Syrian regime forces arrested three civilians, including a child, from Kanaker village in Damascus suburbs governorate on September 28, 2020, while they were passing through a checkpoint in the vicinity of the village, taking them to an undisclosed location. SNHR notes that Syrian regime forces have imposed a security cordon on Kanaker village since the end of September 2020 and arrested a number of locals on their way in or out of the village.
The arrests were conducted without any legal arrest warrants being issued by a court, with no members of the detainees’ families being informed of their arrests or whereabouts, and with the phones of those detained civilians being confiscated, preventing them from contacting their families or lawyers. SNHR fears that they will be subjected to torture and ultimately classified as forcibly ‘disappeared’, like approximately 85 percent of all detained persons.
SNHR can confirm that at least 130,689 Syrian citizens are still detained or forcibly disappeared in the regime’s detention centers, constituting a grave threat to the detainees’ wellbeing, given the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
