Fighters linked to the new Islamist government in Syria have carried out 35 extrajudicial executions in the past three days, most of them of officers from the Bashar al-Assad regime, a non-governmental organization reported, quoted by Agence France-Presse and BTA.
The bodies set up by the Islamist rebels who ousted President Bashar al-Assad last month said they had carried out a large number of arrests in the Homs region in western Syria in recent days. The official Syrian news agency SANA reported that on Friday authorities had accused a "criminal group" in committing crimes against the population, "posing as members of the security services".
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights "these arrests follow serious crimes and summary executions that have claimed the lives of 35 people in the past 72 hours". The same NGO claims that "members of religious minorities" have been subjected to "humiliations".
The London-based NGO has a network of monitors in Syria. According to its data, most of those executed are former employees of the Bashar al-Assad government who surrendered to centers set up by the new authorities. According to the Center "dozens of members of local armed groups under the control of the new ruling Sunni Islamist coalition who participated in security operations" have been arrested" in the Homs region.
These groups "have carried out repression and settled old scores with members of the Alawite minority, to which Bashar al-Assad's clan belongs, taking advantage of the chaos, the abundance of weapons and their connections with the new authorities".
The NGO mentions "massive arbitrary arrests, attacks on religious symbols, mutilation of corpses, and quick and brutal executions of civilians", stressing that they show "an unprecedented level of cruelty and violence".
The NGO Civil Peace Group said in a statement that during the change of power in many villages in the Homs region there were civilian casualties.
Since coming to power, the new Syrian authorities have tried to assure people that they will protect the rights of religious and ethnic minorities in the country. However, members of the Alawite minority have expressed concerns about reprisals for decades of abuses by the Assad clan.
/АГ/
Source: www.bta.bg