Syrians released from Israeli detention have described abuse including sleep deprivation, violent searches, and dog attacks, while dozens of others remain detained. Al Jazeera’s Heidi Pett met with some of them, who recounted the torture they suffered behind bars.
Published On 5 Oct 20265 Oct 2026
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Former Syrian official sentenced to 60 years in US prison for torturing prisoners under al-Assad’s regime.
A former Syrian military official convicted of torturing prisoners during the rule of former President Bashar al-Assad has been sentenced to 60 years in a United States prison.
A federal judge in Los Angeles sentenced Samir Ousman Alsheikh on Thursday. A jury found him guilty in March of one count of conspiracy to commit torture and three counts of torture while in charge of Syria‘s infamous Adra Prison from roughly 2005 to 2008.
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“The conduct was heinous, unimaginably cruel, and almost unspeakably violent and brutal,” the judge said before announcing the sentence.
Human rights groups and the United Nations have accused the Syrian government officials of widespread abuses in detention facilities, including torture and arbitrary detention of thousands of people, in many cases without informing their families.
US prosecutors said Alsheikh, seeking to quash political dissent, sent certain prisoners to a wing of Adra where they were held in small isolation cells and tortured.
At the two-week trial, three victims recounted beatings while suspended from pipes on the ceiling for hours or days and the use of a device that folded their bodies in half at the waist, according to a press release from the US Department of Justice. One person testified that Alsheikh stomped on the device with his foot, according to the department.
“Defendant knew that what he was doing was wrong,” Justice Department prosecutors said in a sentencing memo filed this month. “Nonetheless, he ordered and participated in the torture of his victims because he had the power to do so and because he thought he would never be held accountable.”
The memo included statements from several victims, one of whom, Nidal Shikhani, said he can “still hear the screams of others begging for mercy, repeating, ‘Leave me, leave me.’”
The prosecutors asked US District Judge Hernan D Vera for a minimum sentence of 80 years. Alsheikh’s lawyers, Nina Marino and Collin Cate, called for a five-year sentence, noting that he is 74 years old and has “significant medical and cognitive conditions”. They also said he was willing to be deported to Syria, where a new government has sought to hold Assad-era security officials accountable.
“Whatever moral weight this case carries in the broader arc of history — however much the world, or the victims, or the public might wish the sentence to ‘send a message’ — that desire cannot be the foundation of a just sentence,” Marino and Cate wrote in their September 3 memo.
Alsheikh came to the US in 2020 and applied for citizenship, but the Justice Department said he lied about his past. Federal authorities arrested him at Los Angeles international airport in July 2024.
Jurors also convicted him in March of lying to US immigration authorities and fraudulently obtaining a green card and attempting to naturalise as a US citizen.
“The acts Alsheikh ordered and directly participated in are gruesome and disturbing. We would like to offer our gratitude to the brave victims who testified leading to today’s sentencing,” Heith Janke, assistant director of the FBI’s criminal division, said in a press release Thursday.
Al-Assad was ousted in a lightning rebel offensive in December 2024, bringing a 14-year civil war to an end, but the country has continued to suffer from sporadic outbreaks of violence.
In March 2025, armed groups aligned with al-Assad ambushed the new government’s security forces on Syria’s coast. A government counteroffensive then spiralled into sectarian revenge attacks and the massacre of hundreds of civilians from the Alawite religious minority, to which al-Assad belongs.
On Thursday, three people were sentenced in the Syrian city of Aleppo in connection with the violence. One member of the pro-Assad groups was sentenced to death and another to life in prison, while a member of the government security forces who took part in the revenge attacks was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
FT. MEADE, Md. — A man initially accused of being a high-profile Al Qaeda figure and who was tortured in CIA custody appeared Thursday at a hearing to review his detention at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he has been held for 20 years without charges.
