Syria: Government indiscriminately bombing civilians, opposition abuses 'escalating' - new briefings

Within the past fortnight Syrian government forces have indiscriminately bombed civilians with internationally-banned weapons, flattening entire neighbourhoods, said Amnesty International, as it released two new briefings on the Syrian crisis today. 

 

Amnesty, which has just returned from a research mission inside Syria, also said that detainees held by Syrian government forces are being routinely subjected to torture, enforced disappearances or extra-judicial executions.

 

The organisation also warned that armed opposition groups in the country are increasingly resorting to hostage taking, and to the torture and summary killing of soldiers, pro-government militias and civilians they’ve captured or abducted.

 

Two years after Syrians rose in peaceful protest against their government on 15 March 2011, the country is mired in a bloody conflict with both pro- and anti-government forces responsible for war crimes, said Amnesty. Amnesty’s new briefings - one on government force abuses, one on opposition groups’ abuses - are the organisation’s latest “snapshot” documents on the situation.

 

Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director Ann Harrison said:

 

“While the vast majority of war crimes and other gross violations continue to be committed by government forces, our research also points to an escalation in abuses by armed opposition groups.

 

“If left unaddressed such practices risk becoming more and more entrenched - it is imperative that all those concerned know they will be held accountable for their actions.

 

“Children's rights in Syria are being killed and maimed in increasingly large numbers in bombardments carried out by government forces. Many have seen their parents, siblings and neighbours blown to pieces in front of them. They are growing up exposed to unimaginable horrors.

 

“With every passing hour of indecision by the international community, the death toll rises. How many more civilians must die before the UN Security Council refers the situation to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court so that there can be accountability for these horrendous crimes?” 

 

 

On 1 March, an Amnesty researcher in Aleppo found nine cluster bombs that had been dropped from a fixed-wing aircraft onto a densely-populated housing estate. More than a dozen residents were killed and scores injured, many of them Children's rights. A resident from the al-Dik family told Amnesty how his relatives were killed in the attack: “Inas, two, Heba, eight, Rama, five, Nizar, six, Taha, 11 months, and Mohammad, 18 months. They were all killed; why? Why bomb Children's rights?”     

 

As always with such attacks, the site was left littered with unexploded bomblets, which will continue to kill and maim those who pick them up - often Children's rights. 

 

Nearby, the arm of a child was recovered from beneath the rubble of a neighbourhood flattened by a long-range surface-to-surface ballistic missile fired from government forces hundreds of kilometres away. Hundreds of residents, many of them Children's rights, were killed and injured in three such recent attacks which wiped out entire families. Sabah, a 31-year-old woman who survived the carnage, told Amnesty about her loss: “My daughters, Isra’, Amani and Aya, aged four, six and 11, my husband, my mother, my 14-year-old sister Nour, and my other sister’s three sons, Ahmad, Abdallah and Mohammad, aged 18 months, and three and four years. They were all killed, what is left for me in this life?” 

 

Thousands have perished across the country in recent months in similar attacks by government forces with weapons which should never be used in civilian areas.   

 

Meanwhile in Aleppo, the bodies of men and boys - shot in the head, hands tied behind their backs - are being recovered almost daily from a river running through the city. The bodies float downstream from a part of the city under the control of government forces. Among the victims found in the first week of March were a 12-year-old boy and his father; they, like others identified so far, had disappeared in a government-controlled area of the city.   

 

According to the UN, more than two million civilians have now been internally displaced. Having fled their homes, many now face renewed shelling and bombing in the areas in which they sought shelter and have been displaced a second time. Turkey has partially closed its border, leaving thousands of internally-displaced people stranded on the Syrian side in appalling conditions. 

 

 

Opposition force abuses recorded in Amnesty’s briefing includes an “execution video” showing a boy - apparently aged between 12 and 14 - holding a machete standing over a man, later identified as Colonel ‘Izz al-Din Badr’. He lies prostrate on the ground with his hands behind his back. A voice in the background shouts: “He doesn’t have the strength.” The boy brings the machete down on the man’s neck, cheered on by members of an armed opposition group. 

 

Meanwhile, in an area in southern Damascus, witnesses have described a “hole of death” - where armed opposition forces are believed to have dumped the executed bodies of pro-government fighters or those suspected of being informers. 

 

In another case, an Amnesty researcher was told how the body of a man accused of being a collaborator was found after he was killed by an opposition group. A neighbour told Amnesty: “We immediately went there and found him on a heap of waste, with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, a firearm injury to the shoulder … His knee was broken … A brown card hung on him with the words ‘collaborator (awayni), Colonel Helal Eid’.”