• Friday, December 16, 2011
• Inter Press Service

More than 70 Syrian army commanders and officials have been named by former soldiers as having ordered attacks on unarmed protesters in that country, says the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.

The rights watchdog's report names 74 commanders and military and intelligence officials as having allegedly 'ordered, authorised, or condoned widespread killings , torture, and unlawful arrests' during the country's nine-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's government.

The group urged the United Nations Security Council to refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and to impose sanctions against officials implicated in the report. Those named should be investigated 'for their command responsibility for crimes against humanity,' the report said.

Senior officials mentioned include Imad Dawoud Rajiha, the country's defence minister; Imad Fahed al-Jasem el-Freij, the army chief of staff; and the heads of various intelligence agencies, Abdul Fatah Kudsiyeh, Jamil Hassan and Ali Mamlouk. Syria's government has not yet responded to the report. The report is based on more than 60 interviews conducted with defectors from the Syrian military and intelligence services.

'Defectors gave us names, ranks, and positions of those who gave the orders to shoot and kill, and each and every official named in this report, up to the very highest levels of the Syrian government, should answer for their crimes against the Syrian people,' said Anna Neistat of HRW, one of the authors of the report.

The United Nations says more than 5,000 have died in the uprising. But the question is, to what extent can the figures be accurately assessed? The defectors' statements suggested that their commanders had given them orders to control the largely peaceful protests 'by all means necessary' during regular briefings and prior to deployments.

They said that they understood this phrase to be an authorisation of lethal force, an understanding bolstered by the fact that they were issued live ammunition rather than rubber bullets or other means of crowd control. The rights group says that about half of the former soldiers and officials it spoke to had been given direct orders to fire on protesters.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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