Tag Archives: Islamic State

Nearly 5,700 buildings in Iraq’s Ramadi need repair, U.N. says

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Around 5,700 structures in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi and its outskirts have incurred some level of damage since mid-2014, and almost 2,000 buildings have been destroyed, the United Nations said on Monday, citing satellite images.

Iraq declared victory over Islamic State in December after seizing the main government building in the city, the provincial capital of Anbar. But more than six months of fighting shattered most infrastructure and leveled many homes in the city, where around half a million people once lived.

The impact of Islamic State bomb attacks and U.S.-led coalition air strikes has been documented by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, which compared satellite imagery collected last month with images from July 2014.

More than 3,200 structures in the city center have been affected, with 1,165 destroyed, the analysis showed. Those figures nearly double when outlying areas are included.

It is not clear what percentage of Ramadi has been affected, but the imagery shows none of the central districts has been spared and almost every block has incurred at least some damage.

A U.N. statement called the analysis preliminary and said it had not been validated in the field. Baghdad has not yet declared the city safe for return; Iraqi special forces clashed with militants in some districts as recently as last week.

The cash-strapped government in Baghdad is appealing to international donors to help rebuilding Ramadi, the largest city retaken from Islamic State. But it must first clear explosives planted by the militants in streets and buildings – an effort which also requires funding Iraq doesn’t have.

The United Nations is working with local authorities on plans to rebuild health, water and energy infrastructure. Meanwhile, displaced residents are waiting in camps or rented accommodations in other parts of the country.

It is expected to take months to secure the city before reconstruction can begin.

(Reporting By Stephen Kalin, editing by Larry King)

Samples confirm Islamic State used mustard gas in Iraq, diplomat says

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Islamic State militants attacked Kurdish forces in Iraq with mustard gas last year, the first known use of chemical weapons in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a diplomat said, based on tests by the global chemical weapons watchdog.

A source at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed that laboratory tests had come back positive for the sulfur mustard, after around 35 Kurdish troops were sickened on the battlefield last August.

The OPCW will not identify who used the chemical agent. But the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because the findings have not yet been released, said the result confirmed that chemical weapons had been used by Islamic State fighters.

The samples were taken after the soldiers became ill during fighting against Islamic State militants southwest of Erbil, capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region.

The OPCW already concluded in October that mustard gas was used last year in neighboring Syria. Islamic State has declared a “caliphate” in territory it controls in both Iraq and Syria and does not recognize the frontier.

Experts believe that the sulfur mustard either originated from an undeclared Syrian chemical stockpile, or that militants have gained the basic know how to develop and conduct a crude chemical attack with rockets or mortars.

Iraq’s chemical arsenal was mainly destroyed in the Saddam era, although U.S. troops encountered some old Saddam-era chemical munitions during the 2003-2011 U.S. occupation.

Syria gave up its own chemical weapons, including stockpiles of sulfur mustard, under international supervision after hundreds of civilians were killed with sarin nerve gas in a Damascus suburb in 2013, an attack Western countries blame on President Bashar al-Assad’s government, which denies it.

Sulfur mustard is a Class 1 chemical agent, which means it has very few uses outside chemical warfare. Used with lethal effectiveness in World War One, it causes severe delayed burns to the eyes, skin and respiratory tract.

(Reporting by Anthony Deutsch; Editing by Peter Graff)

Iraq moving troops, preparing offensive to retake Mosul

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq’s military said on Friday it was mobilizing troops to prepare for an offensive the government has pledged to launch this year to retake the northern city of Mosul from Islamic State.

Hundreds of forces from the army’s 15th division reached Makhmour base, 45 miles south of Mosul, and more forces, including Sunni Muslim tribal fighters, were expected to arrive in coming days, said Brigadier-General Yahya Rasool, spokesman for the joint operations command.

Defense Minister Khaled al-Obaidi told Reuters last month that Iraq would launch the Mosul operation in the first half of the year and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said 2016 would see the “final victory” against the militants.

Some U.S. officials have endorsed that assessment, but a top U.S. intelligence officer told Congress this week any operation to retake Mosul would be long and complex and unlikely to finish this year.