A U.S. government official said Abu Zubaydah, who wore a neatly trimmed beard and glasses, had “probably” served as one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted facilitators. The roughly 20-minute hearing offered rare visibility into the secretive military court proceedings of a suspect who had been tortured at CIA black sites during the U.S. war on terrorism and whose case still has not been resolved 25 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Zubaydah’s unidentified government-assigned representative and his private attorney, Annika Conrad, both acknowledged he had known Bin Laden, the 9/11 mastermind. But they said Zubaydah was never a member of the militant group that Bin Laden founded.
Conrad argued that Zubaydah poses no security threat to the United States and that it can no longer justify his detention. She said Zubaydah should be approved for transfer out of Guantanamo, which would kick off a multiyear process that includes finding a country to accept him.
Conrad said Zubaydah is prepared to accept a range of security measures, including continuous monitoring. Conrad said he has the financial and personal support of his family, has rejected any extremist views “and simply wants to live a life of peace.”
She also argued that a chief military prosecutor for U.S. military commissions, which oversees the 15 men still held at Guantanamo Bay, has said it is unlikely that Zubaydah will be charged. The Office of Military Commissions declined to comment.
Zubaydah’s attorney said the most the government can offer is a “probable association” to Bin Laden after more than two decades and noted that Zubaydah declined a direct request from Bin Laden to work for Al Qaeda.
Conrad also cited the torture that Zubaydah experienced, describing him as “a greatly injured man” who lost his left eye and his ability to write in English and “frequently struggles to recall words.”
Zubaydah’s detention is being reviewed by a U.S. government panel of senior defense, intelligence and homeland security officials. The Periodic Review Board was created under the Obama administration to evaluate prisoners and determine whether they could be released without posing a threat to national security.
The review panel issued no immediate ruling Thursday. A live video feed of the unclassified portion of his hearing at Guantanamo was made available to reporters at Ft. Meade, an Army base in Maryland.
Detainees are not permitted to speak at their review hearings, and Zubaydah sat in silence next to his attorney and the government representative. Dressed in a gray suit jacket and patterned gray tie, he often pressed his left index finger to his left temple or fidgeted with something in his hands. A worn-looking book sat in front of him.
Zubaydah’s lawyers, Conrad and Ahmed Almudallal, said in a statement before the hearing that he may never face charges.
“For the first time in over two decades, the military’s chief prosecutor believes it is unlikely our client will ever be charged,” the attorneys said. “This is a major change in circumstances that warrants he be cleared for transfer.”
Almudallal and Conrad said Zubaydah has “no intent to engage in violence against the United States in the future.”
“Now, at 55 years old, he’s eager to reconnect with his family and live out the rest of his days as a free person,” they said. “Twenty-four years in prison plus being ‘patient zero’ in the U.S. government’s torture program has been punishment enough.”
Zubaydah was thought to be a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda when he was captured in Pakistan in 2002. A Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia, Zubaydah was tortured abroad before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.
The U.S. later dropped the claim that Zubaydah was one of the most senior figures in Al Qaeda, although it has continued to regard him as a security risk. Zubaydah’s lawyers have repeatedly said over the years that he was not an Al Qaeda member and point to waterboarding and other harsh treatment he experienced in the early 2000s.
Zubaydah was the first person in the CIA’s detention and interrogation program after 9/11 and subjected to what is now widely viewed as torture. He was held at CIA black sites in Poland and Lithuania, according to the European Court of Human Rights.
Zubaydah was waterboarded more than 80 times in a month at one point and confined over 11 days in a coffin-size box, among a raft of other mistreatment, a Senate report found.
In 2022, the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit by Zubaydah, who was seeking testimony from two former CIA contractors as part of an investigation into his treatment when he was held in Poland. The court rejected his case because the government said it would expose state secrets, despite much of the information having been widely reported.
In January, a lawyer for Zubaydah said the British government had agreed to pay a “substantial sum” to settle a lawsuit that said U.K. intelligence agencies were complicit in his torture. Attorney Helen Duffy said the confidential settlement was symbolically and practically significant for the “intolerable suffering” that Zubaydah endured.
A British parliamentary committee found in 2018 that U.K. security and intelligence services were aware Zubaydah was being tortured but continued to provide questions for the CIA to ask him without seeking assurances of his condition.
Finley writes for the Associated Press.