'Endless torture': Turkish inmate recalls hell of Syria jails

Finally home in Turkey, Mehmet Erturk cannot eat the bread his wife has made him. After 20 years jailed in Syria, half his teeth are missing and the other half are threatening to fall out.

"It was torture after torture," he told AFP, miming the truncheon blows to the mouth the guards would give him at a notorious Damascus prison known as the Palestine Branch, where he spent part of his time incarcerated.

Arrested in 2004 for smuggling, Erturk finally made it back to his home to Magaracik on Monday evening, a village perched at the top of a winding road dotted with olive trees some 10 minutes from the Syrian border.

"My family thought I was dead," said the 53-year-old, whose face and manner of walking make him look 20 years older.

On the night of his release, he heard gunshots and began to pray.

"We didn't know what was happening outside. I thought I was finished," he said.

Then he heard loud hammer blows and within minutes the prison gates were flung open by the rebels who ousted Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad.

"We hadn't seen him for 11 years. We had no hope," admitted his wife Hatice, sitting cross-legged outside their home preparing bread with their youngest daughter, who was barely six months old when her father was arrested.

After he was sentenced to 15 years, the prison authorities left this father-of-four to languish in an underground dungeon, at the mercy of brutal guards.

"Our bones would pop out of the socket when they hit our wrists with hammers," he said.

"They also poured boiling water down the neck of one prisoner. The flesh from his neck just slid all the way down" to his hips, he said.

Pulling up his right trouser leg, he shows his right ankle, the skin darkened by the chain he wore.

"During the day, it was strictly forbidden to talk... there were cockroaches in the food. It was damp, it stank like a toilet," he said, recalling days "without clothes or water or food".

"It was like being in a coffin."

And there was huge overcrowding.

"They put 115, 120 people in a cell for 20 people. Many people died of starvation," he said.

And the guards just "threw the dead into rubbish skips".