With more than a million people still living there, Mosul is the largest city controlled by Islamic State, which declared a ‘caliphate’ in swathes of territory it seized in Iraq and neighboring Syria in 2014.

Retaking it would be a huge boost for Iraqi forces who, backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition, reclaimed the western city of Ramadi from Islamic State in late December.

Mosul, however, is a far larger city with a populace made up of many sects. And even in Ramadi, Iraqi forces are still working to secure that city and its environs.

Iraq’s Rasool told Reuters on Friday that troop movements south of Mosul were being coordinated with the peshmerga, the armed forces of the autonomous Kurdish region north and east of Nineveh which are expected to join the campaign.

“Once we complete all the preparations, we will officially announce the date for the start of Mosul operations,” he added.

The United States, which is leading an international campaign in both Iraq and Syria to defeat the jihadist group, has said its strategy is to regain territory at the heart of Islamic State’s cross-border state, take Mosul and the Syrian city of Raqqa, and destroy the confidence of its fighters that it can expand as a magnet for jihadis.

Iraq’s army, weakened by years of corruption and mismanagement following the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, is trying to rebuild itself after collapsing 18 months ago in the face of Islamic State’s lightning advance.

(Reporting By Stephen Kalin and Ahmed Rasheed; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

U.S. tells allies campaign to defeat Islamic State must be accelerated

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The United States pressed allies on Thursday to contribute more to a U.S.-led military campaign against Islamic State that it says must be accelerated, regardless of the fate of diplomatic efforts to end Syria’s civil war.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter started talks on Thursday in Brussels with more than two dozen defense ministers, including from key ally Saudi Arabia, which renewed its offer potentially to send troops into Syria.

Carter’s push came a day after France delivered a rebuke to President Barack Obama, demanding that Washington show a clearer commitment to resolving the crisis in Syria where Russia is tipping the military balance in favor of President al-Bashar Assad.

The talks take place as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry leads a diplomatic push in Munich to rescue imperiled peace efforts, which are being held despite Russian bombing raids to bolster Syrian forces around the city of Aleppo.

Carter sought to draw a line between military and diplomatic efforts. “Our focus here is going to be on counter-ISIL and that campaign will go on because ISIL must be defeated, will be defeated, whatever happens with the Syrian civil war,” Carter told reporters, using an acronym for Islamic State.

“But it certainly would help to de-fuel extremism if the Syrian civil war came to an end.”

The United States hopes the face-to-face gathering of coalition defense ministers will allow it to secure more support for a military campaign that aims to recapture the Islamic State strongholds of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

WARPLANES, TRAINING, SURVEILLANCE

Carter plans to offer a long list of required military capabilities — which, beyond air power, include training Iraqi forces and help with intelligence and surveillance. Carter said countries that cannot contribute militarily can help in other ways, like by choking Islamic State financing.

“We’ll all look back after victory and remember who participated in the fight,” Carter said, addressing the coalition defense ministers, adding the campaign would move more swiftly “if all of the nations in this room do even more”.

He also predicted “tangible gains” on the ground in the coming weeks, vague terminology that could mean anything from territorial advances to strikes against militant leaders or infrastructure.

Saudi Arabia’s Brigadier General Ahmed Asseri, a military spokesman, said his country was ready to send troops into Syria if there was a consensus in the coalition. But he declined to elaborate, saying: “It is too early to talk about such options.”

“Today we are talking at the strategic level,” Asseri told reporters in Brussels.

Carter and U.S. defense officials also sought to manage expectations about the talks, since many ministers will not be able to make new commitments without first winning support from their parliaments. The timeline for the campaign to retake Raqqa and Mosul is also unclear.

The head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cautioned this week that Iraqi forces were unlikely to recapture Mosul this year, despite hopes by Baghdad.

Carter only said securing Raqqa and Mosul needed to happen “as soon as possible”. He also acknowledged the need to grapple with Islamic State’s spread beyond Syria and Iraq, particularly in Libya.

