It is difficult to grasp the sheer magnitude of enforced disappearances in Syria. According to recent estimates , since 2011 over 150,000 Syrians have been disappeared or arbitrarily detained (out of a total population of around 17 million ), most of them by the regime. By comparison, during the Argentinian military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, the estimated total of desaparecidos was 30,000 (Argentina had a population of around 27 million at the time). What is more, the regime is known to brutally torture those who vanish inside its industrial-scale secret prison system. One of the most notorious locations is the Saydnaya military prison 30 kilometres north of Damascus. Human rights group Amnesty International and a team of forensic architects from Goldsmiths, University of London reconstructed the Saydnaya complex for an international audience in 2017. No recent photographs exist, so they had to rely exclusively on f...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51