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In its latest report, the United Nations expressed its belief that tens of thousands of people arrested by the Syrian authorities over ten years of war have gone missing, and that the issue of detainees represents a “national trauma that will affect the Syrian society for decades.”
Today, Monday 3/1/2021, Reuters quoted the UN Commission of Inquiry as saying: Tens of thousands of people arrested by the Syrian authorities over ten years of war have gone missing, and some have been tortured, raped, or killed in what amounts to war crimes and crimes against Humanity.
They added that opposition groups, including the Free Syrian Army, the Headquarters for the Liberation of Al-Sham and ISIS, carried out illegal arrests, tortured and executed detained civilians.
In their latest report, the investigators said, “The fate of tens of thousands of victims who were forcibly disappeared by the Syrian government forces, and on a smaller scale, by ISIS, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other groups, remains unknown as we approach the end of the decade.”.
They added that the issue of the detainees represents a “national Ttrauma” that will affect the Syrian society for decades.
The Syrian government has denied several previous UN accusations of war crimes and says it does not torture prisoners.
The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria, led by Paulo Pinheiro, called for the prosecution of all those who committed these crimes on both sides of the conflict and for the establishment of an international mechanism to locate the missing or their remains, some of which are in mass graves.
Investigators welcomed a ruling issued by a court in the German city of Koblenz last week to four and a half years in prison for a former member of Assad’s security apparatus for his participation in torturing civilians, the first such verdict for crimes against humanity in the ten-year civil war.
Reuters reported that UN investigators conducted 2,658 interviews, some of them with former detainees, and used official records, photos, recordings, and satellite images to document crimes in more than 100 detention facilities run by various forces.
