The US State Department expressed supported for the report the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability released last week revealing the reach of Bashar al-Assad’s shadowy security agencies that sought to eliminate dissent at all costs.
In comments published on Twitter on Wednesday, the US State Department said that the report ‘Walls have Ears’ shows how the Assad regime deliberately detained its citizens, including women and children, to silence dissent.
The Assad regime must release the tens of thousands who are still unjustly detained in Syria, the Department said.
The report is based on a sample of 5,000 documents and present some of the most damning evidence of state involvement — at the highest level — in the bloody crackdown on protesters, dissidents, and even foreign journalists in Syria.
The documents, which were found in abandoned regime security headquarters, show the agencies created a network of informants that ensured the regime kept a close watch of the most mundane of Syrians’ everyday life. They also offer a rare look into the inner workings of the several security agencies as they sought to eliminate dissidents through detention, intimidation or killings.
Some of the documents include handwritten notes from top commanders to arrest, detain and “do what is necessary” to quell the unrest — a vague directive that has been found to mean use of lethal force. They also showed how security agencies and officials even spied on each other.
“The documents show clearly that orders were very centralized and came from really high-level officials, including from heads of the security agency themselves, and in lots of documents from the National Security Office,” said Mohammad Al-Abdallah, the director of the Washington-based group. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