WASHINGTON FACES SCEPTICISM

Even if there is consensus on the military plan to fight Islamic State on Thursday, it is unlikely to diminish scepticism about broader U.S. policy in Syria, which has sought to limit America’s role in the civil war.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Wednesday questioned the commitment of the United States to resolving the Syrian war. Rebel groups say that while Washington has put pressure on them to attend peace talks, they see less help on the battlefield.

NATO ally Turkey has meanwhile, upbraided the United States for supporting Syrian Kurdish PYD rebels, saying Washington’s inability to understand the group’s true nature had turned the region into a “sea of blood”.

Eager to sidestep such friction, NATO allies have focused on grappling with the humanitarian fallout from Syria’s conflict at talks over the past two days.

NATO announced on Thursday it will seek to help slow refugee flows through the Aegean Sea with a maritime mission to target criminal people smuggling networks.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Robin Emmott, additional reporting by Sabine Seibold, editing by Peter Millership)

FBI director says investigators unable to unlock San Bernardino shooter’s phone content

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – FBI Director James Comey said on Tuesday that federal investigators have still been unable to access the contents of a cellphone belonging to one of the killers in the Dec. 2 shootings in San Bernardino, California, due to encryption technology.

Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the phenomenon of communications “going dark” due to more sophisticated technology and wider use of encryption is “overwhelmingly affecting” law enforcement operations, including investigations into murder, car accidents, drug trafficking and the proliferation of child pornography.

“We still have one of those killer’s phones that we have not been able to open,” Comey said in reference to the San Bernardino attack.

Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, launched the Islamic State-inspired attack with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 29, at a social services agency in the California city, leaving 14 dead.

Comey and other federal officials have long warned that powerful encryption poses a challenge for criminal and national security investigators, though the FBI director added Tuesday that “overwhelmingly this is a problem that local law enforcement sees.”

Technology experts and privacy advocates counter that so-called “back door” access provided to authorities would expose data to malicious actors and undermine the overall security of the Internet.

A study from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard released last month citing some current and former intelligence officials concluded that fears about encryption are overstated in part because new technologies have given investigators unprecedented means to track suspects.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to provide a declassified response to the Berkman study within 60 days. Clapper agreed to the request.

The White House last year abandoned a push for legislation that would mandate U.S. technology firms to allow investigators a way to overcome encryption protections, amid rigorous private sector opposition. But the issue has found renewed life after the shootings in San Bernardino and Paris.

Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the intelligence panel, have said they would like to pursue encryption legislation, though neither has introduced a bill yet.

(Reporting by Dustin Volz and Mark Hosenball; editing by Sandra Maler and G Crosse)

U.S. looks to shore up allies’ support to battle Islamic State

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The United States said on Tuesday it hoped allies demonstrate a willingness to ramp up their contributions to the fight against Islamic State and to deterring Russia in eastern Europe during high-level defense talks in Brussels this week.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter said he plans to outline America’s plan to accelerate the campaign against Islamic State to defense chiefs from more than two dozen allies at talks on Thursday.

The United States has long-standing concerns that many allies are not contributing nearly enough to combat the jihadist group that has spread beyond its self-declared caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.

“I don’t think anybody’s satisfied with the pace of the (campaign), that’s why we’re all looking to accelerate it. Certainly the president isn’t (satisfied),” Carter told reporters traveling with him.

Washington has signaled the need for military and police trainers as well as contributions of special operations forces, including from Sunni Muslim Arab allies now expressing a new willingness to contribute.

“We have a very clear operational picture of how to do it. Now we just need the resources and the forces to fall in behind it,” he said, noting plans to capture Islamic State strongholds of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

A top U.S. intelligence official told Congress on Tuesday that an Iraqi-led operation to retake Mosul is unlikely to take place this year.

The U.S. strategy in Syria is likely to come under intense scrutiny after four months of Russian air strikes have tipped momentum toward President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s five-year-old civil war.

Defense chiefs were expected to discuss a major Syrian government offensive backed by Russia and Iran now underway near Aleppo that rebels say threatens the future of their insurrection.

DETERRING RUSSIA

On Wednesday, NATO defense ministers will begin outlining plans for a complex web of small eastern outposts, forces on rotation, regular war games and warehoused equipment ready for a rapid response force.

