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  1. #1
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    Syria

    Syria tries to crush revolt with death penalty for ‘terrorists’

    Syria’s state-run news agency says President Bashar Assad has issued a new law under which anyone found guilty of distributing weapons for “terrorist acts” would be sentenced to death.

    The Syrian government claims armed gangs and terrorists are behind the nine-month uprising against Assad’s rule. Government opponents deny that and say they are protesters seeking more freedoms in one of the most authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.

    SANA said Tuesday that according to the new law, anyone found guilty of weapons smuggling would be handed sentences ranging from 15 years to life imprisonment. Those smuggling and distributing weapons with the aim of carrying out terrorist acts would be sentenced to death.

    http://www.thestar.com/news/world/ar...for-terrorists

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    Man, woman stoned to death for adultery in Syria

    A man and a woman have been stoned to death for adultery in separate executions in jihadist-controlled areas of Syria, a monitoring group reported on Tuesday.

    The man was executed in Idlib province in an area controlled by Islamist groups including the Nusra Front, al Qaeda's official affiliate in Syria, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks violence on all sides of Syria's civil war.

    It is the 1st documented case of a man being stoned to death for adultery since Syria descended into civil war in 2011 and hardline Islamic groups emerged as powerful players in areas that slipped from government control, the Observatory said.

    The woman was executed in Hama province in an area controlled by Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot that has seized swathes of Syria and Iraq and is being targeted by U.S.-led air strikes, the Observatory said.

    A video posted online appeared to show her execution. A bearded fighter is shown passing down the sentence in the presence of other gunmen and her father, who appears to approve of her execution.

    Her hands and feet are then tied with a rope and she is forced to kneel in a pit. Covered head to toe, she begins to pray out loud as large rocks are seen striking her body. The video shows the logo of Islamic State.

    The 2 incidents, which Reuters could not independently verify, appear to be unrelated.

    The woman's execution was the 3rd of its kind in Islamic State-run territories in Syria, according to the Observatory.

    Islamic State controls around a third of Syria and Iraq after having acquired new territory with lightening speed earlier this year. It quickly established a fierce reputation by crucifying, beheading and carrying out public executions of anyone deemed a threat to its rule.

    Islamic State routinely carries out sentences of lashing against men in territories it rules for offences that range from adultery and subversion to blasphemy and missing prayer time.

    In July, Islamic State stoned 2 women to death under similar circumstances to the Hama stoning. One was of a 26-year-old widow, according to the Observatory.

    Syrian society is unaccustomed to sentences like stoning and lashing. For decades, the country was ruled by a government that implemented a mixture of Islamic and secular laws. Offences such as adultery were rarely prosecuted.

    The fighter overseeing the woman's execution appears to lay the blame for her crime on her husband, suggesting he had been absent. He urges "all men to treat women well" before the stoning begins.

    "Do not leave women. Do not be absent from them for longer than the time period permitted (by Islamic law). Return to God, brothers. And take good care of women," he says.

    At one point he addresses the woman as "honorable sister", and asks her for final words. "I advise every woman to protect her honor more than her life," she says. And I ask every man, before he marries off his daughter, to scrutinize her new marital environment. That�s all," she says in a faint voice.

    It is not clear exactly when the video was shot, or how the woman was found guilty of adultery - a conviction that would require at least 4 witnesses according to Islamic law.

    (Source: Reuters)
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Horan Courthouse executes two men who killed a woman and stole her gold and jewelry in the countryside of Daraa

    The activists of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights were informed by reliable sources that Horan Courthouse carried out the death sentence on two people in the town of al-Hrak (al-Hrak is a rebel controlled town), on charges of “killing a lady in the town after stealing her gold and jewelry”, both men were shot from behind.

    http://www.syriahr.com/en/?p=44067
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Nearly 18,000 have died in Syria state jails, says Amnesty

    Nearly 18,000 people have died in government prisons in Syria since the beginning of the uprising in 2011, according to Amnesty International.

    A new report by the charity, based on interviews with 65 "torture survivors", details systematic use of rape and beatings by prison guards.

    Former detainees described so-called welcome parties - ritual beatings using metal bars and electric cables.

    The Syrian government has repeatedly denied such allegations.

    The report estimates that 17,723 people died in custody across Syria between March 2011, when the uprising against President Bashar Assad began, and December 2015 - equivalent to about 10 people each day or more than 300 a month.

    According to the report, new detainees are subjected to "security checks" that often involve women being sexually assaulted by male guards.

    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37113748
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  5. #5
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Translated and Edited

    Hezbollah Executes 23 Members of a Syrian Militia for refusing to deploy in Daraa

    Orient News

    According to private special sources, 23 members of the Ninth Division's soldiers, located in al-Sanamayn, Rif Dara'a, have been executed by Raed (Waseem Khdour) of Hezbollah militia.

