Clans and Villages Now Fleeing Syria, Investigators Say
A United Nations inquiry commission on rights abuses in the Syria conflict offered grim new details on Friday of the government repression in that country, including the uprooting of extended clans and villages forced to flee into neighboring countries by armed forces bent on crushing armed resistance.
The three-member commission, which released its first highly incriminating report on rights abuses in Syria last November, told a news conference it now had a fuller picture of what had been happening inside Syria in an updated report based partly on the refugee flows.
“There are people coming out in greater numbers,” said Karen Koning AbuZayd, a panel member. While refugees in the early days of the conflict went across borders often by themselves or with their families, she said, “people are now coming out in whole groups.”
Members said refugees had told them that in some cases, entire villages had been warned by advancing military columns that suspected insurgents hiding in their midst must surrender or the villages would be shelled. They did not identify any villages by name.
Sergio Pinheiro, the chairman of the commission, said the pattern of killings in the Syria conflict also had shifted — while most of the deaths in the early months were from clashes between security forces and unarmed protesters at antigovernment demonstrations, many more are now from shelling and shootings by military units deployed to rout insurgents hiding among civilians. “This is a new trend,” he said, calling it a reflection of the government’s apparent determination to exact “collective punishment.”
At least 16,000 Syrians have fled to Turkey, 15,000 to Lebanon and an unspecified number to Jordan, the panelists said at the news conference at the United Nations. They said they suspected that thousands more Syrian refugees were also in these countries but had not registered out of fear that Syrian security forces would take revenge on relatives back home.