Human Rights Group: ‘286 civilians killed in January’

The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) has documented the death of at least 286 civilians, including four medical and civil defence cadres during January 2020, in addition to seven people, who died under torture.

The report issued Saturday indicated that among the documented deaths there are 73 children and 30 women, 111 of whom are civilians killed by the regime forces, including 28 children and 10 women. The Russian forces equally killed 75 civilians, including 31 children and 10 women. Besides, three civilians were killed by Daesh, one civilian by the opposition factions, and four others, including two children and a woman, by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The report also recorded that 92 civilians, including 12 children and nine women, were killed by other parties.

The report also revealed that among the victims was one doctor, who was killed in a bombing. However, the perpetrators were not identified. In addition, three civil defence elements were also killed by the regime forces.

According to the report, last January the SNHR documented that seven people were killed under torture in the Syrian regime’s detention centres.

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The report stated that 11 massacres were documented in January. Thus, six massacres were committed by the Syrian regime forces, three by the Russian forces, and one by a raid, the perpetrators of which have not been identified yet. Another massacre took place when unknown individuals have carried out several executions. The report has employed the term “massacre” to describe any attack that results in the death of at least five peaceful civilians at once.

The 18-page report indicated that the murders were carried out mainly by the forces of the regime and the militias fighting with it, employing a wide and systematic pattern. It added that the process of documenting the victims, who were killed in Syria, became more complicated after the participation of many parties to the Syrian conflict.

The report clarified that the SNHR has built since 2011 complex cyber programs to archive and classify victims data, so that victims can be identified according to their gender, the place in which they were killed, the province to which the victim belongs, and the party responsible for the crime; in addition to identifying the provinces that lost the largest number of victims. Hence, the report has distributed the death toll depending on where the victims were killed, and not depending on the province to which they belong.

The report relied on a continuous process of monitoring incidents and news and on a wide network of contacts with dozens of diverse sources, in addition to analyzing a large number of pictures and videos, reported Syrian TV.