    The reporter explained that the cause of the executions was the refusal of Assad's sectarian militia to board cars that would have taken them to Dara'a through the death Bridge west of Khirbat Ghazala town.

    On the other hand, the Assad sectarian militia closed the Khirbat Ghazala checkpoint, preventing civilians from crossing into Damascus or nearby villages.

    The Asad al-sectarian militia also closed down all the barricades and crossings leading to dar'a areas in the face of civilians, with the exception of students and personnel, and this also applies to all crossings leading to Suwayda or to areas of control of the Assad militia on the Damascus-Dar'a road.

    In the meantime, clashes between the warring factions and the al-sectarian militia are continuing on the outskirts of the deserted al-Fatah battalion, where the guerrilla factions targeted the militia in the battalion and the Khirbat Ghazala checkpoint, directly injuring investigators.

    On Monday night, military factions announced the targeting of a military column of the Assad sectarian militia while trying to get into Dar'a station, which led to heavy casualties among the militia and forced them to return to their controlled city of planting.

    http://www.orient-news.net/ar/news_s...عا

  6. #6
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    Syria's once-teeming prison cells being emptied by mass murder

    By LOUISA LOVELUCK AND ZAKARIA ZAKARIA
    The Washington Post

    BEIRUT — As Syria's government consolidates control after years of civil war, President Bashar al-Assad's army is doubling down on executions of political prisoners, with military judges accelerating the pace they issue death sentences, according to survivors of the country's most notorious prison.

    In interviews, dozens of Syrians recently released from the Sednaya military prison in Damascus described a government campaign to clear the decks of political detainees. The former inmates said prisoners are being transferred from jails across Syria to join death-row detainees in Sednaya's basement and then be executed in pre-dawn hangings.

    Yet despite these transfers, the population of Sednaya's once-packed cells — which at their peak held an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 inmates — has dwindled largely because of the unyielding executions, and at least one section of the prison is now almost entirely empty, the former detainees said.

    Some of the former prisoners had themselves been sentenced to hang, escaping that fate only after relatives paid tens of thousands of dollars to secure their freedom.

    Others described overhearing conversations between guards relating to the transfer of prisoners to their death. The men all spoke on the condition that their full names not be disclosed out of fear for their families' safety.

    According to two former detainees who have passed through the Damascus field court, located inside the capital's military police headquarters, the rate of death sentences has accelerated over the past year as the attitudes of court officials hardened.

    These two men had each appeared twice before a military field court judge, once earlier in the war and once this year, and were able to compare the way this secretive court operates.

    "There was no room for leniency on my second visit," one man said. "Almost everyone in that room was sentenced to death. They were reading the sentences aloud."

    Even before they reach the gallows, many prisoners die of malnutrition, medical neglect or physical abuse, often after a psychological breakdown, the former detainees said.

    One former prisoner said guards had forced a metal pipe down the throat of a cellmate from the Damascus suburb of Darayya.

    "They pinned him to the wall with it and then left him to die. His body lay among us all night," said Abu Hussein, 30, a mechanic from the western province of Homs. Another described how prisoners in his own cell had been forced to kick to death a man from the southern city of Daraa.

    Satellite imagery of the Sednaya prison grounds taken in March shows an accumulation of dozens of dark objects that experts said were consistent with human bodies. The imagery was obtained by The Washington Post, which asked forensic experts to review it.

    "Present in the imagery from March 1st and March 4th of the prison, there are dark elongated objects, similar to each other, measuring approximately five to six feet in length," said Isaac Baker, imagery analysis manager at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative's Signal Program on Human Security and Technology. "While analysis and available data does not prove, it does corroborate, and is consistent with, eyewitness accounts of mass executions at this facility."

    Two former detainees held in cells nearest to the guardroom in their prison wing describe overhearing conversations between their jailers regarding executions in early March. "They were talking about a set of prisoners' bodies that had been moved to the yard," one man said.

    Other satellite imagery of military land near Damascus, previously identified by Amnesty International as a location of mass graves, appears to show an increase in the number of burial pits and headstones in at least one cemetery there since the start of the year.

    Defectors who worked in the military prison system said this area, located south of the capital, is the likely location for the mass burial of Sednaya prisoners.

    In the cemetery on the road running south from Damascus, dozens of new burial pits and headstones have appeared since the winter.

    After seven years of war, more than 100,000 Syrian detainees remain unaccounted for. According to the United Nations and human rights groups, thousands, if not tens of thousands, are probably dead.

    Although all sides in the conflict have arrested, disappeared and killed prisoners, the Syrian Network for Human Rights monitoring group estimates that as many as 90 percent have been held across a network of government jails, where torture, starvation and other forms of lethal neglect are used systematically and to kill.

