SDF, allies set up civilian council to run Deir Ezzor

Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) gather in northern Deir al-Zor province ahead of an offensive against Daesh militants, Syria February 21, 2017. (REUTERS)
Updated 24 September 2017
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SDF, allies set up civilian council to run Deir Ezzor

DEIR EZZOR, Syria: US-allied militias in northern Syria have announced the formation of a civilian council to govern the oil rich eastern province of Deir Ezzor where they are racing with the Syrian regime’s troops to capture territory held by Daesh.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which includes Arab militias but is dominated by the powerful Kurdish people’s protection unit (YPG) militia, launched an operation in Deir Ezzor province which borders Iraq earlier this month which captured its northern countryside and advanced east of the Euphrates River.
On Saturday, they seized a major gas field in Deir Ezzor province from Daesh militants in rapid advances that preempted the Syrian regime that was also heading in that direction.
In a separate offensive, Syrian regime troops and Iranian backed militias with Russian air power had also this month broke a years-long Daesh siege of government-held parts of Deir Ezzor on the other side of the Euphrates river.
The advances against Daesh have brought US-backed forces and the Syrian regime side, backed by Russia and Iran, into close proximity.
The assaults by the Russian-backed Syrian army and the US-backed SDF have at times raised fears of clashes that could stoke tensions between the competing world powers.
The SDF appointed 100 tribal figures to meet and elect a council to run the province on Sunday.
In a final communique, the council said its priority was the return of tens of thousands of displaced residents of the province who fled during the conflict and restoring basic utilities. It urged the US-led coalition to provide aid to the war-torn province.
“We want to cement ties among the people of the province,” the statement of the newly formed Deir Ezzor civil council said.
The extent of Kurdish control in the eastern province that lies at the heart of Arab tribal area is sensitive both for residents and for Ankara.
Many local Arab tribes from the region also complain they are marginalized in decision making and blame the YPG for discrimination against them, including the forced conscription of their youths. The YPG denies these allegations.
On Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said Russian airstrikes had killed 45 members of an extremist group in the northwestern province of Idlib.
It was unclear why the strikes, which took place Saturday, targeted members of the Faylaq Al-Sham rebel group, which has taken part in peace talks supervised by Moscow in the Kazakh capital Astana.
The strikes hit the group in the province of Idlib, which is part of a so-called “de-confliction” zone agreed in a deal between Russia, Iran and Turkey.
The Observatory initially reported a lower toll, but said the figure had risen as bodies were recovered after the strike on one of the rebel group’s headquarters on the outskirts of the village of Tal Mardikh.
Faylaq Al-Sham is a radical group considered close to the Muslim Brotherhood movement.
It has fought against the former Al-Qaeda affiliate that now effectively controls nearly all of Idlib after chasing its former rebel allies from their positions in fighting this summer.
A spokesman for Faylaq Al-Sham confirmed the group’s headquarters had been targeted, despite their participation in the last round of talks in Astana.
“Our participation in Astana does not in any way mean that Russia is a friendly or neutral country,” Idriss Al-Raed said.
“The Russian bombing is not surprising, since its policy since its intervention in Syria is based on criminality and killing,” he added.
Russia began an intervention in Syria in support of ally President Bashar Assad in 2015, and has helped the regime win back large parts of the country.
Moscow also helped broker a deal for four truce zones, one of which includes Idlib province, in an agreement with Iran and Turkey inked in May.
The three other zones are around the capital Damascus, in southern Syria and in the center of the country.
More than 330,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011 with anti-government protests.


Deal reached to release more Israeli hostages and allow Palestinians into north Gaza

Updated 27 January 2025
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Deal reached to release more Israeli hostages and allow Palestinians into north Gaza

  • Netanyahu’s office says another six hostages to be released in coming week after talks with Hamas
  • Israel confirms Qatar’s announcement, says Gazans can now return home from 7 a.m. Monday

DOHA/JERUSALEM/GAZA CITY: Mediator Qatar announced early Monday that an agreement has been reached to release an Israeli civilian hostage and allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, easing the first major crisis of the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Qatar’s statement said Hamas will hand over the civilian hostage, Arbel Yehoud, along with two other hostages before Friday. And on Monday, Israeli authorities will allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement said the hostage release — which will include soldier Agam Berger — will take place on Thursday, and confirmed that Palestinians can move north on Monday. Israel’s military said people can start crossing on foot at 7 a.m.

Under the ceasefire deal, Israel on Saturday was to begin allowing Palestinians to return to their homes in northern Gaza. But Israel put that on hold because of Yehoud, who Israel said should have been released on Saturday. Hamas accused Israel of violating the agreement.

