The police man says the Somalis are in hunger strike now as they rejected to eat scanty and impure food in the jail.

By Shuaib Gemal

DAMASCUS- More than 11 Somali immigrants arrested by Syrian border
forces on their way to Turkey are spending their tenth day in Syrian
jail under torment and daily beating along with coming up deportation,
police said Sunday.

The jailed war weary fleeing Somalis have considered Syria as safe
sanctuary and human rights’ minder, but instead they are jailed,
beaten and deported back to the ‘hell’ in Somalia.

Four of the immigrants who are women have escaped from Somalia after

Somalia’s extremist group of Alshabaab have tried to get them forcibly
married to foreign terrorists in their ranks.

“They are still in our jails and the punishment order is still in
order” Syrian jail guard who asked not to be named told reporters.

“Their situation is traumatic and they will be deported back to the
problems they escaped from next week” he added.

The police man says the Somalis are in hunger strike now as they
rejected to eat scanty and impure food in the jail.

Last week, human rights watch has angrily ordered Saudi Arabia to stop
deporting Somalis fleeing their violence ridden country after Saudi
authorities returned at least 150 Somali nationals, many of them
children, from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu,
on December 17, 2010, press reports said. Saudi Arabia had deported an
estimated 2,000 Somalis to Mogadishu in June and July, according to
the United Nations refugee agency.

No comments could be reached from the human rights’ groups on the matter.

Somalis in their country are subject to abuses by Somalia’s extremist
group Alshabaab. Since last year, Alshabaab have executed more than 40
people after ad-hoc courts’ verdicts without evidence of the alleged
crimes.

Al-Shabab, which vows allegiance to al-Qaida and whose members include
foreign fighters, controls large parts of southern Somalia and much of
the capital, Mogadishu.

Somalia has not had an effective central government for 19 years. The
U.N.-backed government controls only a few blocks of Mogadishu, while
its allies control much of central Somalia.

Shuaib Gemal, is a freelance journalist based in Damascus, Syria. He
writes for different int'l and local media. He can be reached at:
[email protected]

DAMASCUS-SYRIA