Syria jihadists torturing, killing detainees: Amnesty
Rights group Amnesty International charges Islamist group with inflicting severe floggings and holding people in cruel and inhuman conditions in Syria
Amnesty International on Thursday accused an al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group in Syria of abducting, torturing and killing detainees at secret prisons in areas under its control.
The rights group said detainees held by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) include children as young as eight and that minors have been sentenced to severe floggings and held with adults in “cruel and inhuman conditions”.
It described individuals being seized by masked men, held for weeks on end in solitary confinement at unknown locations and tried by self-styled Islamic sharia courts that mete out death or floggings with little if any due process.
Former detainees described being beaten with rubber generator belts or cables, tortured with electric shocks and being forced into a painful stress position known as the “scorpion” in which the detainee’s wrists are bound over one shoulder.
“After years in which they were prey to the brutality of [President Bashar al-Assad’s] regime, the people of Raqa and Aleppo are now suffering under a new form of tyranny imposed on them by [ISIL], in which arbitrary detention, torture and executions have become the order of the day,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty’s director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Amnesty said some people are detained for common crimes like theft while others are jailed for smoking, sex outside of marriage, or because they challenged ISIL’s rule or belong to other armed groups.
In recent months, ISIL has kidnapped dozens of Syrian activists and news providers, as well as several foreign journalists.
