found scratches from detainees on the walls, including lyrics from a 1996 television series about the prevailing peace. Inside a solitary cell, they discovered fitness exercise instructions written in English. Matar said: “I also wrote my name on the wall because I didn’t know if I would come out or if they would kill me,” Al-Monitor reported.

    The website publishes numerous narratives about life within the walls of these detention centers, including stories such as that of Muhammad Al-Attar. Al-Attar, a respected community leader and religious scholar with a doctorate in Islamic Sharia, was jailed after refusing to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State and was subjected to torture. In June 2014, Daesh extremists arrested Al-Attar, then 37, at his perfume shop in Mosul, Iraq, after overrunning the city.

    In his group cell in Mosul’s Ahdath prison, which held at least 148 detainees, Al-Attar described the conditions, saying: “There was nothing left but to cry.” He added: “When I felt like I wanted to cry, I would put my head under a blanket so no one would see me cry.” Al-Attar explained that he could not bear the thought of younger men seeing him cry. “I couldn’t stand it when young people my children’s age saw me cry; I was the oldest of them and I was afraid they would collapse,” he said.

    Al-Attar’s story is one of more than 500 testimonies collected by the team since 2017. These testimonies are included in the online archive called ‘The ISIS Prison Museum’, which aims to document abuses against human rights during and after the period of the terrorist organization. “This is the goal of the project: to document what happened to human rights in Iraq and Syria during and after the period of the terrorist organization,” said Younes Qais, a 30-year-old journalist from Mosul responsible for data collection. in Iraq.

    Qais added: “Many people from the city of Mosul were subjected to the most heinous crimes and the most atrocious methods of torture inside ISIS prisons.” He said he was particularly shocked by the story of a Yazidi woman who was raped 11 times in IS captivity. “Hearing and seeing the crimes inflicted on my people was really hard,” he said.

    The Islamic State (Daesh) controlled vast areas in Syria and neighboring Iraq and announced in 2014 the establishment of the so-called “Islamic caliphate.” The group put into practice its brutal interpretation of religion and imposed its extremist interpretation of Sharia on the populations of the areas it controlled. They banned smoking, alcohol and all forms of entertainment. The Islamic State demanded that women cover themselves from head to toe (niqab) and that men grow beards. Daesh threw suspected informants or “apostates” into makeshift prisons or jails, many of whom never returned, and deliberately arrested and disappeared anyone suspected of rejecting its control.

    The Islamic State cut off the hands of thieves and spread terror through horrific methods of slaughter, including slaughter, beheading, crucifixion and stoning. They publicly executed homosexuals. Many former Daesh prisons were originally “houses, hospitals, government buildings, schools or commercial shops”, and soon began to “change their characteristics with the return of people to them” and work to restore them.

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    Robin Yassin-Kassab, the website’s English editor, said the project aimed to “collect information and cross-reference it” so it could be used in court. He added: “We want legal teams around the world to know we exist so they can come and ask us for evidence.” Matar and his team hope the documentation can help bring the perpetrators to justice.

    Next year, Matar hopes to launch a sister website called ‘Jawab’ (“Answer” in Arabic) to help others find out what happened to their loved ones. He hasn’t found his brother.

    Sources: Al-Monitor, Arab News, France 24, Al-Arab

    This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq.



    Sakege
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