Netanyahu's office said that another six hostages would be released in the coming week, after talks with Hamas. Three would be released on Thursday and another three on Saturday, said a statement from his office.

The breakthrough preserves a fragile ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, which has devastated the Gaza Strip and displaced nearly all its residents, paving the way for more hostage-prisoner swaps under a deal aimed at ending the more than 15-month conflict.

Israel had been preventing vast crowds of Palestinians from using a coastal road to return to northern Gaza, accusing Hamas of violating the truce agreement by failing to release civilian women hostages.

“Hamas has backtracked and will carry out an additional phase of releasing hostages this Thursday,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

Trump’s plan meets mixed reactions

Palestinian leaders meanwhile slammed a plan floated by US President Donald Trump to “clean out” Gaza, vowing to resist any effort to forcibly displace residents of the war-battered territory.

Trump said Gaza had become a “demolition site,” adding he had spoken to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about moving Palestinians out.

“I’d like Egypt to take people. And I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump told reporters.

Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, who is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, “expressed strong rejection and condemnation of any projects” aimed at displacing Palestinians from Gaza, his office said.

Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told AFP that Palestinians would “foil such projects,” as they have done to similar plans “for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades.”

Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas in Gaza, called Trump’s idea “deplorable.”

For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.

“We say to Trump and the whole world: we will not leave Palestine or Gaza, no matter what happens,” said displaced Gaza resident Rashad Al-Naji.

Trump floated the idea to reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One: “You’re talking about probably a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”

Moving Gaza’s roughly 2.4 million inhabitants could be done “temporarily or could be long term,” he said.

Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who opposed the truce deal and has voiced support for re-establishing Israeli settlements in Gaza — called Trump’s suggestion of “a great idea.”

Tantamount to ‘ethnic cleansing’

The Arab League rejected the idea, warning against “attempts to uproot the Palestinian people from their land.”

“The forced displacement and eviction of people from their land can only be called ethnic cleansing,” the league said in a statement.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said “our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”

Egypt’s foreign ministry said it rejected any infringement of Palestinians’ “inalienable rights.”

In Gaza, cars and carts loaded with belongings jammed a road near the Netzarim Corridor that Israel has blocked, preventing the expected return of hundreds of thousands of people to northern Gaza.

Israel had said it would prevent Palestinians’ passage until the release of Arbel Yehud, a civilian woman hostage. She is among those slated for return on Thursday, according to Netanyahu’s office.

Hamas said that blocking returns to the north also amounted to a truce violation, adding it had provided “all the necessary guarantees” for Yehud’s release.

Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee said Monday that residents would be allowed to return on foot starting at 07 a.m. (0500 GMT) and by car at 9 a.m.

Staggered releases

During the first phase of the Gaza truce, 33 hostages are supposed to be freed in staggered releases over six weeks in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

The most recent swap saw four Israeli women hostages, all soldiers, and 200 prisoners, nearly all Palestinian, released Saturday — the second such exchange during the fragile truce entering its second week.

Dani Miran, whose hostage son Omri is not slated for release during the first phase, demonstrated outside Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem on Sunday.

“We want the agreement to continue and for them to bring our children back as quickly as possible — and all at once,” he said.

The truce has brought a surge of food, fuel, medicines and other aid into rubble-strewn Gaza, but the UN says “the humanitarian situation remains dire.”

Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack that ignited the war, 87 remain in Gaza, including 34 the military says are dead.

The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 47,306 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.


Bittersweet return for Syrians with killed, missing relatives

Updated 27 January 2025
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Bittersweet return for Syrians with killed, missing relatives

  • “I thought that once I got to Syria, everything would be better, but in reality everything here is so very painful,” says Wafa Mustafa, whose father Ali was among the tens of thousands killed or missing in Syria’s notorious prison system

DAMASCUS: Wafa Mustafa had long dreamed of returning to Syria but the absence of her father tarnished her homecoming more than a decade after he disappeared in Bashar Assad’s jails.
Her father Ali, an activist, is among the tens of thousands killed or missing in Syria’s notorious prison system, and whose relatives have flocked home in search of answers after Assad’s toppling last month by Islamist-led rebels.
“From December 8 until today, I have not felt any joy,” said Mustafa, 35, who returned from Berlin.
“I thought that once I got to Syria, everything would be better, but in reality everything here is so very painful,” she said. “I walk down the street and remember that I had passed by that same corner with my dad” years before.
Since reaching Damascus she has scoured defunct security service branches, prisons, morgues and hospitals, hoping to glean any information about her long-lost father.
“You can see the fatigue on people’s faces” everywhere, said Mustafa, who works as a communications manager for the Syria Campaign, a rights group.

