HOMS, Syria—A Syrian shopworker limped to a chair, removed his shirt and revealed three bright red scars: Cut several times with a scalpel in what he believes was a Syrian military hospital, he says, he was stitched up without anesthetic, then hit on the wounds.
Recounting what he believes was at least 10 days spent in the hands of Syria's military intelligence service, the man said he was beaten and shocked, kept naked and blindfolded in a room packed with detainees and excrement, and listened as his 17-year-old cousin was burned with a poker. He was asked to kneel in prayer to a portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The 32-year-old father of two provides one of a new flood of accounts of torture, reported by activists and rights organizations and detainees, that have emerged amid the country's ten-week uprising against Mr. Assad. While the U.S., United Nations and others have long characterized Syria's regime as among the region's most repressive, rights groups and other observers say this spring's crackdown has spurred new levels of brutality.
On Friday, Syrian security forces killed at least eight people as antiregime protests brought thousands out in Homs, Hama and other cities, human-rights monitors said. More than 1,000 people have been killed in all, according to several human-rights groups, which estimate that more than 10,000 people have been detained.
European countries have been pushing for a U.N. Security Council resolution against Syria, with Britain, France, Germany and Portugal circulating a draft resolution this week that condemned the "systematic violation of human rights" by the Assad regime. China and Russia have pushed back, say Western diplomats. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday joined international calls for Mr. Assad to embrace reform but said he doesn't favor sanctions.
Interviews with a Syrian woman and two men who said they were detained—as well as accounts from activists, human-rights organizations and others—suggest security forces are arresting not only protesters but others, including men ages 15 to 40, professionals, women and older Syrians. Detainees are held in several cities, these people say, in schools, soccer stadiums, security-force facilities and military hospitals, and subjected to various forms of physical and psychological abuse.
"The stories we hear now are unimaginable in their brutality," said a Syrian who said he worked in military intelligence in the 1980s and witnessed torture then, and said he was now fed up. "It is not only to deter protesters. They enjoy hurting people for the sake of it."
Neil Sammonds, a Syria researcher in London for Amnesty International, says the group documented 38 torture methods in a 1987 report on Syria. "Almost all of them, plus several new ones, continue to be carried out with impunity," he said.
It isn't clear whether such a campaign has been ordered, or by whom. Syria's government hasn't explicitly addressed allegations of torture.
The Syrian Embassy in Washington declined to comment.
Allegations of torture were a flashpoint in Syria's uprising and have remained at the core of the battle over its future. Activists and rights workers say the widening use is meant to spread terror not only among protesters, but also those who may consider joining them. But the practice instead appears to have enraged some Syrians into mobilizing against the government.
"I went out to protest...because of corruption," said one 22-year-old from a rural village. "But then I saw the shots being fired and heard from friends what happens in detention, and I started to shout for the toppling of the regime."
Any torture would signal a weakness in the Assad government, said David Lesch, a Syria expert at Trinity University in San Antonio. He suggested that Mr. Assad's security forces—which as a pillar of the regime has enjoyed a free hand in recent years—may have essentially moved beyond his control.
"The leeway granted to the security forces will come back to haunt them," Mr. Lesch said. "The falling barrier of fear, and the new technology, doesn't allow the regime to control the situation."
Syria's government has blamed this spring's uprising on armed gangs, radical Islamists and foreign agents. In late April, the country's official news agency, SANA, characterized a U.N. Human Rights Council special session on Syria as using "fabricated motives" to detract attention from the Palestinian cause.
Syria's uprising appears to have been fueled in part by the alleged torture of a group of schoolchildren from Deraa, who were accused of writing graffiti critical of the ruling Baath party.
When released, the children, who were as young as 10, bore burn marks from cigarettes and had fingernails torn out, said human-rights activists and a Deraa resident who said he saw some of them after their release.
The allegations spread, enraging Syrians including the shopworker in Homs, Syria's third-largest city. "It was so violent to pull nails from children's hands," the man said. "We have had enough of oppression."
He said his own detention began after he left an antiregime protest in a Homs neighborhood on April 17. He, his brother and two cousins got into a taxi, he said. They identified the driver by his accent as an Alawite, a member of the same religious minority as Mr. Assad and the majority of top government and security-service officials.
The driver took them to what the man said was an Alawite gang, who he said beat them, stuffed a rifle butt in his mouth and fired shots close to him. The four were then taken to the Homs military hospital, he said, where they were held five or six days. They spent the first three or so days, he said, naked and blindfolded with what he believed was medical tape or plaster.
"There were around 15 of us in a room and three beds," he said. They were given no food or water and denied access to a toilet. From a gap in his blindfold, the man said, he saw a bag of saline solution that he opened with his teeth and shared around.
Every 10 minutes, he said, people he believed were security agents, nurses or doctors came in and beat them. He said he passed out at times from pain. It was here, he said, that he was slit with a scalpel three times on his back and again on his leg.
It wasn't possible to locate the relatives to corroborate the account. However, two civilian doctors who accompanied the man to the home in Homs where he was interviewed last week say his partially healed wounds were consistent with his description. Rough skin on his palms match his account of his hands being tied with rope behind his back.
A doctor at a different military hospital, in Damascus, said he had witnessed similar scenes. This doctor said his hospital has an "alternative ER" where people are tortured, with methods that include inflicting cuts and giving patients morphine for several days and then withdrawing it.
Doctors at the Damascus facility were pushed by security officers to take part in torture, this person said, adding he hoped that publicizing the practice would discourage it.
The four Homs protesters were moved to what they believed was a military-intelligence facility for an additional five or six days, and put in a three-by-six-foot cell with nine or 10 others.
They were taken out, he said, to be interrogated—at which time he was beaten, suspended by his hands and poked with electric batons—about who was backing the protests. They were accused of working for Syrian foes including former Lebanese prime minister Saad al-Hariri and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the man said, echoing accounts of other detainees.
Some detainees were asked to pray to a picture of the president, he said, with those who did gaining their release. "I refused," he said. "I pray only to God."
He was eventually moved to a police station, made to affix his thumbprint to a statement he couldn't read because he was blindfolded, and sent to a central prison for three days. A military judge released him and some other detainees.
The man said he isn't done protesting.
"We have had enough of oppression," he said. "We felt like we lived in a small prison, but we needed something to move us. After Tunisia and Egypt, we saw we could do something."
He added: "My wife and children don't want me to, but as soon as I get better, I will go out again."
