Omar Alshogre

Omar Alshogre is a Syrian refugee, public speaker, and human rights activist. He is currently the director for detainee affairs at the Syrian Emergency Task Force. He is known for his efforts to raise awareness of human rights abuses in Syria and his personal experience of torture and starvation by the Assad regime during his three years of detention.

Alshogre, born in al-Bayda in 1995. He is among the few people to have survived Assad's prisons prior to their dissolution in 2024 and had the position to share his experience.

Biography

Arrest The Assad regime first arrested Alshogre for participating in an anti-government protest when he was 15 years old. The regime jailed him for two days and subsequently released him. The regime arrested him seven times between 2011 and 2013. Bashir and Rashad would both die in prison. Alongside other detainees, he experienced daily torture, including by electrical shock, beatings with cable and metal, and the removal of his finger nails. They were 20 and 10 years old respectively when they moved in to Eva Hamilton's house in Nacka, an affluent suburb south of Stockholm.

He has learned English, Norwegian, and Swedish and graduated from high school. He shares his personal story to raise awareness of the abuses of the Assad regime.

Together with other victims, witnesses, activists and lawyers he has contributed to a legal battle for justice in European courts. He has given testimony to German lawyers and prosecutors as well as to European war crimes investigators to build cases against the regime.

He has received death threats for his open discussion of the abuses he faced. In January 2018, one of his former torturers from Branch 215 called him and told him he was in Stockholm. The Nation has noted Alshogre "s one of the few to survive the slaughterhouse of Sednaya, and someone who has personally tagged over 8,000 bodies, who appears in various media and can rattle off the names and locations of multiple military prisons, including the brigadier general in charge of each facility and the names of deceased inmates and their home towns, Omar is a formidable and feared witness".

In June 2020, Alshogre appealed to his former torturer in Syria through a video posted on his YouTube channel and highlighted by Al Jazeera, expressing a hope that he would remain in good health but recognizing that the coronavirus leveled the difference between weak and strong, jailer and detainee.

Life in the United States Alshogre moved to Washington, D.C., in 2021 to study at Georgetown University. A previous video on Twitter filming his reaction to being accepted to the university went viral in November 2020.

He currently assists in legal prosecutions against those who have committed crimes in Syria, serving as a key witness in prosecution efforts. He also travels and gives speeches across the US and Europe, including at the UN Security Council, TEDxGeorgetown, Harvard Law School and at the Human Rights Foundation’s Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway.