U.S. journalist Dorothy Parvaz, detained in Syria three weeks ago and sent to Iran, said after being released and flown to Qatar on Wednesday that she could hear beatings "almost around the clock" in her Syrian jail.
Al-Jazeera had sent Parvaz, 39, to the Syrian capital Damascus to cover a wave of protests against the 41-year rule of President Bashar al-Assad and his family. She went missing on arrival and was detained in Syria and then in Iran.
"The beatings I heard almost around the clock were savage ... I heard two separate interrogations and beatings ... young men ... being beaten so harshly," Parvaz told Al-Jazeera of her time in detention in Syria.
"I saw a man shackled to a radiator being forced, it seemed, to write a confession, but he was quivering so hard he couldn't even write," Parvaz said.
In a first-person account posted on Al-Jazeera, Parvaz described her ordeal in detail, including being held in rooms with pools of blood on the floor and blood smears on walls.
"I was standing in two fist-sized pools of smeared, sticky blood, trying to sort out why there were seven angry Syrians yelling at me," she said. "Only one of them — who I came to know as Mr Shut Up during my three days in a detention center, where so many Syrians 'disappeared' are being kept — spoke English."
She said she arrived at the detention center, "dragged by a handful of hair from a car where I'd been wedged between two armed men."
Led blindfolded from her cell to a courtyard, Parvaz said she heard two sets of interrogations about 10 meters on each side of her.
"The beatings were savage, the words uttered by those beaten only hoarse cries – 'Wallahi! Wahalli!' ('I swear to God! I swear to God!') or simply, 'La! La!' ('No! No!')."
She told interrogators she worked for Al Jazeera and was traveling alone.
Later, another interrogator, whom she dubbed "Firass," equated Al-Jazeera with the watchdog group Human Rights Watch.
"The network had been making a 'big problem' for Syria with the UN Security Council, he said."
After four hours of questioning, she said she was sent to a different room, an office where a terrified teenage girl slept on a couch.
"She'd been there for eight days when I met her, and she looked ill," Parvaz wrote. "The food we were given three times a day — fetid, random and at times, rotting — mostly had the effect of making her vomit, but she was too hungry to stop eating all together."
Most of her time, she said, was spent listening to brutal interrogations.
"One afternoon, the beating we heard was so severe that we could clearly hear the interrogator pummelling his boots and fists into his subject, almost in a trance, yelling questions or accusations rhythmically as the blows landed in what sounded like the prisoner's midriff."
Syrian authorities handed Parvaz over to Iranians and told them she was a spy.
"After a couple of weeks of interrogations, the investigator in Iran charged with my case determined that I was not a spy, but a journalist," she wrote. She said she was treated respectfully in Iran before being placed on the Wednesday flight to Doha, the Qatari capital.
"She landed in Doha, Qatar on May 18 on a flight from Iran," Al-Jazeera said, adding that Parvaz had not been allowed any contact with the outside world since the channel lost touch with her after her arrival at Damascus Airport on April 29.
The Syrian Embassy in Washington said last week that Parvaz, who has U.S., Canadian and Iranian citizenship, had tried to enter Syria illegally on an expired Iranian passport with "tourism" declared as the reason for travel, but that she later admitted to providing false information.
Parvaz said Syrian authorities first suspected that she might be an Israeli spy, and were also suspicious about her claim to be working for Al-Jazeera.
Syria expelled her and put her on a plane to Iran on May 1.
Iran and Syria have a close relationship, and both support Lebanon's Hezbollah, and the Palestinian movement Hamas whose exiled leaders live in Syria.
Parvaz's disappearance sparked a widespread online campaign for her release, including a Twitter hash tag and a Facebook page "Free Dorothy Parvaz."
Al-Jazeera said that Parvaz's fiance, Todd Barker, posted on Facebook: "She is safe in Doha and will be coming to Vancouver, B.C. soon. We can't wait to see her."
In her first-person account, Parvaz said that she was treated with courtesy and care throughout her detention in Iran.
"The family and me are elated, and we're really grateful to the Iranian authorities who treated her very respectfully. It's over," the Seattle Times quoted Barker as saying.
