Global disgust over the Syrian regime’s purported torture of citizens reached a pinnacle Tuesday, with a human rights group and a foreign diplomat decrying new reports of government atrocities.

According to a report published Tuesday by Human Rights Watch, President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime has been carrying out “a state policy of torture” as part of an effort to crush dissent. The group documented 27 detention facilities across Syria it said were used to hold people swept up in the government’s crackdown on an uprising now in its 16th month.

Authorities are using a network of torture chambers “to intimidate and punish people who dare to oppose the government,” said Ole Solvang, a Human Rights Watch researcher.

In some cases, the report said, the government tortured children.

“They electrocuted me on my stomach, with a prod. I fell unconscious,” said Hossam, a 13-year-old boy who told Human Rights Watch he was detained in the town of Tal Kalakh.

“When they interrogated me the second time, they beat me and electrocuted me again. The third time, they had some pliers and they pulled out my toenail.”

The rights body has also interviewed more than a dozen Syrians who described beatings, electrocution and horribly crowded conditions in prison cells.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said he welcomed the Human Rights Watch report. “It highlights the horror of what is happening. The scale of the barbaric acts that are being carried out by the regime against the population is appalling,” Hague said in a statement.

But Assad’s forces are showing signs of fracture, with growing reports of defections. At least 258 people, including soldiers, officers and their relatives, fled Monday, said Col. Malek Kurdi, deputy commander of the rebel Free Syrian Army.

Thousands of Syrians have escaped to Turkey, whose relations with Syria deteriorated after Syria recently shot down a Turkish military jet.

But in an interview with Turkey’s Cumhuriyet newspaper, Al-Assad expressed regret over the downing.

“I would not wish it for any plane other than an enemy one,” he said in the Tuesday article. “Especially for a Turkish plane, I say (a) hundred percent, ‘If only it did not happen.’”

Turkey, third day in a row, scrambled warplanes after Syrian helicopters flew near its border.

Turkey’s armed forces command said the fighters took off Monday when Syrian transport helicopters were spotted flying near the frontier, without entering Turkish air space.

Across the country Tuesday, the government launched new attacks on cities, opposition activists said. “The regime’s army waged a raid-and-arrest campaign ... amid a crippling siege” in a neighborhood of Hama, the Local Coordination Committees of Syria said.

Fresh shelling also landed in the besieged city of Homs and in Deir Ezzor, the opposition group said.