    At one point, Sednaya alone held as many as 20,000 inmates, according to Amnesty International.

    The Syrian government did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

    Former detainees recently released from Sednaya - interviewed in the Turkish cities of Istanbul, Gaziantep, Antakya and Siverek, as well as on the phone - say that guards enforced near-total silence among the prisoners, who sleep under blankets infested with mites and ticks on stone floors sticky with bodily fluids. "When you are in Sednaya, you cannot think of anything, you can't even speak to yourself. The beatings are torture. The silence is torture," said Mohamed, 28.

    He described the cellmates he had left behind as "caged animals."

    "Some had their spirits completely broken, and others just became manic and crazed," he said. "Death would be a mercy for them. It's all they're waiting for."

    Although execution days vary, Sednaya's former prisoners say the guards most commonly tour the cells on Tuesday afternoons, calling out names from lists.

    "You knew they were coming when they banged on the metal door and started screaming at us to turn around. Everyone would scramble to the wall and stand as still as they could," one former inmate said. "Then you just stood there and prayed they didn't pull you away."

    In Mohamed's case, that is exactly what they did. With a T-shirt pulled over his head, the former student was yanked out of his cell and taken to the basement death row, being beaten as he stumbled downstairs. He recalled being surrounded by the screams of others.

    He and other inmates were pushed into a cramped cell and stripped naked before the guards left, slamming the metal door behind them. The prisoners were kept there for a week.

    Even more prisoners were jammed into an adjacent cell. They included Hassan, 29, a farmer who had been transferred to Sednaya from a civilian prison in the southern city of Sweida. Sitting up all night and waiting for death, the men talked in low whispers, sharing their life stories, as well as their regrets.

    "It was dark in there, but what I could see of their faces was pure terror," Hassan said. "Eventually everyone stopped talking."

    Yet when guards came to take prisoners, neither Mohamed nor Hassan had their names called. They would later learn that their families had paid tens of thousands of dollars to a government-connected middleman - part of a network that has sprung up during the war to provide families with news of detained relatives and at times help release them in return for vast sums of money.

    The reported spike in death sentences comes as the fate of Syria's wartime detainees is being discussed at peace talks in the Kazakh capital, Astana. With Syria's rebel forces cornered in the far northwest of the country and all but defeated, officials from Russia, Turkey and Iran are trying to negotiate an end to the conflict.

    The Syrian government, meanwhile, has been issuing death notices for political prisoners at an unprecedented rate. The practice began accelerating in January and, in many cases, appears to confirm that detainees had been dead since the early years of the conflict.

    In a report released last month, the U.N. body established to investigate war crimes in Syria said that the mass release of death notices amounts to an admission by the government that it has been responsible for the deaths of prisoners whose detention it had denied for years.

    "We think it must be linked, obviously, to the state beginning to look ahead beyond the conflict - to feeling like 'our existence is no longer completely under threat and we have to look ahead at how do we deal with the population at large,'" said Hanny Megally, a lead investigator with the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria. "People are demanding now more information about what happened, why, where. Where are the bodies?"

    In interviews, former prisoners offered a rare window into the workings of the military field court, where the accused appear without lawyers and charge sheets are often the product of torture. Detainees arrive cuffed and blindfolded. Their trials rarely last longer than three minutes.

    In some cases, the recent executions in Sednaya were based on sentences handed down years ago. What has changed, former detainees say, is the haste with which new ones are being issued.

    Once the prisoners are hanged, their bodies are usually carried straight from the execution room to a waiting truck or car and then transported for registration at a military hospital before being buried in the mass graves on military land, according to Amnesty International.

    Mohamed and Hassan were among those who dodged that fate. After years of what they described as torture and extreme neglect, leaving both with scars and severe health issues, both made it across the border to Turkey earlier this year.

    As Hassan crossed from Syrian-held territory into a final rebel stronghold close to the Turkish border, the smugglers guiding his group mistakenly steered it into a minefield, and his leg was blown off. He still screams in his sleep.

    "The Sednaya memories cannot easily be forgotten," he said. "Most of my cellmates are dead now. I keep thinking of the people who are still there."

    https://www.stripes.com/news/middle-...urder-1.561895

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    Gardai believe Irish citizen arrested for fighting for IS in Syria ‘facing execution’

    Alexandr Ruzmatovich Bekmirzaev, 45, was one of five men detained by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in the east of the country on December 30

    By Stephen Breen
    The Irish Sun

    AN Irish citizen arrested fighting for IS in Syria could face the death penalty there, gardai believe.

    Alexandr Ruzmatovich Bekmirzaev, 45, was one of five men detained by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in the east of the country on December 30.

