SANA, the Syrian state-run news agency, reported that 672 of prisoners were released in an attempt to support ongoing reconciliations in all provinces.
"They have been released after promising not to do anything against the nation's security or stability," stated Syria’s Justice Minister Hisham al-Shaar on Saturday.
Of the detainees, 588 were said to have been released from Damascus Central Prison, of which 91 were women. The others were released from various other provinces across the war-torn nation.
Shaar used the term “national reconciliation,” which has been used to describe deals between the loyalists and the rebels, akin to population swaps along sectarian lines.
President Bashar al-Assad rejected that the deals are akin to forced displacement.
“In fact, the Syrian state does not force anybody to leave. Reconciliation gives the choice to the people of the area, whether they want to leave or remain,” he said in May. “It also gives the choice to the rebels who can stay if they wanted to lay down their weapons and settle their legal status, or leave if they don’t want to do that.”
The Raqqa City Council also pardoned 83 low-ranking ISIS members in Raqqa province at the request of tribal leaders in the region, Leila Mustafa, the co-leader of the Raqqa City Council, announced on Saturday.
She read their names out loud, noting that they were being released because they were low-level and had no blood on their hands.
The Raqqa City Council is tasked with administering the city after the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) clears it of ISIS. The primarily-Kurdish SDF also has been criticized of forced displacement, and recently of not allowing Arabs to settle in Democratic Union Party (PYD)-controlled territory without having Kurdish sponsors.
A UN report that covered human rights abuses in Syria between July 21, 2016 and February 28, 2017, noted that “the presence of concealed bombs laid by ISIL justifies ordering the temporary displacement of civilians,” contradicting other media and NGO reports of human rights violations being committed by Kurdish forces in northern Syria.
In October 2015, Amnesty International published a report saying that PYD destruction of villages and forced displacement “amounts to war crimes,” which a YPG spokesperson said amounted to a smear campaign.