U.S. plans for a four-fold increase in military spending in Europe to $3.4 billion in fiscal year 2017 are central to the strategy, which has been shaped in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

“I’ll be looking for others in NATO to echo (us) in our investment,” Carter said.

Carter said the plan aimed to move NATO to a “full deterrence posture” to thwart any kind of aggression.

“It’s not going to look like it did back in Cold War days but it will constitute, in today’s terms, a strong deterrent,” Carter said.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Iraq’s troubled finances slow efforts to rebuild Ramadi

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Strain on Iraq’s budget from falling oil prices is delaying the removal of Islamic State explosives in Ramadi and the restoration of basic services needed for displaced civilians to return to the western city.

The army declared victory in December over Islamic State (IS) after elite counter-terrorism forces seized the Anbar provincial capital’s main government building. On Tuesday those forces reclaimed strategic territory linking the city to a major army base nearby.

The recapture of Ramadi was the first major gain for the U.S.-trained army since it collapsed in the face of an assault by the ultra-hardline Sunni militants in 2014. Its recovery boosted Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in his quest to oust IS from Mosul, northern Iraq’s biggest city, later this year.

But Ramadi’s hundreds of thousands of residents will not be able to go home until bombs are removed and infrastructure damaged by six months of fighting is rehabilitated – operations that require tens of millions of dollars Baghdad cannot spare.

“We know that the government has its back against the wall fiscally. In order to stabilize areas and to help displaced families go back, we’ve got to do more,” said Lise Grande, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. She appealed to international donors for at least $40 million more for initial reconstruction efforts.

Iraq, with income nearly exclusively from oil, is struggling to pay its bills amid the fall in global crude prices. Anbar Governor Sohaib al-Rawi said his provincial government had not received its share of the federal budget in about two months.

“The local government has accumulated debts from last year which will be paid from this budget,” al-Rawi told reporters in Baghdad, declining to define the size of the debt.

Besides U.N.-funded activities, he said efforts to prepare Ramadi for the return of civilians were being financed “through local efforts” of provincial authorities, without providing details.

Unless additional funds are provided, it could take nine months for those efforts just to clear Tamim, a large district in southern Ramadi where the first phase of U.N. efforts will be conducted, according to Grande.

The United Nations also plans to rehabilitate health, water and energy infrastructure in the city, much of which was destroyed in fighting that included Islamic State bomb attacks and devastating U.S.-led coalition air strikes.

“The level of destruction in Ramadi is as bad as anything we have seen anywhere in Iraq,” said Grande. “Thousands of homes have to be rebuilt, thousands of buildings have to be rebuilt. The total cost of reconstruction in Ramadi is huge.”

STRATEGIC ADVANCE

Tuesday’s advance by Iraqi forces in Ramadi’s eastern farmlands boosted government efforts to close in on Falluja, the Islamic State stronghold located halfway to Baghdad and now besieged by the Iraqi army and allied, Iranian-backed Shi’ite Muslim militias.

The ultra-hardline Sunni militants of IS swept through a third of Iraq in 2014, declaring a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, carrying out mass killings and imposing a draconian form of Islam, but have since been pushed back on various fronts.

A military statement broadcast on state television said the army, police and counter-terrorism forces had retaken several areas, including the town of Husaiba al-Sharqiya, about 10 km (6 miles) east of Ramadi.

“(Our forces) also managed to open the road from Ramadi to Baghdad that passes through al-Khaldiya,” the statement added, referring to a highway that links the city to the Habbaniya army base where U.S.-led coalition forces are located.

“All of Ramadi has now been liberated,” said al-Rawi, the Anbar governor, adding that the handover of authority to local police from the military was going smoothly. No civilians are currently living in the city, he added.

It has taken more than a month for the military to clear insurgents from the eastern rural outskirts. Militants are still holed up in some northern farmlands bordering the main east-west highway, according to security sources.

