adminThe group urged the United Nations Security Council to refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and to impose sanctions against officials implicated in the report.
Those named should be investigated “for their command responsibility for crimes against humanity,” the report said.
Senior officials mentioned include Imad Dawoud Rajiha, the country’s defence minister; Imad Fahed al-Jasem el-Freij, the army chief of staff; and the heads of various intelligence agencies, Abdul Fatah Kudsiyeh, Jamil Hassan and Ali Mamlouk.
Syria’s government has not yet responded to the report.
The report is based on more than 60 interviews conducted with defectors from the Syrian military and intelligence services.
“Defectors gave us names, ranks, and positions of those who gave the orders to shoot and kill, and each and every official named in this report, up to the very highest levels of the Syrian government, should answer for their crimes against the Syrian people,” said Anna Neistat of Human Rights Watch, one of the authors of the report.
The UN says more than 5 000 have died in the uprising but can the figures be accurately assessed?
The defectors’ statements suggested that their commanders had given them orders to control the largely peaceful protests “by all means necessary” during regular briefings and prior to deployments.
They said that they understood this phrase to be an authorisation of lethal force, an understanding bolstered by the fact that they were issued live ammunition rather than rubber bullets or other means of crowd control.
The rights group says that about half of the former soldiers and officials it spoke to had been given direct orders to fire on protesters.
Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has termed the situation in Syria “intolerable”, putting the death toll since March at more than 5 000. The Syrian government has disputed this figure, saying the country is the victim of a “huge conspiracy”, according to its ambassador to the UN.
The government has consistently said that the violence is the result of “armed groups” sowing unrest and attacking security forces.
HRW said it had documented “several incidents” where anti-government demonstrators or neighbourhood groups had engaged in violence, and that attacks on Syrian security forces by defectors had increased significantly since September. In the latest such incident, 27 members of the Syrian military and security forces were killed in a series of clashes in the restive province of Deraa yesterday.
Defectors also told HRW of their involvement in “large-scale arbitrary arrests” during protests and at checkpoints, in addition to carrying out “sweep” operations in neighbourhoods across the country.
They said that they had routinely beaten and mistreated detainees, including with electric cattle prods, and that they were encouraged to do so by their commanders. — Al Jazeera.
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