‘They beat me for two hours with cables’
Syrian forces’ attacks on children, detentions and torture documented by Human Rights Watch
BEIRUT— Syrian forces have detained and tortured children as young as13 as President Bashar Assad’s regime tries to crush a nearly 11-month-old uprising, Human Rights Watch said Friday.
The report was released the same day that a roadside bomb killed two boys in the northern province of Idlib, state media and activists said. More than 200 people were reported killed Friday and early Saturday, mostly in the city of Homs.
Human Rights Watch said it has documented at least12 cases of children detained under “inhumane” conditions and tortured, as well as children shot in their homes or on the street.
“Children have not been spared the horror of Syria’s crackdown,” said Lois Whitman, children’s rights director at the New Yorkbased group. “Syrian security forces have killed, arrested and tortured children in their homes, their schools, or on the streets. In many cases, security forces have targeted children just as they have targeted adults.”
The report quoted a 16-year-old boy from the town of Tal Kalakh near the Lebanese border as saying he was detained for eight months, during which he was held in seven detention centres, as well as the Homs Central Prison. The boy, whom HRW referred to as Alaa, said security forces first asked him how many protests he participated in, and then cuffed his left hand to the ceiling and left him hanging there for about seven hours, standing on his toes. “They beat me for about two hours with cables and shocked me with cattle prods. Then they threw water on the ground and poured water on me from above,” he said. In another case, the parents of a 13-year-old boy from the coastal city of Latakia said that in December, security officers arrested him and held him for nine days. According to his parents, he was accused of burning photos of Assad, vandalizing security forces’ cars and inciting other children to protest. Security officers burned him with cigarettes on his neck and hands, the parents said, and threw boiling water on his body. An adult former detainee told the rights group that some children were raped while in detention. The United Nations estimated in January that at least 5,400 people have been killed in the Syrian crackdown, including soldiers who defected and those who refused orders to fire on civilians. But the UN has been unable to update its tally since then because of the chaos in the country. The conflict has grown more militarized in recent months as army defectors have joined the uprising against Assad and formed a guerrilla force, which in turn has in turn provoked a heavier regime assault.