Syria monitor says 35 people summarily executed in three days

DAMASCUS (AFP): Fighters affiliated with Syria’s new Islamist leaders have carried out 35 summary executions over 72 hours, mostly of Assad-era officers, a war monitor said Sunday.

The authorities, installed by the rebel forces that toppled longtime president Bashar Assad last month, said they had carried out multiple arrests in the western Homs area over unspecified “violations.”

Official news agency SANA said the authorities on Friday accused members of a “criminal group” who used a security sweep to commit abuses against residents, “posing as members of the security services.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said that “these arrests follow grave violations and summary executions that had cost the lives of 35 people over the past 72 hours.”

It also said that “members of religious minorities” had suffered “humiliations.”

Most of those executed are former officers in the toppled Assad government who had presented themselves in centers set up by the new authorities, according to the Britain-based monitor with a network of sources inside Syria.

“Dozens of members of local armed groups under the control of the new Sunni Islamist coalition in power who participated in the security operations” in the Homs area “have been arrested,” the Observatory said.

It added that these groups “carried out reprisals and settled old scores with members of the Alawite minority to which Bashar Assad belongs, taking advantage of the state of chaos, the proliferations of arms and their ties to the new authorities.”

The Observatory listed “mass arbitrary arrests, atrocious abuse, attacks against religious symbols, mutilations of corpses, summary and brutal executions targeting civilians,” which it said showed “an unprecedented level of cruelty and violence.”

Civil Peace Group, a civil society organization, said in a statement that there had been civilian victims in multiple villages in the Homs area during the security sweep.

The group “condemned the unjustified violations” including the killing of unarmed men.

Since seizing power, the new authorities have sought to reassure religious and ethnic minorities in Syria that their rights would be upheld.

Members of Assad’s Alawite minority have expressed fear of retaliation over abuses during his clan’s decades in power.