The London-based rights group said the executions had been carried out in the notorious Saydnaya military prison near Damascus. “The victims are overwhelmingly ordinary civilians who are thought to oppose the government,” Amnesty said in a new report.
The report, which was based on interviews with former detainees there, prison employees, judges and others, said the victims had been killed in “secret extrajudicial executions”, after being held in conditions amounting to enforced disappearance.
“Many other detainees at Saydnaya Military Prison have been killed after being repeatedly tortured and systematically deprived of food, water, medicine and medical care,” it said. Amnesty said the bodies of the victims were buried in mass graves with families not informed of their fate and that the executions have been authorized by officials at the highest level of government.
The rights monitoring group said an average of 20-25 people were hanged each week after sham trials. “They are only told that they have been sentenced to death minutes before the executions are carried out; they are never told when their execution will be carried out; and they do not know how they will die until the nooses are placed around their necks,” it said.
Amnesty said between 5,000 and 13,000 people were executed at Saydnaya between September 2011 and December 2015 and were probably still being carried out. “There is no reason to believe that executions have stopped. Therefore, since December 2015, thousands more people are likely to have been executed,” it said.
Syria has been locked in a devastating civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity. One month ago, a ceasefire deal brokered by Turkey and Russia went into effect throughout war-torn Syria.