U. S.: Syria cremating thousands at prison
The Syrian government has constructed and is using a crematorium inside its Saydnaya military prison outside Damascus to clandestinely dispose of thousands of prisoners it continues to execute inside the facility, a State Department official said Monday.
At least 50 prisoners a day are executed in the prison, some in mass hangings, said Stuart Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for the Middle East. A recent Amnesty International report called Saydnaya, which is about 45 minutes north of Damascus, a “human slaughterhouse” and said thousands of Syrians have been abducted, detained and “exterminated” there.
The government of President Bashar Assad, Jones said in a special news conference, has carried out these atrocities and others “seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran,” his main backers.
The information, he said, came from human- rights and nongovernmental sources as well as “intelligence assessments.”
Russia, Jones said, “has either aided in or passively looked away as the regime has” engaged in years of “mass murders” and other atrocities, including extensive bombing of hospitals and other health care sites and the use of chemical weapons on both civilians and rebel forces.
During last week’s meeting in Washington with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Jones said, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said
that “Russia must now, with great urgency, exercise its great influence over the Syrian regime.”
The allegation of mass killings came as U. S. President Donald Trump weighs options in Syria, where the U. S. launched cruise missiles on a government air base last month after accusing Assad’s military of killing scores of civilians with a sarinlike nerve agent. Trump on Monday kicked off a week of meetings with Middle East leaders, sitting down with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi the day before he hosts Turkey’s president. Trump flies to Saudi Arabia later this week.
All are governments that have pressed the United States over six years of civil war in Syria to intervene more forcefully. Trump had backed away from President Barack Obama’s calls for regime change in the Arab country, with the new president’s officials pointedly saying leadership questions should be left to Syria’s citizens, until his intervention last month. His administration now says Assad cannot bring longterm stability to Syria.
Jones accused Assad’s government of sinking “to a new level of depravity.”
The department released commercial satellite photographs showing what it described as a building in the prison complex that was modified to support the crematorium. The photographs, taken over the course of several years, beginning in 2013, do not prove the building is a crematorium, but show construction consistent with such use.
The revelations echoed a February report by Amnesty International that said Syria’s military police hanged as many as 13,000 people in four years before carting out bodies by the truckload for burial in mass graves.
Although the State Department cast its news conference as an effort to press Assad’s key backers, Russia and Iran, it also underscored Trump’s lack of a strategy for stopping Syria’s violence. The war has killed as many as 400,000 people since 2011, contributed to Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II and enabled the Islamic State militant group to emerge as a global terrorism threat.
Trump had been highly critical of Obama for failing to respond to earlier chemical weapons attacks in 2013 even after setting a “red line” against such usage. After last month’s attack in northern Syria, Trump said the Syrians crossed “a lot of lines” for his administration. Beyond authorizing cruise missiles in response, however, he didn’t outline a strategy to eliminate the threat.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer on Monday reiterated the administration’s line that Syria’s future “should be decided by Syrians in a free credibly and transparent process.” But he called such a future “unimaginable” if Assad is propped up with help from the “seemingly unconditional support from Russia and Iran.” He didn’t outline how such a future might become imaginable.
Russia has shown no inclination to drop its support for Assad. It is now pushing the idea of “de- escalation zones” that would be designed to reduce violence, while not challenging Assad’s authority over almost all of Syria’s major cities.
State Department spokesman Heather Nauert said Tillerson had been “firm and clear” in a meeting with Lavrov last week that “Russia holds tremendous influence over Bashar al- Assad.”
A main point of that meeting “was telling Russia to use its power to rein in the regime,” she said. “Simply put, the killing, the devastation has gone on for far too long in Syria.”
Syrian human- rights groups and opposition activists have long reported on mass killings inside Syrian prisons, though not on bodies being burned to cover up evidence.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights corroborated the U. S. accounts of mass killings but said it lacked sufficient information about the crematorium.