In Syria, where I worked during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s terror, people were often taken away to torture cells before dawn by masked men. The timing was deliberate. It disoriented them at their most vulnerable, ensuring the torture to come would be even more agonising. The testimonies I recorded from survivors almost always contained the same phrase: “The morning they came for me.” One young woman, shattered by rape and violence, later told me that her life had split in two – before and after the masked men came for her.
In Iraq, those who spoke against Saddam Hussein – even abroad, even casually – were punished in cruel ways by a vengeful leader determined to crush any hint of dissent.
In Egypt in 2016, Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian academic researching labour unions, was abducted, beaten and tortured to death, it is thought, by president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s security services. His own mother had difficulty recognising his mutilated body.
During the second Chechen war, I met the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Chechnya.
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