BEIRUT (AFP) – Amnesty International accused U.S.-backed Kurdish authorities in northeastern Syria Wednesday of resorting to torture and other abuses in their detention of tens of thousands of suspected militants and their dependents.
The London-based watchdog said Washington too “likely” violated the human rights of detainees in Kurdish custody.
Camps and prisons run by the Kurdish-led so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) still hold more than 56,000 detainees with alleged or perceived links to the Daesh group, five years after the militants were ousted from their last territory in Syria.
They include militant suspects locked up in prisons, and wives and children of Daesh terrorists held in the al-Hol and Roj internment camps.
Kurdish authorities “have committed the war crimes of torture and cruel treatment, and likely committed the war crime of murder”, Amnesty’s secretary general, Agnes Callamard, said.
“The U.S. government is supporting” the detention system and in some cases “is committing violations itself”, an Amnesty report said, concluding that Washington “likely violated the human rights of many of those who have been within its effective control”.
Al-Hol is the largest internment camp in northeastern Syria, with more than 43,000 detainees from 47 countries, many of them family members of Daesh terrorists.
Kurdish authorities have long urged foreign governments with nationals in the camps to repatriate their citizens but Western governments have responded slowly for fear of domestic backlash.
Amnesty said some 94 percent of residents at al-Hol and Roj were women and children, noting “no one in these camps has been charged or given the opportunity to challenge their detention before an independent judicial authority”.
The camps and prisons likely hold thousands of human trafficking victims, including women and girls forcibly married to Daesh members, it said.