In what one Syrian described as a “barbaric way,” the Assad regime is updating its records of prisoners it is holding and informing families that their loved ones have died, sometimes years after the fact, Agence France-Presse reported Tuesday.
As the Syrian regime is updating it records, families of the estimated 80,000 Syrians held in regime prisons say that the authorities are notifying them of their relatives’ deaths, often years after the fact. The report of a relative’s death, for many families, comes after years of silence from the regime about the prisoner’s status.
“Before, the regime was giving no details on the detained. It wouldn’t declare them dead,” Fadel Abdul Ghany, head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, told AFP. “Now it is, but in a barbaric way.”
Families lately have been going to authorities for information about their detained relatives. Until recently, the regime would share no information about detainees. Now the Assad regime, which has been accused of torturing and murdering prisoners, has been telling families that their relatives have died. Some of the newly reported deaths go back to 2013.
One activist, who was identified as Salwa, recounted how she was informed that her nephew, who had been arrested in 2011, had died in 2013. In June, she and her sister-in-law went to the regime offices to find out about her nephew and found “a line out the door,” of other Syrians seeking information about their missing relatives.
A civil records official checked a list and informed Salwa that her nephew’s name was one of those who died. When Salwa expressed disbelief, the official told her, “Yes, we received the names of everyone who died inside” the prison.
Salwa learned that day that one nephew, Saad, who had been arrested in 2011, was declared dead in 2013. A second nephew, Saeed, who had been arrested in 2012, died last year.
But the regime gave the family no body to bury. Since the two young men were imprisoned and she fears the regime, Halwa said, “Even in mourning, we’re afraid and hide our grief.”
Abdulrahman Dabbas said that his family last saw his brother Islam in the infamous Saydnaya prison in 2012 and didn’t hear another word about him until now. The family, including Abdulrahman and his mother, both of whom now live in Egypt, found out that Islam died in January 2013. Without a body and hundreds of miles from home, the family held a memorial service for Islam five and half years after his reported death.
A Syrian police photographer known by the code name Caesar smuggled out tens of thousands of photographs documenting the terrible tortures and deaths to which Syrian prisoners were subjected.
Steven Rapp, then the top war crimes official for the U.S. government, declared in July 2014 that the Caesar’s photographs provided “solid evidence of the kind of machinery of cruel death that we haven’t seen frankly since the Nazis.”
The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution in March 2016 calling for a tribunal to prosecute Assad and his allies for war crimes. The resolution notably cast blame on the Assad regime, as well as “the Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Iran’s terrorist proxies including Hezbollah,” for killing the “vast majority” of Syrian civilians who have died in the conflict.
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