(Reporting by Ahmed Rasheed and Stephen Kalin; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Dan Grebler)

U.S. military seeks to prepare Africa for shifting terror threat

THIES, Senegal (Reuters) – African forces began a U.S.-led counter-terrorism training program in Senegal on Monday amid what a U.S. commander said were rising signs of collaboration between Islamist militant groups across north Africa and the Sahel.

The annual “Flintlock” exercises started only weeks after an attack in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou left 30 people dead. The assault on a hotel used by foreigners raised concerns that militants were expanding from a stronghold in north Mali toward stable, Western allies like Senegal.

Al Qaeda (AQIM) fighters claimed responsibility for the attack, one of increasingly bold regional strikes in the Sahel, a poor, arid zone between the Sahara Desert and Sudanian Savanna that is home to a number of roving militant groups.

U.S. Commander for Special Operations Command Africa Brigadier General Donald Bolduc told reporters on Monday that increased collaboration between militant groups meant they have been able to strengthen and strike harder in the region.

“We have watched that collaboration manifest itself with ISIS becoming more effective in north Africa, Boko Haram becoming more deadly in the Lake Chad Basin (and) AQIM adopting asymmetrical attacks … against urban infrastructure,” he said. ISIS, or ISIL, is used for the militant group Islamic State.

Bolduc said that cooperation had increased as Islamic State exploited a power vacuum in Libya to expand its self-declared caliphate, which takes up large areas in Syria and Iraq.

“We know in Libya that they (AQIM and ISIS) are working more closely together. It’s more than just influence, they (AQIM) are really taking direction from them,” he said.

Not all security experts agree that there are emerging alliances between Islamist militant groups. Some argue that competition between groups has led to more attacks.

This year’s program, which opened on a dusty airstrip in Senegal’s central city of Thies, involves around 1,700 mostly African special operation forces. Western partners including France and Germany are among more than 30 countries participating.

Nathan Broshear, spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, said the exercises were called Flintlock, after a type of firearm, to symbolize readiness for any threat.

Bolduc stressed the importance of regional cooperation and intelligence-sharing and said the United States would help Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon set up a joint intelligence center by the middle of next year.

The United States already supports a regional task force against the Nigeria-based group Boko Haram.

The Ouagadougou attack and a hotel attack in Mali’s capital in November led to a greater emphasis on preparing for urban attacks this year through training to increase cooperation between military forces and police.

At the request of African partners, the exercises will also include anti-Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) training.

The program, an annual event since 2005, will run from February 8 through 29. Some exercises will also be held in Mauritania.

(Reporting by Emma Farge; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

U.S. defense intelligence chief predicts increased Islamic State attacks

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Islamic State is likely to “increase the pace and lethality” of its transnational attacks, U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Director Vincent Stewart said on Monday.

Speaking to a security conference, Stewart linked his warning to the extremist movement’s establishment of “emerging branches” in Mali, Tunisia, Somalia, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

“And it wouldn’t surprise me to see them further extend” operations from the Sinai Peninsula deeper into Egypt, he said.

“Last year, Daesh remained entrenched on Iraqi and Syrian battlefields and expanded globally to Libya, Sinai, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Caucasus,” Stewart said, using a derisive Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “Daesh is likely to increase the pace and lethality of its transnational attacks.”

(Reporting by Jonathan Landay. Editing by Warren Strobel and Eric Beech)

Mass deaths in Syrian jails amount to crime of ‘extermination’, U.N. says

GENEVA (Reuters) – Detainees held by the Syrian government are being killed on a massive scale amounting to a state policy of “extermination” of the civilian population, a crime against humanity, United Nations investigators said on Monday.

The U.N. commission of inquiry called on the Security Council to impose “targeted sanctions” on high-ranking Syrian civilian and military officials responsible for or complicit in deaths, torture and disappearances in custody, but stopped short of naming the suspects.

The independent experts said they had also documented mass executions and torture of prisoners by two jihadi groups, the Nusra Front and Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. These constituted war crimes and in the case of Islamic State also crimes against humanity, it said.

The report, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Deaths in Detention”, covers March 10, 2011 to November 30, 2015. It is based on interviews with 621 survivors and witnesses and evidence gathered by the team led by chairman Paulo Pinheiro.

