Damascus, Dec 17 (EFE).- Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday urged the new Syrian authorities to take urgent measures to secure and preserve physical evidence in the country of serious international crimes committed by members of the former government of Bashar al-Assad, after finding dozens of human remains in a mass grave.
“Without immediate Syrian and international efforts to secure and preserve likely sites of mass crimes for coordinated exhumations and forensic investigations, there is a serious risk that critical evidence for accountability will be lost,” Hiba Zayadin, senior researcher for the Middle East and North Africa at HRW, said in a statement.
The nonprofit visited a mass grave in the Tadamon neighborhood in southern Damascus between Dec.11-12, and found dozens of human remains both at the site of an April 2013 massacre – which showed summary killings by Syrian government forces and affiliated militias – as well as scattered throughout the surrounding neighborhood.
“Transitional Syrian authorities should take steps to urgently secure and preserve physical evidence across the country of grave international crimes by members of the former government,” HRW said.
Investigators retraced the final moments of the 11 blindfolded victims shown in the video, who were shot at point-blank range and pushed into the machine-dug grave, alongside the bodies of 13 other people.
At the site, investigators found human remains, including teeth and bones from the skull, jaw, hand and pelvis on the ground and in a bag collected by residents.
Human remains are also strewn on the floor of buildings near the mass grave, leading investigators to conclude that other people were most likely killed or buried at the same location, according to HRW.
Residents in Tadamon said that executions in the area were common. In interviews conducted in 2022, they described at least 10 other incidents of summary killings between August 2012 and January 2014 in Tadamon, Daraya, Moadamiya and surrounding areas.
The area was the scene of armed clashes between Syrian government forces and opposition fighters affiliated with the Free Syrian Army at numerous points between 2012 and 2013.
The government of ousted President Bashar al-Assad used summary killings along with other unlawful tactics, including arbitrary arrests, indiscriminate attacks and starvation, to forcibly displace residents from opposition-held areas, HRW said.
After the former government retook many of the former opposition-held areas in 2018, it designed and implemented policies that effectively allowed it to prevent people it perceived as opponents from returning to their homes, the nonprofit added.
Extrajudicial killings and summary executions are serious violations of international human rights law and may amount to crimes against humanity when carried out systematically or widely as state policy, HRW said.
The organization explained that access to due process and fair trials for the alleged perpetrators of the Tadamon massacre was “vital”, so the transitional authorities must guarantee unhindered access to independent observers who can help preserve evidence, such as the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria and the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria.
“The Syrian transitional authorities should also cooperate with the International Committee of the Red Cross which can provide critical expertise and support to safeguard these records with the view to assist in clarifying what happened to missing people and thereby enable families, left in excruciating uncertainty for years, if not decades, to obtain answers,” it concluded. EFE
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