Fighters affiliated with the new Islamist power in Syria have committed 35 summary executions over the past three days, most of them against officers of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, an NGO said on Sunday.
The authorities set up by the Islamist rebels who ousted President Bashar al-Assad last month said they had carried out numerous arrests in the Homs region (west) in recent days.
The official Syrian agency Sana indicated that the authorities had accused on Friday a “criminal group” having committed crimes against the population “while posing as members of the security services”.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, “these arrests follow serious crimes and summary executions which have cost the lives of 35 people in the last 72 hours.” The same NGO claims that “members of religious minorities” have suffered “humiliation”.
Most of those executed are former officers of Bashar al-Assad’s government, who presented themselves in centers set up by the new authorities, according to the NGO based in London and benefiting from a network of observers in Syria.
“Dozens of members of local armed groups under the control of the new Sunni Islamist coalition in power, who had participated in security operations” in the Homs region, “were arrested,” according to the Observatory.
-According to the same source, these groups “carried out reprisals and settled old scores with members of the Alawite minority to which Bashar al-Assad’s clan belongs, taking advantage of the chaos, the abundance of weapons and their links with the new authorities.
The NGO mentioned “mass arbitrary arrests, attacks on religious symbols, mutilation of corpses, summary and brutal executions of civilians” which it said showed “an unprecedented level of cruelty and violence”.
The Civil Group for Peace, a civil society organization, said in a statement that there were civilian casualties in many villages in the Homs region during the change of power. This group denounced in particular the murder of unarmed men.
The new Syrian authorities have sought since coming to power to reassure that they will respect the rights of the country’s religious and ethnic minorities.
Members of the Alawite minority have expressed fear of reprisals for decades of abuses by the Assad clan.
