It wasn’t until January 2013– a full year and a half after Nora was assaulted that she told her mother what happened to her.

“When we fled to Jordan, Nora cried,” Fatima said. “I thought that she was sad to leave Syria. But she said, “No, I’m happy to leave that place.” I asked her why and she told me everything.”

Five years after the incident, the family is still traumatized. Nora can’t bear to be around any men. Both she and her little brother have received care from a center for orphans in Jordan. One of the coordinators at the center, Loubna, has taken Nora under her wing over the past year.

“When I met Nora, she acted like a woman, not like a little girl,” Loubna remembers. “She said, ‘I know what happens between men and women. And she really knew. How could she know those things?”

While confiding in Loubna, Nora disclosed other details of the assault.

“The prison director told her that she was cute,” Loubna said. “He also took her to see a woman who was being tortured. ‘If you don’t want to suffer like that, you should come with me.’ Nora didn’t know what that meant. She was only 11 years old. She was a child.”

Nora was a child who was drugged, raped and mutilated. Like other underage victims in Syria, Nora was targeted, and then abducted, by the regime because she was the child of man considered to be a “terrorist”.

Because sexual violence against children is the ultimate taboo, it is hard to measure the extent of its role in the Syrian conflict. There have been reports of rape, threats of sexual violence as well as simulations, sexual mutilations and the electrocution of genital organs.

In more than six years of war in Syria, no one knows how many children have fallen victim to violation and abuse, despite the fact that these crimes fall under the “six grave violations” against children during armed conflict (as established by the UN Security Council). Documentation of these crimes remains extremely rare, and are buried in general reports. However, there hasn’t been a single investigation focused entirely on violence against children.

“There is proof that girls and boys scarcely over the age of 12 have experienced sexual violence, including both torture to their genitals and rape,” said international human rights organization Save the Children in its 2013 report Childhood under Fire. Save the Children, “Childhood Under Fire. The impact of two years of conflict in Syria”, March 2013

The NGO Human Rights Watch also mentions sexual violence against children in two more general publications, one about the detention of children Human Rights Watch, “Extreme measures: Abuses against Children Detained as National Security Threats”, July 2016 and the second about sexual assault within Syrian prisons. Human Rights Watch, “Syria: Sexual Assault in Detention”, June 15, 2012 The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which documents human rights violations in Syria, has also written several paragraphs about this topic in various reports.

In 2014, in a publication by the UN Secretary General on “children and armed conflict in Syria”, investigators said that the “UN was assembling proof of sexual violence endured by children detained by government forces in both official and secret detention centres”. Report of the Secretary-General on children and armed conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic, January 27, 2014, paragraph 35 UN investigators don’t hesitate to state that “this violence [against children] serves to humiliate, wound, obtain forced confessions or to pressure a parent to turn himself in.”

The Syrian regime has started using sexual violence against children as a weapon in its repressive machine. This very first victim of this weapon was likely a Syrian boy named Hamza El Khatib.

On April 29, 2011, anger and unrest were rumbling across Syria. On that day, 13-year-old Hamza Al Jazeera, “Tortured and killed: Hamza El Khateeb, age 13”, May 31, 2011 was arrested by Syrian authorities during protest in Daraa. This round-faced boy would die in detention. A month after his arrest, Syrian authorities returned his horribly mutilated body to his parents, as if to send a warning to those clamoring for revolution in Daraa. Hamza’s small body bore many signs of torture. Among other things, his penis had been cut off.

This gruesome warning, however, did not play out to its desired effect. Instead, it set the country ablaze. Young Hamza became the first martyr of the Damascus Arab Spring.

To understand the extent to which this violence was systematic, one must to cross the Syrian border into southern Turkey, to an area called Antakya, where many former actors of the state’s repressive machine now live. One of them is Bassam Al Aloulou, 54, a former general in the Syrian army who was once the director of Aleppo’s civilian prison.

Zero Impunity met with him one morning in October 2016. It was the first time that Al Aloulou agreed to speak to journalists about the goings on inside “his” prison.

Since 2012, this general and his family have been living in Apaydin, a Turkish military camp reserved for roughly 5,000 officers who deserted the Syrian army and their families. The camp is tightly controlled and the living conditions there are better than the refugee camps in Jordan and Greece, which overflows with tens of thousands of Syrian refugees who don’t have any special titles or medals.

General Al Aloulou served Assad’s regime for three decades, first as a director of a police academy, then as a prison director in Daraa and Aleppo. The day he deserted– July 18, 2012– is engraved in his memory.

Even in the early hours of the revolution, Aleppo’s civilian prison, which was thought to be less repressive than the detention centers run by the government’s intelligence services and other branches of the military, was overflowing with inmates. Though its capacity was 4,500, it soon had 7,500 inmates on the books.

There were even more prisoners who did not exist officially. These were the prisoners “who we weren’t supposed to ask any questions about”, according to Al Aloulou. Though he had always been a loyal cog in the wheel of Assad’s repressive machine, this long-time military man and civil servant was starting to become fearful… of God.

“I said to myself that I needed to start applying the law because, the day I die, God will punish me.”