On November 26, 2020, Syrian regime forces personnel arrested seven civilians from al Tebni town in the western suburbs of Deir Ez-Zour governorate, while they were near the Euphrates River adjacent to the town, and took them to a detention center in Deir Ez-Zour city.
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 in Syria.
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.
