Source: UN Human Rights Council
The Human Rights Council of the United Nations has just released its report on Syria, sounding defensive about the delayed publication. It is an eye-opener.
From reading the newspapers, I had thought that the
civil war was basically over. And indeed President Bashar al-Assad has the
upper hand. But the UN reports that war has escalated for six months, with no
ceasefire in sight and in the presence of the February earthquakes.
In northwestern Syria, the Turks tangle with Islamic militants
to the point of being considered by legal observers as the Occupation. In October,
an opposition activist and his pregnant wife were murdered, and the Al-Qaeda
offshoot Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham seized the moment to advance in Afrin. So the
Turks invaded. In November, they
extended the attack in Operation Claw-Sword, responding, they said, to a
terrorist bombing in Istanbul. Fighting
will continue “over swathes of territory and leverage and revenue drawn from
checkpoints,” said the human rights commissioners.
The war is taking on an international taint (see Figure 1). After Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham went into north
Aleppo, Russia air-bombed military targets there. Israel apparently struck 15 times from air throughout
Syria, including the international airports at Damascus and Aleppo, incidentally
blocking the delivery of aid to refugees in Idlib Province. The Israelis were attacking
the delivery of Iranian arms to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which launched rockets
into Israel in 2021 (hardly the first time) and which the Israelis suspect of
bombing a highway in north Israel a few days ago. Iranians fought in southern and northeastern
Syria, and US air strikes hit facilities in northeastern Syria in Dayr al-Zawr, used by allies of the
Revolutionary Guards. The Islamic State is still in Syria, although The Free Syrian Army killed Da’esh leader
Abu al-Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi in October in Dar’a province, reported the
US Central Command.
Source: UN Human Rights Council
The fighting exacerbates the world’s largest human displacement. More than 14 million in Syria are homeless or refugees. The UN helps 2.3 million of them. But 90% of all Syrians are poor, and 15.3 million need aid this year, up 700,000 from last year, reported the commissioners.
Civilians are not immune from the war. Soldiers of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and the
opposition Syrian National Army rape with impunity, since stigma discourages victims
from reporting and even from seeking medical help. So do Syria’s adultery bans;
sometimes the police take victims of rape into custody. The law also reduces punishment of rapists
who marry their victims, who may be forced by their families to wed for honor
or be killed. Overall, the UN reports
that nearly 7.3 million females in Syria suffer sex violence, almost 70% of all
females.
Twenty pro-government attacks in Idlib Province and
western Aleppo, often with cluster bombs, led to 195 civilian casualties—including
36 deaths, 12 of them of children (see Figure 2).
Rarely was a military objective in sight.
Misrule of law
Sometimes soldiers seemed to attack civilians for sport. Consider, in northwest Syria, a family returning from their olive farm in the early evening in their vehicle -- two women, a boy aged 5, and a girl aged 7. From just three kilometers away, a guided missile from the 46th regiment of the Syrian Arab Armed Forces hit the engine of the vehicle, seriously injuring the children. The vehicle was on ground above the regiment and thus easy to target. Without a vehicle, the family cannot bring in their olives from the fields. But neither do they want to leave their home, despite the danger, because the olive farm is all that they have, according to the report.
A vigilante atmosphere prevails. On September 14, “a 9-year-old Iraqi boy was
found dead after being severely beaten and raped, allegedly by a former armed
group fighter who had recently arrived in Ra’s al-Ayn,” reported the
commissioners. The man was handed over
to the military police of the Syrian National Army, who promised the public “revenge.”
The next day, as the military police took him to the civil police, “a group of
masked gunmen stopped the vehicle transporting him and shot him dead. Later
that day, two SNA faction leaders publicly lauded the killing.”
The rebels' prisons are brutal. "A Kurdish man, held in a makeshift facility run by the Hamzah Division [of the Syrian National Army], was beaten with cables, deprived of food and water, and forced to clean their premises. A few days later, he was transferred from their custody to the Ra’s al-Ayn military police, where he was interrogated during the night, beaten, hung from the ceiling by his arms (shabh), and placed in a tire (doulab). He was only brought before a judge and allowed to contact his family three weeks later. Although he was acquitted, he remained in military police custody for two more weeks, until his family paid 150 Turkish lira [seven or eight dollars] in 'fees' to the court, and $2,500 to a military police commander for his release."
Pro-government forces compelled some civilians to pay foreign currency to Syria's central bank, which lacks dollars for defending the collapsing Syrian pound. The US central bank blocks Iraq from sending dollars to Syria's central bank, because of laundering by Syria and Iran.
Syria did not reply to the commissioners’ questions about particular allegations of human rights violations. —Leon Taylor, Baltimore tayloralmaty@gmail.com
References
Emanuel Fabian. IDF suspects Hezbollah behind bombing attack on northern highway; terrorist killed. The Times of Israel. March 15, 2023. IDF suspects Hezbollah behind bombing attack on northern highway; terrorist killed | The Times of Israel
United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. March 13, 2023. A/HRC/52/69 (un.org)
No comments:
Post a Comment