The Death of no less than 92 Civilians including 78 at the Hand of Government Forces and its Allies
SNHR has released the report: “Detailed Account of Violations of Eid Al-Fitr 2016” which documents the killing of 92 civilians during Eid Al-Fitr.
The report notes that despite General Command of the Armed Forces of the Syrian regime’s declaration of a truce for 72 hours in all Syrian governorates which commenced at 1:00 of 6 July 2016 until 24:00 of 8 July 2016, we noticed a slight decline in the killing of civilians at the hands of the Syrian regime and its allies compared with previous days. However, it didn’t stop a day.
The report focuses exclusively on the death toll of civilians and the most notable incidents of killing and attack against vital civil facilities that occurred between 6 July 2016 and 9 July 2016 at the hands of the main influential parties in Syria. The Syrian regime was responsible for 85% of all crimes.
Additionally, the report sheds light on the difficulties SNHR encounters in documenting victims from armed opposition factions as many of those victims are killed on battlefronts and not inside cities. Also, we aren’t able to obtain details such as names, pictures and other important details on account of the armed opposition forces’ unwillingness to reveal such information for security among other reasons. Therefore, the actual number of victims is much greater than what is being recorded.
Furthermore, the report affirms that It is almost impossible to access information about victims from government forces and ISIS and the margin of error is considerably higher due to the lack of any applicable methodology in this type of documentation. The Syrian government and ISIS don’t publish, reveal, or record their victims. From our perspective, the statistics published by some groups on this category of victims are fictitious and are not based on any actual data.
Therefore, we are only going to include civilian victims who were killed by all parties and compare them.
The report notes that The ongoing and daily process of documenting detainees comes with additional challenges for SNHR where one of the most notable challenges is the families’ reluctance to cooperate and reveal any information on their family members’ arrest even secretively and especially if the arrested individual was a female due to a prevalent notion among the Syrian society that doing so would result in more torture and risks. Instead, the families try to negotiate with security forces that usually blackmail these families and demand a cash payment up to thousands of dollars in same cases.
SNHR possesses lists of more than 117,000 detainees, including children and women, it should be noted that we estimate that the actual number of detainees have exceeded 215,000; 99% of them are being detained mainly by government forces.
According to the report, government forces and its allies killed 76 civilians including 11 children (four children are killed every day) and 15 women.
35% of the total number of civilian victims are children and women which is an indicator on the deliberate targeting of civilians by government forces and its allies.
The report also notes that self-management forces (consisting primarily of the Democratic Union Party forces, a branch for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party) killed nine civilians including four children and one woman while ISIS killed two civilians, Additionally, armed opposition factions killed three civilians including one child.
Also, the report records that one civilian was killed by the international coalition forces and one civilian by unidentified groups.
According to the report, no less than 51 arbitrary arrests were documented between 6 July and 9 July, government forces were responsible for 29 cases while self-management forces were responsible for 17 cases. Additionally, five arbitrary arrests were carried out by ISIS.
The report demands that Security Council and international institution shoulder their responsibilities with respect to the ongoing and ceaseless killings in Syria and press on the Syrian regime to cease indiscrete and deliberate bombardment against civilians.
Finally, the report calls on the United Nations and the international community to uphold their responsivities regarding hundreds of thousands of detainees and forcibly-disappeared persons.