Geneva – SANA-The United Nations’ Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic has confirmed that the former Syrian regime’s systematic arbitrary arrests, torture, and enforced disappearances of Syrians constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes, representing some of the worst systematic violations of international law ever committed.
According to the UN News Center, the commission revealed in a report titled “Web of Agony: Arbitrary Detention, Torture, and Ill-Treatment in the Syrian Arab Republic,” based on over 2,000 witness testimonies, including more than 550 interviews with torture survivors, horrifying details of the patterns of torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment inflicted by the former regime’s forces on detained men, women, and children.
These acts included severe beatings, electric shocks, burning, pulling out nails, tooth damage, rape, sexual violence, mutilation, prolonged stress positions, deliberate neglect, and denial of medical care, exacerbating wounds, and psychological torture.
The commission asserted that what it observed during its visits to detention facilities in Syria aligns with the descriptions provided by hundreds of survivors and defectors to the commission over the past 14 years.
It clarified that the small windowless basement isolation cells were still filled with stench and marked by unimaginable suffering when the Commission initiated its first on-site investigations. The locations visited were consistent with descriptions that hundreds of survivors and defectors have provided to the Commission over the past 14 years.
The commission emphasized that the suffering of tens of thousands of families who have not found their missing relatives among the released prisoners continues, affirming that the discovery of additional mass graves has led many families to conclude the worst.
The report underscored the urgent need for decisive action to safeguard evidence, archives, and crime sites, including mass graves, until experts can examine them and where needed conduct forensic exhumations.
The commission explained that it plans to conduct in-depth investigations in the coming months after the current Syrian government allowed it access to the country for the first time since 2011 and after it was granted unprecedented access to sites and survivors who no longer fear reprisals for testifying.
The report comes after the commission visited mass graves and former detention centers in Damascus, including Saydnaya Military Prison, Branch 235 of Military Intelligence (Palestine Branch), and the Air Force Intelligence Branches in Mezzeh and Harasta, after years of being barred access by the former regime’s authorities.
Nisreen Othman /Manar Salameh
