BEIRUT, Lebanon — Muhamad Raslan is no stranger to violence.

He has been fighting in the mountains of Idlib with the Free Syrian Army for more than two years. But when his unit overthrew a regime prison in Maart al Numan, he said the conditions of the prisoners were worse than anything he had seen.

“The regime killed most of them but three were saved by some miracle,” Raslan recalled during an interview via internet from Syria on Thursday.

“I met those three men and they told me some stories of the way they were tortured. Until now, I can’t believe that a human being can bear this or even that a human being can do this to another human being.”

This week, a report released by three former war crimes prosecutors and sponsored by the Qatar government detailed 55,000 horrific pictures they say represent 11,000 executions of Syrian regime prisoners.

The report says the photos were smuggled out of Syria by a defected military police photographer. A new batch of sickening images released Friday showed corpses with clear signs of torture: starvation, severe beatings, burns and strangulation.

If authentic, this latest report shows the killing and torture has reached a far greater scale than the international community could have imagined.

It has sparked much talk of an ICC investigation and possible charges of war crimes against the Syrian regime.

Although the US State Department said it was made aware of these photos in November, the report was released on the eve of peace talks between rebel and government forces.

Marie Harf, spokesperson for the US State Department, said they were working with the United Nations to determine how to move forward with the case.

“We have no reason to believe these are not authentic photos,” she said.

The Syrian government said the report has no credibility since it was commissioned and funded by Qatar, which openly supports the Syrian uprising.

In a statement released through the state news agency SANA, the Syrian justice ministry called the photos “fake” and said the report was “politicized.”

The statement further accused international parties of trying to undermine the Geneva peace talks.

Abuse is nothing new

In Syria, you do not have to look far to meet distraught families of the “disappeared” or victims bearing shocking scars from torture in detention.

Many of these victims find it hard to understand how it has taken this long for the international community to pay attention to these ongoing violations when reports, photos, interviews and video evidence have flooded both social and mainstream media since the uprising began.

“The torture report doesn’t shock me as for the methods of torture, but the number shocks me, and the public opinion shocks me much more,” said Kinda Zaour, one of four women arrested for protesting in Damascus in 2012.

The women were dressed as ‘brides of Syria’ calling for an end to military operations against civilians. Here is some footage of the protest:

“They didn't torture us a lot; I mean they beat us a lot but they tortured other arrested people in front of us,” said Zaour who has since fled to Turkey.

“We spent 50 days in a small room — 3×3 meters — with another 23 women, so we were 27 in that rotten room. We used to listen to the tortured voices in the rooms around us. The guards sexually harassed us all the time.”

The "brides" spent 50 days in prison before being released along with 2,130 other protesters in exchange for 48 Iranian hostages captured by opposition forces.

Here is footage (in Arabic) of the exchange in which some of those released show signs of abuse and torture:

The photographic evidence revealed in the Qatar-sponsored report covers a period from the beginning of the uprising in March 2011 until August last year.

But political prisoners and other inmates report torture in Assad’s prisons long before the revolution began. Human rights groups have been documenting the abuses for decades.

In an interview with GlobalPost last year, Ahmed Hiedar, 28, described the abuse he experienced after arrests in 2004 and 2006. He said he was tortured with electric shocks, burned with cigarettes, stabbed under his toenails, starved and viciously beaten.

“They left memories all over my body,” Hiedar said.

And Heidar said he’d had no interest in politics. He said his first arrest, in 2004, came after he tried to buy an album by Chris de Burg titled "The Road to Freedom." He was picked up the second time after requesting permission to build a female robot.