“You are thrown to the ground and they use different instruments for the beatings: electric cables with exposed copper wire ends… Also they have created what they call the ‘tank belt,’ which is made out of tire that has been cut into strips… They make a very specific sound; it sounds like a small explosion. I was blindfolded the whole time, but I would try to see somehow. All you see is blood: your own blood, the blood of others.” The Atlantic with the details of Amnesty’s disturbing report on Assad’s mass murder in a Syrian jail. “It is here that Syria’s top officials have overseen the clandestine hangings of between 5,000 and 13,000 people, the report found. Later, their causes of death will be ruled by doctors as respiratory failure — an effort by the Assad regime to create a phony paper trail to legitimize these thousands of executions and hide them from the world.”

+ BBC: Thousands hanged at Saydnaya prison, Amnesty says.