via The Washington Times The rebel movement on the ground in many parts of Syria is led by Islamic extremist groups hostile to the United States and they are holding at least 15 Westerners hostage, most of the them journalists, according to a published account Friday of an American who recently escaped their clutches.
Matthew Schrier, 35, a freelance photographer from New York state, was held for seven months by insurgents fighting in a bloody uprising against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He escaped last month by squeezing through a broken grate from the basement where he was jailed in the rebel stronghold of Aleppo. The New York Times published an extensive account of his ordeal.
via The New York Times
Matthew Schrier was helpless. An American photographer held in a rebel-controlled prison in the Syrian city of Aleppo, he and a fellow prisoner had been caught trying to gouge a hole in their cell’s wooden door. The captors took his cellmate, he said, beat him, and brought him back with blood-streaked ankles and feet.
Now was Mr. Schrier’s turn.
Wearing masks, his jailers led him out, sat him down and forced a car tire over his knees. They slid a wooden rod behind his legs, locking the tire in place. Then they rolled him over. Mr. Schrier was face down on a basement floor, he said, legs immobilized, bare feet facing up.
“Give him 115,” one of his captors said in English, as they began whipping his feet with a metal cable.
When the torture ended Mr. Schrier could not walk. His captors, he said, dragged him to his cell. He remembers their parting phrase: “Have you heard of Guantánamo Bay?”
For seven months, Mr. Schrier, 35, was a prisoner in Syria of jihadi fighters opposed to President Bashar al-Assad. Held in bases and prisons run by two Islamist rebel groups, he said, he was robbed, beaten and accused of being an American spy by men who then assumed his identity online. More
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