As Syrians celebrate the collapse of President Bashar al-Assad's government after more than 50 years of brutal father-son rule, the search continues for tens of thousands of Syrians still missing after being arrested, detained or 'disappeared'. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Friday that it had registered 35,000 cases of people missing in Syria over the past 13 years, and that there was every reason to believe there were many more.
The fate of those missing and unaccounted for - still estimated at 100,000 people - has created a crisis within the crisis that has plagued Syria for years, especially for families directly affected. Human rights experts are urging the preservation of evidence of the torture and death of political prisoners as the country's jail doors are finally opened.
“We must prioritize accounting for the missing, ensuring that families receive the clarity and recognition they desperately need,” Geir Pedersen, UN special envoy for Syria, said in a statement Thursday.
“Evidence of atrocities must be preserved and thoroughly documented to ensure accountability under international humanitarian law. Justice for the victims and their families is not only a right, but also essential for healing and for preventing further violations.”
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) has been documenting the thousands of people arbitrarily detained, forcibly disappeared and tortured to death under Assad's rule since 2011, when a government crackdown on peaceful anti-government protests turned into a civil war.
According to figures from SNHR, at least 231,000 civilians have been killed in the war as direct result of violence, with 202,000 deaths attributed to Syrian government forces and allied militias and the rest to various armed factions. SNHR says those killed by the authorities include 23,000 children and 22,000 women, as well as 15,000 who have been tortured to death. The group has also documented more than 96,000 forcibly disappeared people and some 40,000 detainees.
SNHR founder and director Fadel Abdul Ghany told VOA that his group has been continuously monitoring who has been released from detention since the collapse of the Assad government on Sunday.
“So, approximately 31,000 have been released from those arbitrary arrests or enforced disappearances,” he said, from a total of 136,000 persons. He said that leaves about 105,000 people who are unaccounted for.
Abdul Ghany said his organization’s research over the past 14 years, including the examination of thousands of death certificates, has “enabled us at the Syrian Network for Human Rights to announce that the vast majority of those, the remaining 105,000, have been killed.”
This is devastating news for families, many of whom have been hoping for more than a decade to see their missing loved ones again.
Scores of families descended this week upon the notorious military prison on the outskirts of the capital, Damascus, known as Sednaya. In 2017, Amnesty International described the prison as a "human slaughterhouse" where authorities quietly and methodically killed thousands of people.
International news reports this week showed men, many barefoot and some half-naked, walking out of the prison, many emaciated, some unable to remember their own names.
Some prisoners had been in the facility since before the war, dating back decades to the rule of Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad. Video from inside Sednaya shows torture chambers and cells, walls and floors caked with years of blood, mold, filth and thick cobwebs.
Paulo Pinheiro, a Brazilian political science professor, has chaired the UN-mandated Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic since 2011. The Assad government would not allow them access to Syria, but the Commission did its work, methodically documenting testimony from more than 11,000 survivors and witnesses of abuses and atrocities in the civil war.
Pinheiro said Sednaya had close ties to the government.
“We know what units were responsible for the arbitrary detention, what personnel was involved in each center, the command of the center, the articulation with central organizations in the Syrian state,” he told VOA.
Video from Sednaya also showed people taking documents, perhaps hoping to find the names of their loved ones among the pages. Other papers appeared to have been burned to ashes.
Pinheiro said evidence needs to be preserved for the new authorities.
“And we are intending to contact the new authorities precisely to affirm this need,” he said. “I think it is in the best interests of the new authorities that the evidence is being preserved.”
Those new authorities are members of the non-state armed group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The group's leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, led the coalition of rebels whose offensive toppled the Assad government in just over a week. Assad and his family fled to Russia as the rebels closed in on the capital.
On Tuesday, Jolani said he would name former regime officials wanted for torturing Syrian citizens.
In its latest report, released in August, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria said it had “reasonable grounds to believe that the Government continued to commit acts of torture and ill-treatment against persons in State custody, including practices causing death in detention, as well as arbitrary imprisonment, rape or other forms of sexual violence of similar gravity, and enforced disappearances, again confirming continuing patterns of crimes against humanity and war crimes.”
Pinheiro said that since the start of the conflict in 2011, the Commission has compiled and updated a confidential list of alleged perpetrators. Their names are kept in a safe in Geneva with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“When the government will be established, we will be very happy to contribute this list to the judicial system,” Pinheiro said.
SNHR this week appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin to extradite Assad to face justice in Syria for the crimes committed by his regime, including the use of chemical weapons and barrel bombs against the population in opposition areas.
Abdul Ghany told VOA that the new authorities should offer assurances that Assad or any security or military officers will not be subjected to torture.
“This should be a rule that no one should be subjected to any type of torture,” he said. “The uprising’s aim is to move our state from brutal dictatorship, family rule, toward democracy and toward rule [that] respects the human rights.”
Both Abdul Ghany and Pinheiro say accountability should not be limited to the Assad government. Rights violations have been committed by other armed groups in the Syrian civil war, including HTS, though to a much lesser extent than the government.
The Commission of Inquiry's August report cited HTS for some executions, as well as detentions, including of a 7-year-old child, beatings, forced confessions, and reports of torture in its prisons. Since HTS launched its lightning offensive in several towns and cities on November 27, the group has been responsible for the deaths of fewer than 10 civilians, according to SNHR.
“I think it is a good indication,” Abdul Ghany said. He said his group has recorded minor violations by HTS and will continue to monitor them as the transition plays out.
“Until now, they are doing good,” he said.
After more than 10 days of rapid military advances in north-west Syria, a coalition of armed opposition forces led by HTS seized the capital, Damascus, on December 8 as President Bashar Al-Assad fled to Moscow.
Armed opposition forces had begun advancing on Damascus on November 27, taking control of large areas in Hama, Idlib, and Aleppo governorates and capturing the city of Homs. Government forces then launched counter-offensives, with airstrikes and shelling resulting in civilian casualties.
HTS and other opposition groups also released prisoners from the infamous Sednaya prison and other state-run detention centers during the advance. Tens of thousands of people have been held incommunicado in prisons and detention centers, with the Commission of Inquiry on Syria reporting that more than 130,000 people have been arbitrarily detained, abducted or disappeared since the conflict began in 2011.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), fighting displaced more than 1.1 million people between November 28 and December 12, with some 100,000 people displaced across north-east Syria. Tens of thousands of civilians seeking safety in the Kurdish-controlled north-east face dire conditions due to a lack of adequate shelter, water, food and health care.
Since Wednesday, the security situation has stabilized in many parts of Syria, but insecurity remains high in others, notably in parts of Aleppo governorate and in north-east Syria, particularly in the two governorates of Al-Hasakeh and Ar-Raqqa.
The European Commission announced on Friday that it is launching a new Humanitarian Air Bridge operation for those most in need in Syria to deliver emergency health care and other essential supplies, and is increasing its humanitarian funding.
Syrians are living through one of the world's largest humanitarian crises. Across Syria, 16.7 million people - more than 70 percent of the population - are in need of humanitarian assistance and protection, with women and children particularly affected. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed since the conflict began in March 2011.
Nearly 14 years of war have left the Syrian people facing mass displacement, widespread food insecurity, crumbling infrastructure, economic decline, and preventable disease. The Syrian people have been subjected to massive and systematic violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.
Before the recent escalation, some 13.6 million people had been forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of the war. While 7.2 million women, men and children were internally displaced within their own country, the civil war had led to more than 6.4 million Syrian refugees, mostly in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Germany.
Some information for this report provided by VOA.
Further information
Website: Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR)
https://snhr.org/
Website: Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic
https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/iici-syria/independent-international-commission