Thousands detained by Assad regime in 2018

The Syrian Network For Human Rights (SNHR) said on Thursday (January 3) that thousands of civilians were arbitrarily detained across Syria in 2018 by the Assad militia and its allies.

The report records 7,706 cases of arbitrary arrest in 2018, at the hands of all the parties to the conflict, including 504 children and 699 women.

SNHR notes that regime militias have carried out arbitrary arrests on a daily basis in Syria since the start of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, detaining people for simply exercising one of their basic rights such as the freedom of opinion and expression.

The report stresses that the Assad regime is responsible for no less than 87% of all arbitrary arrests. 

The report records 7,706 cases of arbitrary arrest in 2018, with 5,607 of these carried out at the hands of Assad Regime militias, including 355 children and 596 women.

The report also shows a distribution of cases of arbitrary arrests by governorate, with Aleppo seeing the largest number of arrests with 87 cases documented.

The report stresses that the UN and the guarantor parties at Astana should form an impartial special committee to monitor cases of arbitrary arrest, and reveal the fate of the 95,000 missing persons in Syria, approximately 86% of whom are detained by the Assad regime. 

Lastly, the report emphasizes that children and women should be released, and families and friends should not be taken as prisoners of war. 

In another report, SNHR announced that 951 individuals died due to torture at the hands of Assad regime in Syria in 2018, including 11 children and two women.