A new report released on Friday by the United Nations Human Rights Council charged the Syrian regime with committing war crimes in the last seven months, including by bombing schools and water supplies.
In October, planes executed a so-called “double tap attack” on a school complex near Idlib, bombing a school and then striking the area again after aid workers came to rescue civilians from the wreckage. Twenty-one children and 15 adults were killed, with more than 100 wounded.
Two months later, Syrian jets twice bombed a spring outside Damascus in December, damaging structures and thereby cutting off the water supply for 5.5 million people.
“We are speaking of a daily massacre going on for six years,” Mazen Darwish, a Syrian lawyer freed in 2015 after three years in jail, told the council.
“Today in a sense the entire country has become a torture-chamber; a place of savage horror and absolute injustice,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said on Tuesday. He called for the release of tens of thousands of detainees from Syria’s prisons, and for torturers and executioners to be brought to justice.
Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the Human Rights Council’s commission investigating Syria, stated when releasing last year’s report that the Syrian government’s actions “amount to extermination as a crime against humanity.” The UN also formally accused Assad in February 2016 of carrying out the “extermination” of prisoners.
A report released last week by the group Physicians for Human Rights charged the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with was also committing war crimes by diverting international aid from the populations it was intended for. The Assad regime has often used such sieges as a tactic against civilians since the civil war began in 2011. NGOs reported in July that around 65 people in the beseiged city of Madaya died of starvation since siege began a year earlier.
The Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an independent group operating in Europe, has begun collecting evidence of war crimes committed by the Assad regime. The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution last year calling for a war crimes tribunal to prosecute Assad and his allies, including Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah.
[Photo: euronews (in English) / YouTube ]