Refugees tortured, raped, disappeared on return to Syria: Report

By Muhammad Mussa

LONDON (AA) - Syrian refugees who returned to their country have been subjected to torture, sexual violence, and disappearance by regime forces, a global rights group said on Tuesday.

Amnesty International, in a report titled “You’re going to your death,” documented how 66 returnees, including 13 children, faced “horrific violations” by intelligence officers of the Bashar al-Assad regime.

It also cited five cases where people died in custody and said the fate of 17 individuals who were disappeared remains unknown.

The rights group warned that refugees forced to return to Syria will face a similar fate, calling for action from the international community.

“Military hostilities may have subsided, but the Syrian government’s propensity for egregious human rights violations has not. The torture, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary or unlawful detention which forced many Syrians to seek asylum abroad are as rife as ever in Syria today,” said Marie Forestier, a researcher on refugee and migrants rights at Amnesty International.

“Any government claiming Syria is now safe is willfully ignoring the horrific reality on the ground, leaving refugees once again fearing for their lives. We are urging European governments to grant refugee status to people from Syria, and immediately halt any practice directly or indirectly forcing people to return to Syria.”

The group called on the governments of Lebanon and Jordan to “protect Syrian refugees from deportation or any other forcible return, in line with their international obligations.”

The report said authorities in Damascus have repeatedly targeted refugees returning home, accusing them of treason or supporting terrorism.

It documented “24 cases where men, women and children were targeted as a direct result of these perceptions, and subjected to human rights violations including rape or other forms of sexual violence, arbitrary or unlawful detention, and torture or other ill-treatment.”

Other returnees were persecuted for simply coming from a region that had been under the Syrian opposition’s control, the report added.

A person interviewed by Amnesty International said regime security personnel arrested him four days after he returned to his village in Syria’s western Homs province from Lebanon.

He was accused of being a terrorist and detained for over six months.

“[An officer] said: ‘You came to ruin the country and complete what you started before you left.’ I said that I was coming to my home country, to my village … They [security officials] told me that I’m a terrorist because I’m from [a renowned pro-opposition village],” the man narrated.

The report also documented 14 cases of sexual violence committed by security forces, including seven cases of rape, committed against five women, a teenage boy, and a little girl.

A woman and her five-year-old daughter were raped by an intelligence officer in an interrogation room at a crossing on the Lebanon border, the report said.

Intelligence officers raped another woman who returned from Lebanon with her teenage son and three-year-old daughter at a detention center, it added.

Her son was also raped with an object, according to the report.

Amnesty International conducted this investigation from mid-2017 to the spring of 2021.

The violations were committed against refugees who had returned from Denmark, France, Germany, and many other countries in Europe, as well as in the Middle East, the report said.