Salam Othman, a lawyer and human rights activist from Aleppo, was arrested by Syrian military intelligence in 2011. For nearly three years, he was shuttled between various detention centers and prisons, his whereabouts unknown to his family.
“People would die and then be replaced,” Othman told Amnesty International about his experience in detention. “I did not leave the cell for the whole three years, not once … Many people became hysterical and lost their minds.”
Othman is one of at least 65,116 individuals who have been “forcibly disappeared” by the Syrian government in the aftermath of mass demonstrations in 2011 that devolved into a brutal civil war, according a new Amnesty report released Thursday citing figures from the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR).
“Enforced disappearances” are individuals who have been arbitrarily arrested and held by government forces or allied militias, but whose whereabouts officials deny knowing. This lack of acknowledgement has left thousands of detainees outside the protection of the law.
In the absence of any such protection, detainees have been systematically subjected to mistreatment, violence, and sometimes torture, rape and death, according to Amnesty.
“Since the beginning of the crisis in 2011, a largely unseen but egregious human rights violation has been committed on a systematic and near-daily basis in Syria,” the report’s authors write. “Tens of thousands of people have been taken – snatched from their homes, offices, cars, and neighborhood markets.”
Of the more than 65,000 who have disappeared, 58,148 are civilians, according to figures cited in the Amnesty report. More than half of all the disappeared have been missing for two years or longer.
