The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry for Syria said on Monday that the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is committing crimes against people held in the country’s prisons which include extermination, murder, rape, torture, forced disappearance and other inhumane acts.
The investigating body which has documented violations of human rights in the Syrian conflict since late 2011 asked the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on high-ranking civilian and military officials of the Assad regime responsible for or complicit in deaths, torture and disappearances in custody.
The investigators gathered evidence based on interviews with hundreds of people who managed to survive a period of detention, former prison staff and relatives of victims.
The information has been published in a report entitled “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Deaths in Detention in the Syrian Arab Republic.”
Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, chairman of the United Nations commission, said in a news conference: “Prison officials, their superiors throughout the hierarchy, high-ranking officials in military hospitals and the military police corps as well as the government were aware that deaths on a massive scale were occurring. Thus, we concluded there were reasonable grounds to believe that the conduct described amounts to extermination as a crime against humanity.”
Pinheiro said that nearly every detainee has suffered unimaginable abuses, such as being beaten to death during interrogation or in their cells, or left to die of severe injuries sustained from gruesome torture.
The report which covers detentions from March 10, 2011 to November 30, 2015, gathered evidence based on interviews with 621 people who managed to survive a period of detention, former employees of prisons, relatives of dead prisoners and witnesses.
In recent weeks, the Iranian regime, Assad’s main backer, has considerably ramped up its criminal dispatch of forces to Syria amassing tens of thousands of its Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and non-Iranian mercenaries around Aleppo to cruelly slaughter the deprived people of villages, townships and towns in this region in tandem with the brutal bombings of the civilians. Recently, dozens of IRGC commanders and hundreds of mercenaries were killed at the Aleppo front.
Incapable of mobilizing and dispatching necessary troops from Iran to the conflict and apprehensive of a backlash within its forces due to rising IRGC casualties, the regime has resorted to mobilizing foreign mercenaries using various tactics including threating them with execution.
In recent years, particularly Afghan refugees living in Iran have been tapped for this purpose. The Iranian regime has threatened the refugees with deportation from Iran, imprisonment or even execution (all serious violations of human rights) to dispatch the Afghan refugees to Syria.
According to the sources of the main Iranian opposition group People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK) inside the IRGC, the dispatching of Afghans to Syria has grown almost three-fold in 2015; from around 2500 to close to 7000.