“Over the past four and a half years, thousands of detainees have been killed while in the custody of warring parties,” the Commission of Inquiry on Syria said.

The U.N. criticism of the Damascus government comes at a time when its forces have been advancing with the aid of Russian air strikes. A Moscow-backed government assault near the city of Aleppo this month marks one of the biggest momentum shifts in the five year war and helped torpedo peace talks last week.

Pinheiro, noting that the victims were mostly civilian men, told a news briefing: “Never in these five years these facilities that are described in our report have been visited and we have repeatedly asked the government to do so.”

There was no immediate response by the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which has rejected previous reports.

“Prison officials, their superiors throughout the hierarchy, high-ranking officials in military hospitals and the military police corps as well as government were aware that deaths on a massive scale were occurring,” Pinheiro said.

“Thus we concluded there were ‘reasonable grounds’ – that is (the threshold) that we apply – to believe that the conduct described amounts to extermination as a crime against humanity.”

NAMES KEPT IN U.N. SAFE

Tens of thousands of detainees are held by the government atany one time, and thousands more have “disappeared” after arrest by state forces or gone missing after abduction by armed groups, the report said.

Through mass arrests and killing of civilians, including by starvation and denial of medical treatment, state forces have “engaged in the multiple commissions of crimes, amounting to a systematic and widespread attack against a civilian population”.

There were reasonable grounds to believe that “high-ranking officers”, including the heads of branches and directorates commanding the detention facilities and military police, as well as their civilian superiors, knew of the deaths and of bodies buried anonymously in mass graves.

They are thus “individually criminally liable”, the investigators said, calling again for Syria to be referred to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a decision that only the Security Council can take.

“It depends on the political will of states. Apparently for Syria now, there is none – there is total impunity, unfortunately,” said panel member Carla del Ponte.

“We are still waiting for a green light for international justice,” she said.

“The Security Council doesn’t do anything and can’t do anything because of the veto”, she added, a reference to Russia, Assad’s ally, which has repeatedly used its power as a permanent Council member to block resolutions against Damascus.

Over the past four years, the investigators have drawn up a confidential list of suspected war criminals and units from all sides which is kept in a U.N. safe in Geneva. Pinheiro said “we have included new names” but gave no details.

Del Ponte disclosed that the U.N. investigators have provided judicial assistance to various authorities in response to 15 requests for information on foreign fighters in Syria.

She declined to identify the countries involved, but later told Reuters: “These are low-level and middle-level perpetrators because they are foreign fighters, not high-ranking.”

The Nusra Front, which is allied to al Qaeda, and Islamic State, which has proclaimed a “caliphate” in swathes of Syria and Iraq, have committed mass executions of captured government soldiers and subjected civilians to “illicit trials” by Sharia courts which ordered death sentences, the report said.

“Due to their exclusive control of large territories and its centralized command and control structure the so-called ISIS established detention facilities as far as we know are in Raqqa, Deir al-Zor and Aleppo. Serious violations were documented in these facilities, including torture and mass executions,” Pinheiro said.

“Accountability for these and other crimes must form part of any political solution,” the investigators said, five days after U.N.-sponsored peace talks were suspended without any result.

DEAD BODIES

Raneem Matouq, daughter of prominent lawyer Khalil Matouq missing since Oct 2012, said she had been held for two months in 2014 at Military Security Damascus Branch 227 after being arrested for her own “peaceful activism” while a student.

Inmates at the detention facility, estimated to hold several thousand, have died as a result of torture, disease and appalling prison conditions, including chronic lack of food, according to the U.N. report.

“I was with 10 other girls in a room one-and-a-half metres long by two meters long. For guys it was a room the same scale but they had 30-40 men, with dead bodies,” Matouq told Reuters on a visit to Geneva last week with Amnesty International.

“It was full of insects, we were sleeping on the floor, there was no toilet,” she said. “We were allowed to go to the toilet three times a day, we called it ‘the picnic’ because we could walk outside.

“Sometimes we would find dead bodies inside the toilet (area). It was so horrible, they were all men.”

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; editing by Ralph Boulton and Peter Graff)