Members of the security forces of Syria's new administration inspect the Saydnaya prison in Damascus on January 3, 2025. The prison is infamous for its inhumane conditions and its central role in the violent repression carried out by the clan of the ousted Syian president Bashar al-Assad. (AFP)

In 2021, she was invited to testify at the United Nations about the fate of Syria’s disappeared.
The rebels who toppled Assad freed thousands of detainees nearly 14 years into a civil war that killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions.
Mustafa returned to Branch 215, one of Syria’s most notorious prisons run by military intelligence, where she herself had been detained simply for participating in pro-democracy protests in 2011.
She found documents there mentioning her father. “That’s already a start,” Mustafa said.
Now, she “wants the truth” and plans to continue searching for answers in Syria.
“I only dream of a grave, of having a place to go to in the morning to talk to my father,” she said. “Graves have become our biggest dream.”

In Damascus, Mustafa took part in a protest demanding justice for the disappeared and answers about their fate.

Syrian activist and former refugee Ayat Ahmad (C) lifts a placard as she attends a demonstration in Damascus on January 1, 2025. (AFP)

Youssef Sammawi, 29, was there too. He held up a picture of his cousin, whose arrest and beating in 2012 prompted Sammawi to flee for Germany.
A few years later, he identified his cousin’s corpse among the 55,000 images by a former military photographer codenamed “Caesar,” who defected and made the images public.
The photos taken between 2011 and 2013, authenticated by experts, show thousands of bodies tortured and starved to death in Syrian prisons.
“The joy I felt gave way to pain when I returned home, without being able to see my cousin,” Sammawi said.
He said his uncle had also been arrested and then executed after he went to see his son in the hospital.
“When I returned, it was the first time I truly realized that they were no longer there,” he said with sadness in his voice.
“My relatives had gotten used to their absence, but not me,” he added. “We demand that justice be served, to alleviate our suffering.”

A boy runs after a sheep next to tanks that belonged to the ousted Assad government, parked in front of a destroyed building in Palmyra, Syria, on Jan. 25, 2025. (AP)

While Assad’s fall allowed many to end their exile and seek answers, others are hesitant.
Fadwa Mahmoud, 70, told AFP she has had no news of her son and her husband, both opponents of the Assad government arrested upon arrival at Damascus airport in 2012.
She fled to Germany a year later and co-founded the Families For Freedom human rights group.
She said she has no plans to return to Syria just yet.
“No one really knows what might happen, so I prefer to stay cautious,” she said.
Mahmoud said she was disappointed that Syria’s new authorities, who pledged justice for victims of atrocities under Assad’s rule, “are not yet taking these cases seriously.”
She said Syria’s new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa “has yet to do anything for missing Syrians,” yet “met Austin Tice’s mother two hours” after she arrived in the Syrian capital.
Tice is an American journalist missing in Syria since 2012.
Sharaa “did not respond” to requests from relatives of missing Syrians to meet him, Mahmoud said.
“The revolution would not have succeeded without the sacrifices of our detainees,” she said.
 


Deal reached to release more Israeli hostages and allow Palestinians into north Gaza

Updated 27 January 2025
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Deal reached to release more Israeli hostages and allow Palestinians into north Gaza

  • Israel confirms Qatar's announcement, says Gazans can now return home from 7 a.m. Monday
  • Netanyahu's office said that another six hostages would be released in the coming week, after talks with Hamas

DOHA/JERUSALEM/GAZA CITY: Mediator Qatar announced early Monday that an agreement has been reached to release an Israeli civilian hostage and allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, easing the first major crisis of the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Qatar’s statement said Hamas will hand over the civilian hostage, Arbel Yehoud, along with two other hostages before Friday. And on Monday, Israeli authorities will allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement said the hostage release — which will include soldier Agam Berger — will take place on Thursday, and confirmed that Palestinians can move north on Monday. Israel’s military said people can start crossing on foot at 7 a.m.
Under the ceasefire deal, Israel on Saturday was to begin allowing Palestinians to return to their homes in northern Gaza. But Israel put that on hold because of Yehoud, who Israel said should have been released on Saturday. Hamas accused Israel of violating the agreement.

Netanyahu's office said that another six hostages would be released in the coming week, after talks with Hamas. Three would be released on Thursday and another three on Saturday, said a statement from his office.

