Omar Alshogre is a Syrian refugee, a public speaker and human rights activist who is currently the Director for Detainee Affairs at the Syrian Emergency Task Force. He is known for his efforts to raise awareness of human rights abuses in Syria and his personal experience of torture and starvation subservient to the Syrian government during his three years of detention. Alshogre, born in al-Bayda in 1995, is now a Swedish resident. He is among the few people to have survived Syria's prisons and had the position to share his experience.
Biography
Arrest
The Syrian government first arrested Omar Alshogre for participating in an anti-government protest when he was 15-years old. The Bashar al-Assad authorities jailed him for two days and subsequently released him. The regime arrested him seven times between 2011 and 2013. On November 16, 2012, while visiting his cousins, armed militiamen entered his house and arrested Omar alongside his cousins, Bashir, Nour, and Rashad. The militiamen sent them to the Military Intelligence in central Tartus for investigation. Bashir and Rashad would both die in prison. Alshogre then spent a total of three years in detention.
Detention
Alshogre spent a year and nine months in Branch 215, a military intelligence detention center in central Damascus. Alongside other detainees, he experienced daily torture, including by electrical shock, beatings with cable and metal, and the removal of his finger nails. During his detention in Branch 215, the detention center administration charged him with removing the bodies of prisoners who had died and numbering their foreheads. On March 15, 2013, Alshogre's older cousin Rashad died after enduring extreme torture. In early 2014, his closest cousin, Bashir, died as a result of torture and tuberculosis. Alshogre had been carrying him to enable him to go to the restroom, as he had become too weak to walk by his own. Alshogre carried Bashir's body to the mortuary and numbered his forehead. The regime transferred Alshogre to Sednaya Prison on August 15, 2014. He says Branch 215 was heaven compared to Sednaya, where psychological and physical torture were much more intense. He attests that prisoners faced arbitrary executions for offenses like talking without authorization. Ashogre learned both solidarity and a wealth of knowledge from the doctors, teachers and other educated inmates he met there. Alshogre has termed this experience "the University of Whispers."
Release
Alshogre's mother, who had fled to Turkey, collected $15,000 to pay a bribe for his release. He was freed in June 2015 following a mock execution. At that time, he weighed only 34 kilograms as a result of starvation and tuberculosis. He travelled to Europe as a refugee seeking to obtain access to medical treatment and escape from the regime.
Life in Sweden
Alshogre is now a refugee in Sweden. He has learned English, Norwegian, and Swedish and graduated from high school. He shares his personal story to raise awareness of the abuses of the Syrian government. Together with other victims, witnesses, activists and lawyers he has contributed to a legal battle for justice in European courts. He has given testimony to German lawyers and prosecutors as well as to European war crimes investigators to build cases against the Syrian regime. The first European case against Syrian crimes against humanity started in April 2020. He has received death threats for his open discussion of the abuses he faced. In January 2018, one of his former torturers from Branch 215 called him and told him he was in Stockholm. The Nation has noted Alshogre "s one of the few to survive the slaughterhouse of Sednaya, and someone who has personally tagged over 8,000 bodies, who appears in various media and can rattle off the names and locations of multiple military prisons, including the brigadier general in charge of each facility and the names of deceased inmates and their home towns, Omar is a formidable and feared witness". Alshogre was awarded a Compass Rose Scholarship by the King of Sweden in April 2020, for his compassion, courage and strong values. In June 2020 Alshogre appealed to his former torturer in Syria through a video posted on his YouTube channel and highlighted by Al Jazeera, expressing a hope that he would remain in good health but recognize that the coronavirus leveled the difference between weak and strong, jailer and detainee.
