On the International Day against Torture, Syrian victims’ memories of fearful moments at the hands of the terrorist PKK’s Syrian wing, the YPG, remain still fresh.

Ahmed Kurmi, a committee member of the Syrian Kurdistan Democratic Party (SKDP), is one of those who were abducted and tortured for two days by the PKK in 2013.

While a group of civil activists, including Kurmi, were protesting the Bashar Assad regime in the northeastern border town of Amuda in June 2013, the terrorists surrounded the demonstrators and took three of them away, he told Anadolu Agency (AA).

He also took part in another demonstration against these three detentions. The terrorist group responded by blocking their way with over a dozen vehicles and shooting into the crowd, Kurmi said.

"The militants started shooting at people. Many of our friends died. The (terrorist) organization did not allow the wounded who were taken to the hospital to be treated, either. That day, five people died and 32 people were seriously injured," he recounted.

Wishing for death

PKK terrorists later also attacked and abducted Kurmi at his home, making off with money and household items, and taking him to an unknown location.

"They put me in a 2-meter cell. We were 30 people in total. When I came to my senses in the prison where we were taken, I saw that my son had also been taken. They also broke his nose.

"Then, they blindfolded me again. I could hear sounds of torture inflicted on my friends. They were constantly screaming because of the pain they were suffering... I knew our torturers by their voices. They were people from our region. I was willing to die because of the torture," he added.

Kurmi and his fellow inmates were later taken roughly 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) east to the city of Qamishli.

"We didn't know exactly where they were taking us because our eyes were closed. There was worse torture there. They tortured us from morning until night with no food or water. We weren't allowed to sleep," he said.

Shortly after his release, he took his family and sought shelter with friends in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, fearing that he would be killed if he stayed.

Unimaginable torture

Zeyneb Sheikh Khalid is a mother from the town of Afrin, a district liberated from PKK/YPG control by Turkey’s Operation Olive Branch in 2018. Before then, she lost several members of her family, including her son, to the terrorist group's torture.

In July 2012, 10 PKK terrorists raided Khalid's home and killed her 67-year-old husband and 41-year-old son, Abdurrahman, she told AA.

The terrorists whisked away her other son, Nureddin, who they would kill in their torture chambers.

"After inflicting all manner of torture on my son, Nureddin, they killed him the next day and threw his body in the courtyard of our house," she said.

Describing the gruesome state that they left her son in, Khalid explained: "The PKK tortured my son a lot without killing him. He had stab wounds on his body. They gouged out his eyes and cut off his lips."

The PKK is an organization that causes problems for its people wherever they are in the world, she said, calling on the international community and countries to stop the PKK.

14,685 deaths from torture

Meanwhile, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) on Sunday published a 45-page report saying that 14,685 people have been documented killed due to torture from March 2011 to June 2022. The number included 181 children and 94 women, with the vast majority of all these victims killed at the hands of the Assad regime.

The SNHR underlined that "torture, prohibited in the harshest terms in international law, continues to be widely practiced in Syria against political dissidents or military opponents, among the parties to the conflict, or by the controlling forces against civilian citizens of the society that they govern."

It added that the vast majority of detainees go on to be classified as forcibly disappeared.

The SNHR urged the international community to "take serious punitive measures against the Syrian regime to deter it from continuing to kill Syrian citizens under torture, and to put pressure on the other parties to the conflict in all possible ways to stop practicing torture once and for all."