A watchdog group said that the Assad regime and its allied militias carried out arbitrary arrests against thousands of people in 2019, describing these arrests as systematic and at times randomly carried out with the aim of terrorizing the civilian population.
In a report released on Tuesday, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said that it had recorded more than 2,460 arbitrary arrests across Syria in the first half of 2019, half of whom were arrested by the Assad regime.
The Network said that the detainees included 117 children and 122 women, adding that 1,204 cases were classified as forcibly disappeared.
The monitoring group said that the Assad regime detained 1,733 people in the reporting period, including 80 children and 97 women. The ISIS extremist group detained 16 people in the same period, including a child. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham detained 190 people, including four children and two women, while the PYD militia arrested 337 people, including 22 children and 16 women.
According to the report, 880 people were forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime, seven by ISIS, 82 by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, 152 by the PYD militia, and 82 by other militant groups.
The majority of arrests in Syria “take place without a judicial warrant as they take place at checkpoints or during house-to-house raids, the Network said.
The report indicated that detainees were subjected to torture from the very first moment of detention. They are also not allowed to communicate with their families or appoint lawyers. The Assad regime denies responsibility for arbitrary arrests, the Network said, adding that the majority of the detainees are forcibly disappeared.
The Network called on the UN Security Council to take additional measures to resolution 2254, stressing the need to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court and to hold accountable all those involved in war crimes, including Russia. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
