Painting the walls of a cell in Syria angers the families of the missing

Volunteers painting the walls of a cell in Syria angered the families of missing persons, detainees, and organizations concerned with the file, which called on the new authorities to ban entry to prisons to prevent them from “obliterating” their features and “tampering” with evidence.

Immediately after the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime on December 8, thousands were released from prisons, but the fate of tens of thousands of others is still unknown and their families are searching for any trace of them.

In the first hours of the new authority’s arrival in Damascus, prisons and detention centers were a destination for thousands of families and journalists amidst a state of chaos, which led to official documents being damaged, others being looted, and a number of them being lost.

In a video clip circulated on social networking sites in the last two days, twenty young men and women enter a detention center inside a security branch, with phrases engraved by former detainees on its walls, before they paint them and draw the independence flag adopted by the new authority and take pictures in front of their drawings.

Dozens of organizations concerned with the issue of missing persons, detainees and forcibly disappeared people in Syria, in an open statement, called on the new authorities to “take urgent, immediate and strict action to stop the invasion of prisons and detention centers in Syria and treat them as theaters of crimes and atrocities against humanity, and prevent entry into them, obliterate their features, photograph them, and tamper with what they contain.” Documents and evidence.

Diab Sariyah from the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons from Sednaya Prison, which signed the statement, told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday, “Painting the walls of Syrian security branches is condemnable, especially before the start of new investigations into war crimes that the country has witnessed over the years of conflict.”

He warned that the move “impedes efforts to document and collect evidence that investigators may need,” recalling that “crimes have been committed in these places, including torture, extrajudicial killing, and forced disappearance.”

International human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, called on the new authorities to “take urgent steps to secure and preserve evidence related to the atrocities committed” by Assad’s authorities, including “important government and intelligence documents, as well as crime sites and mass graves.”