An American and two French are among thousands of detainees who were killed by the Syrian in detention centers, official documents showed.
Zaman al-Wasl has obtained official documents uncovering the fate of 500 detainees who were killed in the Syrian regime prisons since the erupt of the Syrian revolution in March 2011.
During the past months, and by checking the "old and new" sources of Zaman al-Wasl to search for the fate of the detainees, and in coordination with 25 families of the detainees' families who submitted the data of their sons in order for the newspaper to search for their fate, and it became clear that most of them were killed under torture or disease, and Zaman al-Wasl is currently informing the families Victims and hand them the documents you obtained.
The sources of the search were the civil registry in Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Damascus and Deir Ezzor, and records of mass graves that Zaman al-Wasl viewed, in addition to official telegrams containing names of people who summarily killed.
Zaman al-Wasl also obtained new documents, including death data recorded in 2022, burial permits, and testimonies explaining the fate of detainees who were arrested between 2011 and 2015.
In addition to information about their movements within the security branches, and the names of those responsible for their arrest, torture and ultimately killing, and then burying them in mass graves.
Zaman al-Wasl handed over the information to a human rights organization after completing the process of collecting evidence and including it in cases it filed in the EU.
The list includes prominent names among the first activists, writers, doctors, and revolutionaries in the areas that witnessed demonstrations against al-Assad and the remarkable number of brothers who were killed as entire families were wiped out.
The Assad regime adopted a policy of arbitrary and indiscriminate detention of the residents of the rebellious areas without any prior accusations, and imprisoned them in its prisons within the intelligence branches or in detention centers considered human slaughterhouses such as the Saydnaya military prison north of the capital, Damascus
The Assad regime also established additional detention centers, with the help of sectarian militias, to accommodate the huge numbers of detainees, whether at checkpoints or during raids that were carried out by the regime forces and its intelligence services.
According to the data, most of the detainees were declared dead (or their death was registered) in the civil registry departments in 2018, noting that they all died years before that date, the number of which reached 7 years and there is also a detainee in Syrian prisons since a year 1978, his death was announced in July 1918.
The majority of detainees on the name have died, as it is recorded in the table, in the detention centers of Damascus, and among them were those who were killed according to a field court in Damascus.
The file of the disappeared and unaccounted for detainees is one of the most sensitive files in the Syrian revolution.
The Assad regime continues to deny the existence of forcibly disappeared persons in its prisons, despite the discovery of statistics on tens of thousands of disappeared Syrians, including women and children.
“Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fallen victim to the Syrian regime’s arrest machine, with their cases devoid of any clear charges or evidence. They have been arrested for political reasons, grounded in the Syrian regime’s battle to survive without making any meaningful political changes. (These) are unlawful arbitrary arrests that violate international human rights law, as well as the Syrian constitution and domestic laws," according to the Guardian.
Most of the detainees were arrested without legal justification, often for taking part in anti-regime peaceful protests in the early months and years of the revolution against Assad’s regime.
The Syrian uprising turned into a brutal war that killed a half million people and displaced half the country’s pre-war population of 23 million.
Contact Zaman al-Wasl at [email protected]
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