Assad regime accused of 28,000 disappearances
Date October 19, 2012 - 1:00PM
Destroyed buildings in the town of Maarat al-Numan where government airstrikes killed almost 50 people this week. Photo: AFP
AT LEAST 28,000 people have vanished in Syria, victims of a state campaign to terrorise President Bashar al-Assad's subjects into submission, human rights groups say.
Employing a tactic reminiscent of the enforced disappearances of Stalin's Soviet Union or Idi Amin's Uganda, agents of the regime are seizing suspected opposition sympathisers from their homes or even off the street, according to campaigners.
"They always ask me, 'Where is dad? Who took him?', and I don't know how to respond."
Avaaz, a global campaign network that aids opposition activists in Syria, said the names of 18,000 missing people had been collected, along with a further 10,000 cases of unnamed victims spirited into secret detention and torture facilities.
One Syrian-based human rights organisation reported that up to 80,000 people had disappeared since the uprising began 19 months ago. The figures could not be verified independently.
"People are being snatched at night, on the street and when no one is looking," said Muhannad al Hasani, the chairman of Sawasya, a Syrian human rights organisation.
"According to information given to us by our contacts in villages across Syria, we think there could be as many as 80,000 forcibly disappeared people."
Alice Jay, the campaign director at Avaaz, said: "Syrians are being plucked off the street by Syrian security forces and paramilitaries and being 'disappeared' into torture cells."
Syrians interviewed by the group spoke of the despair caused by the disappearance of loved ones.
"If I know someone who was killed, I resign to God that they are dead," said one man, identified as Yousef, whose sister was allegedly abducted in Homs six months ago. "If I know someone who is injured, I still have hope they might heal. But the unknown ... the only word that expresses it is unknown."
One woman, identified as Mais, said that she has concealed from her children the disappearance of her husband in the central province of Homs in February.
"The children need a father in their lives," she said. "They always ask me, 'Where is dad? Who took him?', and I don't know how to respond. I have to lie to them. I tell them he is at work, that he is OK."
Accounts by those who have been held in secret detention facilities, which are often located in school basements, suggest that those who are seized by state security forces face systematic torture.
Men, women and even children are regularly beaten, subjected to electric shocks and have their fingernails pulled out, former captives say. Many do not survive.
The alleged scale of the disappearances adds a further chilling dimension to Syria's civil war, which has claimed an estimated 33,000 lives, according to opposition groups.
Mr Assad's decision to deploy his air force in recent months has already caused a sharp leap in the number of civilian and rebel deaths reported every day. But the enforced disappearances mean that even civilians not on the war's front line are falling victim to the government's determination to intimidate Syria's population into quiescence.
"Whether it is women buying groceries or farmers going for fuel, nobody is safe," said Ms Jay. "This is a deliberate strategy to terrorise families and communities. The panic of not knowing whether your husband or child is alive breeds such fear that is silences dissent."
The Syrian government did not comment on the allegations but in the past it has denied carrying out human rights abuses.
Enforced disappearances in Syria are not new – about 7000 people who vanished during the rule of Assad's father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, are still unaccounted for.
At least 44 people, including children, were reportedly killed in an air strike that destroyed two blocks of flats and a mosque in the rebel-held town of Maarat al-Numan yesterday.
Rescue workers said many more remained trapped under the rubble.
Telegraph, London