    Bekmirzaev, originally from Belarus, moved to Ireland in 2000 but left in 2013 when he took his family to the Middle East. He was an associate of a Jordanian man deported from Ireland in 2016. The State had dubbed him the “main recruiter of Islamic State in Ireland”.

    Gardai, who trailed Bekmirzaev for months following his radicalisation, also believe he was pals with suicide bomb flop Khalid Kelly, who blew himself up in March 2016.

    Cops expect Bekmirzaev will now face an extended spell in a Syrian prison, or even face the death penalty at the hands of the US-backed Kurdish-Arab Syrian Democratic Forces.

    A source said: “He will spend some time in prison there — you can be sure of that. He could even face the death penalty. It’s hard to know at this stage.”

    Kurdish officials are desperate to send captured fighters back to their home countries to stand trial as Kurdish *prisons and *displacement camps housing suspected IS fighters and their families are already *overstretched.

    Abdel Karim Omar, co-chair of the Kurdish administrative centre in Syria, said: “Each country must be pressurised to repatriate its own citizens, and prosecute them on their own soil.”

    Bekmirzaev, who could face ten years in jail if convicted here, was on a garda watch-list and under constant surveillance. However, he was seen as “harmless” during his stay here.

    Our source added: “He was never not getting any attention in Ireland once he had been radicalised.

    “He was harmless while here but that changed when the Jordanian and Kelly started chipping away at him.

    “Once he was radicalised, he was mad to get away and go off and fight.

    “If anything, he is a good example of how a normal person can be radicalised by dangerous preachers.”

    https://www.thesun.ie/news/3621498/i...ighting-syria/

  8. #8
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    Syrian President issues general amnesty for all prisoners

    By Almasdar News

    Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday issued Legislative Decree No. 6 for the year 2020 granting a general amnesty for crimes committed before March 22, 2020.

    The decree expanded the range of amnesty for some crimes that were not covered in previous decrees.

    This new decree will commute the sentences of prisoners who were facing the death penalty and several years in prison.

    Prisoners facing the death penalty will not have their sentences commuted to life in prison, while those sentenced to life in prison will now see their prison time reduced to 20 years in prison.

    A similar decree was made in the past; however, this new amnesty bill has expanded on the previous one.

    https://www.almasdarnews.com/article...all-prisoners/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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    Syria says 24 executed for starting wildfires

    Justice ministry says those executed were ‘criminals’ responsible for the deaths and damage to infrastructure and public property.

    aljazeera.com

    Syria has executed 24 people after charging them with igniting wildfires last year that left three people dead and burned thousands of hectares (acres) of forests, the justice ministry said.

    Although executions are common in war-torn Syria, the number of those put to death on Wednesday was larger than usual.

    Those executed were charged with “committing terrorist acts that led to death and damage to state infrastructure and public and private property through the use of flammable material”, the justice ministry said in a statement carried by state media on Thursday.

    Eleven others were sentenced to hard labour for life, four to temporary penal labour and five minors were handed jail sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years for similar charges, it added.

    Their identities were not disclosed, and no details were provided on where and how the executions took place.

    The suspects, the ministry said, were identified late last year in an interior ministry probe into wildfires in the provinces of Latakia, Tartus and Homs.

    “They confessed that they had started fires at several locations in the three provinces and they also confessed to convening meetings to plan the fires” that occurred intermittently in September and October 2020, according to the justice ministry.

    It said it documented 187 fires affecting 280 towns and villages last year.

    They devastated 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres) of agricultural land and 11,000 hectares of forest land, while also damaging more than 370 homes, the justice ministry said.

    President Bashar al-Assad’s hometown of Qardaha in Latakia province was hard hit by the fires, which heavily damaged a building used as storage for the state-owned tobacco company, part of which collapsed.

    Al-Assad made a rare visit to the region shortly after the fire was brought under control.

    Syria Researcher at Human Rights Watch Sara Kayyali told Al Jazeera that the news of the 24 executions was “shocking”.

    “What we know from the counterterrorism courts from the cases that we’ve seen in the past is that there is no due process afforded for anyone who is accused of an act of terrorism – no right to a defence and no lawyer” Kayyali said.

    “This action by the Syrian government really signals how far we have to go to reform the system before any Syrian is safe.”

    Syrian law still provides for the death penalty for offences including terrorism, arson and army desertion, according to rights group Amnesty International.

    In its latest death penalty report published this year, Amnesty said it was able to corroborate information indicating that executions took place in Syria in 2020 but said it did not have sufficient information to give a reliable minimum figure.

    The death penalty is usually carried out by hanging in Syria.

    Syria Researcher at Amnesty International Diana Semaan told Al Jazeera that confessions are “routinely extracted under torture or other ill-treatment and duress”.

    Syria’s decade-old conflict has left hundreds of thousands dead and displaced half the country’s population, including five million refugees outside the country.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/...ting-wildfires

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