On Thursday, the Syrian Network for Human Rights said that it had documented at least 95,056 people who were still forcibly disappeared in Syria, most of them by the Bashar al-Assad regime.
This came in a report issued by the Network titled “A Tunnel With No End” a copy of which Alsouria Net obtained. The report covered the period from the start of the revolution in March 2011 to August 2018.
The report said that 85.9 percent of the people had been forcibly disappeared by the regime, saying that the regime had “disappeared at least 81,652 people, including 1,546 children, and 4,837 adult women.”
The report, which was issued by the Network on International Day of the Disappeared, said it believed that prisoners and the forcibly disappeared were subjected to the most monstrous and sadistic forms of torture, whereby the toll of those killed by torture in regime detention centers has been 13,608 from March 2011 to August 2018.
The report said that although other parties such as Hayyat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamic State (ISIS), the Democratic Union Party and rebel groups had carried out forms of arrest, forcible disappearance and torture, they collectively amount to no more than 10 percent of what the regime has done.
The report said that ISIS had forcibly disappeared at least 8,349 people, including 314 children and 218 women, while Hayyat Tahrir al-Sham was responsible for the disappearance of 1,645 people, including seven children and 19 women.
According to the report, the number of forcibly disappeared people by opposition groups was at least 1,887 people, including 208 children and 411 women. The Kurdish Self-Administration forces had been responsible for the disappearance of at least 1,523 people, including 41 children and 63 women.
Forcible disappearance is a crime against humanity, when it is committed as part of a plan or general policy, or in the context of a wide scale campaign, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Killing of Prisoners
The report also said that the Assad regime had recently begun manipulating the issue of the forcibly displaced and acknowledged the deaths of 836 people who were registered as dead, although they have not returned the bodies to relatives.
The Network report said that the crime of forcible disappearance is ongoing, and that as long as a person is not found, alive or dead, then according to international law, all these people are considered forcibly disappeared — and the main party accused of this crime is the regime.
This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