The breakthrough preserves a fragile ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, which has devastated the Gaza Strip and displaced nearly all its residents, paving the way for more hostage-prisoner swaps under a deal aimed at ending the more than 15-month conflict.
Israel had been preventing vast crowds of Palestinians from using a coastal road to return to northern Gaza, accusing Hamas of violating the truce agreement by failing to release civilian women hostages.
“Hamas has backtracked and will carry out an additional phase of releasing hostages this Thursday,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

Trump’s plan meets mixed reactions

Palestinian leaders meanwhile slammed a plan floated by US President Donald Trump to “clean out” Gaza, vowing to resist any effort to forcibly displace residents of the war-battered territory.
Trump said Gaza had become a “demolition site,” adding he had spoken to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about moving Palestinians out.
“I’d like Egypt to take people. And I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump told reporters.
Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, who is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, “expressed strong rejection and condemnation of any projects” aimed at displacing Palestinians from Gaza, his office said.
Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told AFP that Palestinians would “foil such projects,” as they have done to similar plans “for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades.”
Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas in Gaza, called Trump’s idea “deplorable.”
For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.
“We say to Trump and the whole world: we will not leave Palestine or Gaza, no matter what happens,” said displaced Gaza resident Rashad Al-Naji.

Trump floated the idea to reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One: “You’re talking about probably a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”
Moving Gaza’s roughly 2.4 million inhabitants could be done “temporarily or could be long term,” he said.
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who opposed the truce deal and has voiced support for re-establishing Israeli settlements in Gaza — called Trump’s suggestion of “a great idea.”

Tantamount to ‘ethnic cleansing’

The Arab League rejected the idea, warning against “attempts to uproot the Palestinian people from their land.”
“The forced displacement and eviction of people from their land can only be called ethnic cleansing,” the league said in a statement.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said “our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”
Egypt’s foreign ministry said it rejected any infringement of Palestinians’ “inalienable rights.”
In Gaza, cars and carts loaded with belongings jammed a road near the Netzarim Corridor that Israel has blocked, preventing the expected return of hundreds of thousands of people to northern Gaza.
Israel had said it would prevent Palestinians’ passage until the release of Arbel Yehud, a civilian woman hostage. She is among those slated for return on Thursday, according to Netanyahu’s office.
Hamas said that blocking returns to the north also amounted to a truce violation, adding it had provided “all the necessary guarantees” for Yehud’s release.
Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee said Monday that residents would be allowed to return on foot starting at 07 a.m. (0500 GMT) and by car at 9 a.m.

Staggered releases

During the first phase of the Gaza truce, 33 hostages are supposed to be freed in staggered releases over six weeks in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
The most recent swap saw four Israeli women hostages, all soldiers, and 200 prisoners, nearly all Palestinian, released Saturday — the second such exchange during the fragile truce entering its second week.
Dani Miran, whose hostage son Omri is not slated for release during the first phase, demonstrated outside Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem on Sunday.
“We want the agreement to continue and for them to bring our children back as quickly as possible — and all at once,” he said.
The truce has brought a surge of food, fuel, medicines and other aid into rubble-strewn Gaza, but the UN says “the humanitarian situation remains dire.”
Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack that ignited the war, 87 remain in Gaza, including 34 the military says are dead.
The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 47,306 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.
 


Trump’s Palestinian refugee idea falls flat with Jordan and confounds a Senate ally

Updated 27 January 2025
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Trump’s Palestinian refugee idea falls flat with Jordan and confounds a Senate ally

  • Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel but support the creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, territories that Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War
  • Both Egypt and Jordan also have perpetually struggling economies and their governments, as well as those of other Arab states, fear massive destabilization of their own countries and the region from any such influx of refugees

