The Black Prison of Afrin
Khalifa al-Khuder
May 14, 2018
Sixty-eight prisoners are crammed into an overcrowded communal cell somewhere in the Afrin valley. Where they sit depends on how many days they have been imprisoned. As prisoners spend more time in the cell, they gradually move further from the door. New detainees sit and sleep closest to the dormitory’s entrance, standing up as the door is opened by the jailer and sitting back down to sleep when the jailer closes the door. A dim LED bulb lights the cell, under which hangs an old portrait of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK); who is part of an insurgent group active in Turkey since the early 1980s.
At the time, Afrin was an enclave under the control of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), along with its militia, the Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG). The YPG is the main militia in the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF); the multi-ethnic grouping of militias that has done the bulk of the fighting against the Islamic State east of the Euphrates River, and against Turkish-backed Arab-majority rebels west of the Euphrates; in the Turkish military intervention dubbed Operation Olive Branch.
Ahmad Raslan was a teacher that lived in the al-Bab neighborhood of Eastern Aleppo city. When the area came under control by the regime in late 2016, Raslan, twenty-four years old at the time, fled with Syrian opposition fighter convoys, towards western Aleppo countryside. At the Ghazzawiyah village checkpoint on the edge of the Afrin valley, then controlled by the SDF, he was arrested and detained on charges of being an informer and a participant in anti-regime demonstrations.
Read more at: http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/syriasource/the-black-prison-of-afrin
This lengthy article accuses our Kurd allies of running a "black prison". Okay, those are around, probably most places fighting terrorism will do this. I read the article and did not seem to find that anyone got killed. So, make one's own judgments.
