Assad announced Saturday a general amnesty for Syrians who have been involved in "terrorist crimes" before April 30, 2022, excluding those that led to the death of human beings.
“This decision of releasing detainees seems surprising and was not planned before,” Shibal Ibrahim, a Kurdish human rights activist and former detainee in Syrian prisons told Rudaw’s Hussein Omar on Wednesday, adding that “large numbers of detainees will be released during the coming days, which may extend to more than twenty days.”
Three days before the announcement of Assad’s decree, The Guardian published footage from a 2013 incident depicting Assad’s regime brutally killing tens of people in Damascus’ Tadamon neighborhood.
Ibrahim believes Assad issued the decree as a way to cover up for the massive outrage of the public on social media in reaction to the footage.
“I think that the issuance of this decree is related to the big problem and the great media uproar on social media following the leak of video clips of the al-Tadamon neighborhood massacre committed by the regime’s forces, and the regime wants to hide this massacre by releasing some detainees,” said Ibrahim.
In a December 2021 report, the Syrian Network for Human Rights reported that there were over 149 thousand detainees or forcibly disappeared persons held by the Syrian regime since March 2011, which includes over 4900 children and 9200 women.
Official numbers of those released so far have not been announced by the Syrian Ministry of Justice nor Ministry of Interior, but human rights organizations estimate the number of detainees released to be more than two hundred as of May 4. Human rights organizations also expect that thousands of detainees will be released in a process that may extend until June.
