UN Report: Syria Experiences Wave of Violence Not Seen Since 2020

This aerial picture shows people shopping at a market in the town of Ariha, in Syria's northwestern Idlib province, on the first day of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan on March 11, 2024. (Photo by Aaref WATAD / AFP)
This aerial picture shows people shopping at a market in the town of Ariha, in Syria's northwestern Idlib province, on the first day of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan on March 11, 2024. (Photo by Aaref WATAD / AFP)
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UN Report: Syria Experiences Wave of Violence Not Seen Since 2020

This aerial picture shows people shopping at a market in the town of Ariha, in Syria's northwestern Idlib province, on the first day of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan on March 11, 2024. (Photo by Aaref WATAD / AFP)
This aerial picture shows people shopping at a market in the town of Ariha, in Syria's northwestern Idlib province, on the first day of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan on March 11, 2024. (Photo by Aaref WATAD / AFP)

Syria is experiencing a wave of violence not seen since 2020, the UN Syria Commission of Inquiry warned in a report. It said that across multiple frontlines, parties to the conflict have attacked civilians and infrastructure in ways likely amounting to war crimes.

“Since October, Syria has seen the largest escalation in fighting in four years. With the region in turmoil, a determined international effort to contain the fighting on Syrian soil is imperative. Syria, too, desperately needs a ceasefire,” said Paulo Pinheiro, Chair of the Commission.

“The Syrian people cannot sustain any further intensification of this devastating, protracted war,” Pinheiro said. “More than 90% now live in poverty, the economy is in freefall amid tightening sanctions, and increased lawlessness is fueling predatory practices and extortion” by different parties to the conflict.

The upsurge in fighting in Syria started on October 5 when consecutive explosions during a graduation ceremony at a military academy in the government-controlled city of Homs killed at least 63 people, including 37 civilians, and injured scores.

Syrian government and Russian forces responded with bombardments affecting at least 2,300 sites in opposition-controlled areas over just three weeks, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians. “Their indiscriminate attacks, which may amount to war crimes, hit well-known and visible hospitals, schools, markets and camps for internally displaced persons, and have since continued,” said the report.

Since the start of the Gaza onslaught, tensions have increased between some of the six foreign armies active in Syria, notably Israel, Iran and the US - raising concerns of a wider conflict. Israel reportedly struck alleged Iran-linked sites and forces in Syria at least 35 times and attacked the Aleppo and Damascus airports, temporarily halting vital UN humanitarian air services. Pro-Iranian militias reportedly attacked US bases in north-east Syria over 100 times, and the US responded with air strikes against pro-Iranian militias in eastern Syria.

Meanwhile, in northeast Syria, the Turkish military accelerated operations against Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in retaliation for an attack claimed by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Ankara in October. Turkish aerial attacks on power plants deprived nearly one million people of water and electricity for weeks, in violation of international humanitarian law. Civilians were also killed in targeted aerial attacks fitting a pattern of Turkish drone strikes. “Such attacks may amount to war crimes.”

Five years after the fall of Baghuz when ISIS lost its territorial control in Syria, “almost 30,000 children are still held in internment camps, prisons or rehabilitation centers in northeast Syria,” Commissioner Lynn Welchman said. “These children were already victimized during ISISs rule, only to be subjected to years of continued human rights violations and abuses.”

The Commission has concluded that living conditions in Al-Hol and Al-Rawj camps amount to cruel and inhuman treatment and outrages on personal dignity.

“No child should ever be punished for their parents’ actions or beliefs,” Welchman said. “We urge all States to immediately allow all children, including Syrian children, to return home from the camps and take measures to ensure their reintegration into society and accountability for the crimes they have suffered.”

The Commission concluded that 16.7 million inside Syria now require humanitarian assistance, the largest number of people in need since the start of the crisis.

A severe shortfall in donor funds has forced the UN to suspend regular food aid in Syria, placing millions in the grip of hunger. Yet aid deliveries are held hostage to arbitrary decision-making by the Syrian government and hampered by sanctions.



Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

 Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

 Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.