XPost: alt.fatty-fuckers, alt.politics.elections, alt.politics.democrats   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns   
   From: dick.sucker.obama@cnn.com   
      
   It is one of the darkest, most secretive weapons used in war.   
   But slowly, the widespread nature of the sexual abuse of boys   
   and men is being cast under anguished limelight as survivors and   
   activists seek more awareness and perpetrator accountability.   
      
   “I didn’t see him because they blindfolded us before the   
   interrogation, but I heard the officers calling for Abo Somar to   
   torture me,” Marwan al Qarout, 38, told Fox News of his abuser.   
   “He hit me on my genitals and threatened me with cutting it off   
   so I could not ‘re-produce terrorists.’ After an hour of hitting   
   me, another [torturer] came. He stuck a rifle up my bottom.”   
      
   Qarout, a pseudonym, is an activist who says he was peacefully   
   demonstrating against the Syrian dictatorship led by Bashar al-   
   Assad, when he was subsequently arrested by an Air Force   
   intelligence branch on April 23, 2014 in his hometown of Homs   
   City. He spent five months behind bars – months marked by fear   
   and the kind of abuse he lives over and over in his mind.   
      
   “I haven’t survived it,” he lamented, acknowledging that while   
   he wants the perpetrators to be held accountable and punished by   
   the international community, he has not sought any professional   
   help and only a few close family members know about what he   
   endured.   
      
   “People who know sympathize with me,” Qarout continued. “But all   
   of us, all detainees have suffered from this problem in one way   
   or another.”   
      
   And for fellow Syrian activist Khalid Terkawi, the screams of   
   his fellow male detainees still echo in the walls of his mind.   
      
   “First, there was a woman who had iron sticks inside her   
   genitals. Then the men had wooden sticks shoved in their ass   
   whenever the interrogator wanted to torture,” Terkawi, 34, who   
   is now based in Istanbul but spent two different stints in   
   detention for protesting the government, recalled. “But the   
   victim cannot speak about this in our society.”   
      
   Throughout the eight-year civil war that has rubbled Syria and   
   left more than half a million dead, sexual violence against   
   women in detention has emerged as one of the horrific methods of   
   torture at the hands of government forces. However, only now is   
   it coming to light just how extensively male sexual violence has   
   – and continues to be – deployed against male detainees.   
      
   A report released this month by Syrian rights organization   
   Lawyers and Doctors for Human Rights documented 138 accounts of   
   male detainee abuse, of which more than 40 percent detailed   
   occurrences of sexual abuse ranging from forced nudity and   
   sterilization to the mutilation of genitals and rape, sometimes   
   resulting in false confessions.   
      
   But the issue is hardly confined to the Syrian conflict.   
      
   “The scale of sexual violence against young males and men in   
   conflict and near-conflict spaces represents a global epidemic   
   that knows no borders,” said Ian Bradbury, CEO of 1st NAEF, a   
   non-profit focused on humanitarian aid and assisting victims of   
   all gender-based violence. “It has been observed prominently in   
   Afghanistan, Iraq, Philippines, Indonesia, Syria, Nigeria,   
   Libya, Sudan and other conflict zones. And it is not limited to   
   these areas alone.”   
      
   Indeed, the Qaddafi regime was accused of male rape as a tool of   
   war during the 2011 revolution in Libya, with the systematic   
   tactic used by several different factions in the severed nation   
   in the ensuing years. Videos and testimony collected in recent   
   years by a Tunis-based advocacy group painted a painful picture   
   of victims having been forced to rape other male detainees   
   behind bars, as well as men being sodomized by objects such as   
   rockets and broom handles.   
      
   Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Rudolph Atallah, now chief   
   executive officer of White Mountain Research, and former Africa   
   Counterterrorism in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, also   
   recalled hushed accounts of male sexual abuse throughout the   
   conflicts in Bosnia and eastern Congo – pointing out that it   
   also happens in conflict-riddled parts of Africa under the   
   auspice of witch doctor creed that sometimes claims raping young   
   boys can bring about cures for major diseases such as HIV.   
      
   “It breaks the victims down so much, it is often impossible for   
   them to talk openly,” he said. “There is so much stigma, so much   
   taboo. For the perpetrator, it’s about dominance and control   
   that destroy a victim internally, make them feel no longer male.”   
      
   Moreover, a report released by Amnesty International earlier   
   this month, following a detailed investigation, illuminated that   
      
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