The Assad regime continues to carry out arbitrary arrests in the areas under its control. Rights groups said that regime forces detained dozens of unarmed civilians, including children and women, across Syria in April.
In a report released on Thursday, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said that it recorded no fewer than 459 arbitrary arrests in April, including against 34 children and 23 women.
According to the report, the Assad regime detained 325 people, including 23 children and 17 women, while the PYD militia detained about 55 others, including six children and three women. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham militant group detained 48 people, including a child and a woman, while 31 people, including four children and two women, were detained by parties that the Network did not identify.
The Network also said that the arrests took place during at least 147 raids on homes and at checkpoints, 102 of which were manned by regime forces and 19 others by the PYD militia.
The monitoring group said that 272 arrests had turned into enforced disappearances, adding that the regime forces had detained civilians returning from northern Syria after being forcibly displaced as part of so-called settlement agreements with the regime.
In a separate report released on February 23, the Network reported that 127,916 people, including 3,469 children and 7,721 women, were still being held in the prisons of the Assad regime. It said that at least 82,000 were still forcefully disappeared.
The Network called on the UN Security Council to impose severe sanctions on the Assad regime for its involvement, along with its allies, in mass atrocities against the Syrian people since the beginning of the Syrian revolution. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)