DORAL, Florida: President Donald Trump’s push to have Egypt and Jordan take in large numbers of Palestinian refugees from besieged Gaza fell flat with those countries’ governments and left a key congressional ally in Washington perplexed on Sunday.
Fighting that broke out in the territory after ruling Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023 is paused due to a fragile ceasefire, but much of Gaza’s population has been left largely homeless by an Israeli military campaign. Trump told reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One that moving some 1.5 million people away from Gaza might mean that “we just clean out that whole thing.”
Trump relayed what he told Jordan’s King Abdullah when the two held a call earlier Saturday: “I said to him, ‘I’d love for you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess.’”
He said he was making a similar appeal to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi during a conversation they were having while Trump was at his Doral resort in Florida on Sunday. Trump said he would “like Egypt to take people and I’d like Jordan to take people.”
Egypt and Jordan, along with the Palestinians, worry that Israel would never allow them to return to Gaza once they have left. Both Egypt and Jordan also have perpetually struggling economies and their governments, as well as those of other Arab states, fear massive destabilization of their own countries and the region from any such influx of refugees.
Jordan already is home to more than 2 million Palestinian refugees. Egypt has warned of the security implications of transferring large numbers of Palestinians to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, bordering Gaza.
Trump suggested that resettling most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million could be temporary or long term.
Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said Sunday that his country’s opposition to what Trump floated was “firm and unwavering.” Some Israel officials had raised the idea early in the war.
Egypt’s foreign minister issued a statement saying that the temporary or long-term transfer of Palestinians “risks expanding the conflict in the region.”
Trump does have leverage to wield over Jordan, which is a debt-strapped, but strategically important, US ally and is heavily dependent on foreign aid. The US is historically the single-largest provider of that aid, including more than $1.6 billion through the State Department in 2023.
Much of that comes as support for Jordan’s security forces and direct budget support.
Jordan in return has been a vital regional partner to the US in trying to help keep the region stable. Jordan hosts some 3,000 US troops. Yet, on Friday, new Secretary of State Marco Rubio exempted security assistance to Israel and Egypt but not to Jordan, when he laid out the details of a freeze on foreign assistance that Trump ordered on his first day in office.
Meantime, in the United States, even Trump loyalists tried to make sense of his words.
“I really don’t know,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, when asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” about what Trump meant by the ”clean out” remark. Graham, who is close to Trump, said the suggestion was not feasible.
“The idea that all the Palestinians are going to leave and go somewhere else, I don’t see that to be overly practical,” said Graham, R-S.C. He said Trump should keep talking to Mideast leaders, including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and officials in the United Arab Emirates.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about. But go talk to MBS, go talk to UAE, go talk to Egypt,” Graham said. “What is their plan for the Palestinians? Do they want them all to leave?”
Trump, a staunch supporter of Israel, also announced Saturday that he had directed the US to release a supply of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. Former President Joe Biden had imposed a hold due to concerns about their effects on Gaza’s civilian population.
Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel but support the creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, territories that Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War. They fear that the permanent displacement of Gaza’s population could make that impossible.
In making his case for such a massive population shift, Trump said Gaza is “literally a demolition site right now.”
“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations, and build housing in a different location,” he said of people displaced in Gaza. “Where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”
 

 


Syria monitor says 35 people summarily executed in three days

Updated 27 January 2025
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Syria monitor says 35 people summarily executed in three days

  • Most of those executed are former officers in the toppled Assad government who had presented themselves in centers set up by the new authorities, according to the Britain-based monitor with a network of sources inside Syria

DAMASCUS: Fighters affiliated with Syria’s new Islamist leaders have carried out 35 summary executions over 72 hours, mostly of Assad-era officers, a war monitor said Sunday.
The authorities, installed by the rebel forces that toppled longtime president Bashar Assad last month, said they had carried out multiple arrests in the western Homs area over unspecified “violations.”
Official news agency SANA said the authorities on Friday accused members of a “criminal group” who used a security sweep to commit abuses against residents, “posing as members of the security services.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said that “these arrests follow grave violations and summary executions that had cost the lives of 35 people over the past 72 hours.”
It also said that “members of religious minorities” had suffered “humiliations.”
Most of those executed are former officers in the toppled Assad government who had presented themselves in centers set up by the new authorities, according to the Britain-based monitor with a network of sources inside Syria.
“Dozens of members of local armed groups under the control of the new Sunni Islamist coalition in power who participated in the security operations” in the Homs area “have been arrested,” the Observatory said.
It added that these groups “carried out reprisals and settled old scores with members of the Alawite minority to which Bashar Assad belongs, taking advantage of the state of chaos, the proliferations of arms and their ties to the new authorities.”
The Observatory listed “mass arbitrary arrests, atrocious abuse, attacks against religious symbols, mutilations of corpses, summary and brutal executions targeting civilians,” which it said showed “an unprecedented level of cruelty and violence.”
Civil Peace Group, a civil society organization, said in a statement that there had been civilian victims in multiple villages in the Homs area during the security sweep.
The group “condemned the unjustified violations” including the killing of unarmed men.
Since seizing power, the new authorities have sought to reassure religious and ethnic minorities in Syria that their rights would be upheld.
Members of Assad’s Alawite minority have expressed fear of retaliation over abuses during his clan’s decades in power.