Ahmad Helmi spent three years in Syrian prisons, managed to escape and, even after that, was sentenced to life in prison. He is now the president of the Ta’afi (recover, in Portuguese) initiative and searches for more than 100,000 missing victims of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
“They made the Nazi torture look very good,” Ahmad said. TSFabout the time he spent in prisons in Syria.
The Syrian activist was a student of civil construction, when one day at the gates of the University of Damascus, the Bashar al-Assad regime changed his destiny.
“There was a checkpoint at the entrance to the university. I was on my way to the university and they kidnapped me,” says Ahmad Helmi.
He spent the first six months in underground prisons, without seeing sunlight, and then he visited nine more prisons: “In the first cell we were 36 activists, in the second 72, in the last 48 or 47 and so on. There were hundreds of people.”
He was arrested between December 2012 and October 2015, accused of supporting terrorism, and was finally tried in absentia. He then managed to escape.
“My family gave a large amount of money to some officials. They released me and I fled the country. Then they sentenced me to life imprisonment,” explains Ahmad, who was already in Turkey at the time of that sentence.
Ahmad Helmi knows that he is one of the few who survived the disappearances: “Many of those who shared food and cells died right next to me.”
Disappearance is a weapon used by the different sides of the conflict and there are more than 100,000 missing persons. A few weeks ago, the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, requested a tool to locate them. The problem is that “there is no standard”.
“If we go out to buy bread, we can disappear. If we are activists, we can be sure that we will disappear. If we go to university without ever having been politically active, we can disappear”, says the activist.
At the age of 33, 12 years after his arrest, Ahmad Helmi leads the Ta’afi Initiative. The goal is to locate the more than 100,000 Syrians who are still missing, many of whom the survivor knows well.
Source: TSF
