UN probe accuses Syria government of 'exterminating' prisoners

The Syrian government has carried out a campaign of “massive and systematised violence” in its prisons over the past four years, a damning new UN report said on Monday.

Based on over 600 interviews spanning a four-year period since the early days of the revolution in 2011, the report reveals that state violence against prisoners amounts to “extermination”.

The report was prepared by independent experts who were commissioned by the UN’s human rights body to investigate killings in detention, often far from the front lines of the conflict.

“Detainees held by the government [have been] beaten to death, or died as a result of injuries sustained due to torture.

“Others [have] perished as a consequence of inhuman living conditions. The government has committed the crimes against humanity of extermination, murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture, imprisonment, enforced disappearance and other inhuman acts.”

Two non-state groups, Islamic State and the Nusra Front, have also subjected detainees to inhuman treatment amounting to a crime against humanity, the report notes, calling on them – and their external backers – to reform their treatment of prisoners.

The report seeks to highlight the impact of deaths in custody, which “continue to occur in near-total secrecy,” and which are often absent from coverage of the conflict, which is dominated by images of the aftermath of aerial bombardments and frontline battles.

Tens of thousands of people are detained by the Syrian government at any one time, the report finds, and thousands more have disappeared after being arrested by state forces or abducted by militant groups.

Some of the torture and ill-treatment suffered by those detained in government-run facilities has been captured on camera by a man known only as Caesar, a former army photographer who defected after being made to photograph the bodies of thousands of people tortured to death.

Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force and a supporter of Caesar, told Middle East Eye during a recent exhibition in London that even photographic evidence of thousands of deaths under torture has struggled to make an impact on the discourse surrounding the conflict.

“Most people still don’t know about this, which is shocking. When there is outrage, there is still zero action.

“One of the biggest things we do with the files is try to identify dual-nationals [among the victims].

“When two US journalists were taken and beheaded by IS, the US mobilised an international coalition. So we thought if there were Americans who were tortured to death it might provoke a response.”